On 6 August 1862, a young man called Albert Cashier enlisted in the Union army in Belvidere, Illinois. He was short for a soldier, just 5ft 3in. His fellow privates noted that Cashier kept his collar buttoned high up his neck, above his Adam’s apple, and that he always slept apart from the other men.

Cashier’s size did not hold him back. Fighting with the 95th Illinois infantry, he was involved in some of the most important battles in the war.

Cashier’s bravery was noted in accounts from the time. On one occasion, he was captured and escaped by attacking his Confederate guard. In another battle, comrades remembered Cashier sweeping up a Union flag which had been felled from its post by Confederate gunfire. He climbed a tree and lashed the tattered stars and stripes to a branch, showing that the Union would not be cowed.

But what Cashier’s fellow soldiers did not know was that the diminutive private had a secret – one that would only be revealed decades later.

Albert Cashier was assigned female at birth.

His story, from immigrant to proud soldier, to eventually being “outed” by nefarious hospital workers, will be retold in Albert Cashier the Musical, which airs in Chicago this month.

The production’s six-week run is timely, given Donald Trump’s recent announcement that he will not allow transgender individuals to serve in the military in any capacity. There are up to 6,630 transgender people on active duty in the US military, according to a 2016 study, and up to 4,160 in the select reserve.

Dani Shay, who plays Albert Cashier, in the play The Civility of Albert Cashier. Photograph: Courtesy of Permoveo Productions

“The temperature Trump sets for our country, the mood he sets and the anger that he’s creating and the polarization that he’s building between people – it’s just terrible,” said Jay Deratany, who wrote the musical. “But I hope this play bridges some gap.”

Deratany, who also wrote the play Haram! Iran! – based on the true story of two gay Iranian teenagers who were executed in 2005 – said his own experiences as a gay man had attracted him to Cashier’s story.

“I was a lawyer and the idea in the legal field of coming out … I would have lost my career if people found out. I was terrified,” he said. “I had a girlfriend at one point and I hid all that. So I identified with Albert and the secret life he had to lead.”

Cashier was born Jennie Hodgers in Clogherhead, a fishing village 40 miles north of Dublin, on Christmas Day 1843. He moved to the US as a child, eventually settling in Illinois, and was presenting as a man by the time he enlisted in 1862.

There were just 16,000 men in the US army when the civil war broke out. Abraham Lincoln pleaded for volunteers, and was successful – of the more than 2.5 million people who served in the Union army, the majority did so voluntarily.

With the 95th regiment, Cashier fought in Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee and Louisiana, marching almost 10,000 miles over three years.

Come out of there, you damned rebels, and show your face! Attributed to Albert Cashier

“In handling a musket in battle, he was the equal of any in the company,” Gerhard P Clausius, a Belvidere amateur historian, wrote in his 1958 essay The Little Soldier of the 95th. “[And] he was able to withstand the long marches, the rigors of camp life, and the problems of an infantryman, as well as his comrades who were bigger and brawnier.”

In an article from the True Republican newspaper, published in 1913, Sgt Ives, who served alongside Cashier in the 95th, remembers Cashier taunting Confederate soldiers.

“Come out of there, you damned rebels, and show your face,” Cashier is alleged to have said when faced with a concealed enemy.

After Trump announced in a series of tweets that the government “will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the US military”, the move was roundly criticized by ex-military personnel and civil rights groups. The Department of Defense itself appeared to have been blindsided: Barack Obama had ended a longtime ban on trans people serving in the military just one year earlier.

When he issued his decree, Trump may have been unaware that there is a decades-long history of trans people serving in the US armed forces.

There is also a recorded history of women who presented as men to be able to serve. DeAnne Blanton, who co-wrote They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War – which documents women who fought in the conflict – said hundreds of women took up arms.

It was common in the 1800s for working class women to identify as men to get jobs that otherwise would be out of their reach, Blanton said. Some professions were simply unattainable for women. In other jobs, such as working in industrial mills, women were paid less than men – a disparity that still exists today.

When the civil war broke out in 1861, after seven southern states declared their secession from the US and attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina, for some women, it represented an opportunity to boost their wages further.

This portrait is believed by some historians to be a photograph of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, who enlisted in the Union army under the false identity of Lyons Wakeman at 17. Photograph: Public domain

“A union private made $13 a month, which doesn’t seem like a lot of money. But no women’s employment at that time, except prostitution, would yield a higher paycheck,” Blanton said.

“They’d chop off their hair and bind their breasts and pass themselves off as men to enlist.”

One such woman is Sarah Wakeman, who was already presenting as a man before the war. Wakeman’s family was in debt, and she was working on a canal boat when the war broke out.

“Her letters make it pretty clear she was doing it for the paycheck,” Blanton said.

Wakeman signed up to the Union army in New York as Lyon Wakeman and fought in the Red River campaign – a series of battles along the Red river in Louisiana. She died of dysentery in New Orleans in 1864, aged 21.

“And then there were women who enlisted for the same reasons men did,” Blanton said. “They were patriotic and wanted to serve their country and because of the era they lived in, the only way they could do this was to pretend to be men.”

Blanton said most of the fighters she and her co-author, Lauren Cook Wike, wrote about returned to living as women after the war. Since writing the book, however, Blanton said she had started to wonder whether there might have been more people like Cashier, who continued to live as men.

“Who knows. Maybe more of them did, but they went to their graves as men.”

Cashier himself might never have been exposed were it not for a tragic incident that forced his assigned sex to be exposed decades later, when he was elderly and vulnerable.

After his service, Cashier returned to Belvidere – 90 miles north-west of Chicago towards the Wisconsin border – before working his way south to the tiny town of Saunemin.



There he worked as a farmhand, street lamplighter and general handyman. Records show that Cashier voted in elections, had a bank account, and was able to claim a military pension – things that would have been denied to Jennie Hodgers – and lived in a small, one room cabin.

Things were going well. Until 1911 – when Cashier was hit by a car and broke his leg. He was taken to hospital, where the doctor treating him discovered his assigned sex. With Cashier unable to work, the doctor agreed to keep his secret and helped transfer Cashier to a soldiers’ and sailors’ home – reserved for male ex-military members – in Quincy, Illinois.

Reports from the time suggest Cashier was happy at the home, and was visited by soldiers he had fought alongside during the civil war.

But after two years, Cashier began to experience dementia, and the state transferred him to an asylum. There, his assigned sex was discovered again, and this time the doctors treating him were not as understanding.

“This is where Albert’s story gets very heartbreaking,” Blanton said. “Because they set about making Albert be a woman again.

“They put him in a dress. And Albert hasn’t worn a dress since he was a teenager.”

Albert Cashier’s home in Saunemin, Illinois. Photograph: Public Domain

At the same time, people working in the hospital leaked Cashier’s story to the press. Newspapers from Illinois to New York carried reports on the “woman [who] adopted the garb of a man”, as the Syracuse Herald put it, revealing Cashier’s secret after more than 50 years.

By 1915, Cashier was being forced to dress and live as a woman in the asylum. Struggling with both his mental health and physical health, and clad in a long dress, he tripped and fell down a flight of stairs. Cashier broke his hip, became bedridden, and died on 10 October 1915. He was 71 years old.

During Cashier’s long, and public, travails with his health, his fellow veterans never gave up on him, Blanton said. His ex-comrades made numerous attempts to have Cashier transferred back to the soldiers’ and sailors’ home, but were unsuccessful.

In death, however, Cashier was afforded the identity denied him in the last years of his life.

“His comrades basically took charge,” Blanton said. “When they took possession of his body they treated him like any other comrade who had died.”

Cashier received a full military funeral, and was buried in his Union army uniform.

And when it came to his grave, his fellow soldiers made sure he received a military headstone bearing the name he had chosen: Albert Cashier.