Nine Irish Lives

by Mark Bailey

  LET’S SAY ALBERT CASHIER grew up in County Louth, from 1843 to 1856, as he offered in one version of his past. This gave him an unenviable view of the famine that killed a fifth of the people around him. Primary sources from those years include stories of whole fields gone so rotten the stench drove people away. Sheriffs report on the number of corpses found on the side of the road. Newspapers describe a family found living with bodies stacked around their shack like sandbags against a flood. Accounts from that place, that time, read like The Walking Dead, some zombie apocalypse from our nightmares. The word unspeakable gets used a lot.

  In County Louth in the 1840s and 1850s, when you lost your home and had nowhere else to go, you could go to the workhouse. These were like big dorms where you were able to trade work for food and a place to sleep. Men spent their days breaking rocks for roads, women and kids walked in a circle together pushing a huge wheel to grind corn, old people picked apart old ropes to make them into new ones. But the workhouses were quickly patched together and were just as quickly overwhelmed, and soon they had to turn people away. So you’d walk to the nearest one, hear it was full, and walk on to the next. Help was there, you heard, you hoped, if you could keep walking.

  If Albert Cashier ever spoke of these scenes, it was never recorded. Maybe for him it was unspeakable to survive when so many around him had died. Though surviving was certainly better than falling down dead by a turf rick, or of famine fever, or having pigs eat your legs while you were maybe dead or maybe still working on dying. Is it any wonder he set off for America? After all, how scary could America be? Even for a young girl, a teenager more or less, alone in the world. How scary could it be?

  So maybe Jennie’s passing as a man isn’t the most remarkable thing here. Maybe it’s his coming from open trenches filled with victims of the great hunger and cholera and all the other diseases that came with it. Stowing away on a ship likely filled with immigrants—your great-great-great-grandmother, my grandfather’s grandfather—whose landlords found it was cheaper to book passage for their tenants than to keep them alive in Ireland. A million Irish poured off the island in droves, heading into the unknown, leaving behind everything familiar, their families, their loved ones, living and dead. They left their homes, their language. They ran away from death and into a new world, a new life. It’s getting from there, from all that, to a time and place so safe and tame that gender, something so frivolous, can become the most remarkable thing about your safe, well-fed, miraculous life.

  AMERICA WAS A clean slate, a do-over, a place to become a new person. America, for Jennie Hodgers and for so many others, was a land of reinvention. And Jennie made the most of it. We don’t know when Jennie used the name Albert for the first time, when he cut his hair and put on pants instead of skirts, petticoats, bodices, those shoes that called for a buttonhook. Illinois was still the frontier when Albert went west from New York; jobs there offered higher wages to bring people out to help, and back then, like now, men made more money than women. Irish immigrants went there in waves, looking for a safe and fertile place to use their hands, to do the kind of work they knew how to do—often the only kind of work they knew how to do. So Albert Cashier ended up in Illinois, working as a farmhand for a year.

  Rolling fields green as those in Ireland. Planting corn and tomatoes, weeding, feeding chickens, milking cows. Birdsong, wind brushing across meadows, a richly bruised sunrise, day after day after day. I think of this as a sort of recovery period from the horrors of the famine and the uncertainty of immigration. A quiet routine on a farm, regular meals, a safe place to sleep. Waking up before dawn to plant or weed a patch before the sun got up too high in summer. Chopping wood to warm yourself twice in winter. A lot of solitude, plenty of food, sleeping safe and alone in a bed. With enough time and quiet it might occur to you that you’re pretty lucky, getting away with this whole dressing-up-like-a-man thing. But by then you’re already in it, and you see that even if you had some desire to go back to being a woman, you’d be crazy to give up the higher wages and other perks. Would you rather work as a farmhand, be outside all day, or start up with the laundering, work just as hard for a lot less money, with the ever-present risk of people messing with you. No way. You’ve got ladies doing your laundry, man!

  AS FOR THE army—there were lots of good reasons to sign up for the army: adventure, patriotism, money. Perhaps the most likely reason Albert enlisted is that it is just what men did.

  He signed up on August 6, 1862, in Belvidere, Boone County, Illinois. On the records, someone wrote “Albert D. J. Cashier” in nice, big handwriting. Description: nineteen years old, five feet three inches, light complexion, blue eyes, auburn hair. Where born? New York City. Look at him, reinventing himself! Adding a couple inches, using the name that’s been working for him for a while, making himself not just an American but a New Yorker.

  So he signed up for a training camp on how to be an American man. All the guys were doing it. And some of those people ended up nicknaming Albert “Chub.” His fellow soldiers saw that smooth round face, those soft breasts, but they couldn’t see them for what they were. To them, Albert’s body read as fat, not female. Chub! Not bad for someone who lived through the famine.

  WHEN YOU READ about the hundreds—hundreds!—of women who have disguised themselves as men and become soldiers, every author eventually gets to the wonder of how they hid their breasts and dealt with their periods. The books on lady soldiers spend more time on this than on the military physicals that these recruits apparently passed without revealing their sex. Mostly, it seems like all they had to do was show their working hands and feet; if you could march and pull a trigger, you were good to go. Also, no one would ever have suspected it—why on earth would a lady sign up for that? Anyone who wanted to be a soldier must be a man, at least according to the definitions of gender they were working with.

  Wartime was probably an easier than usual time to deal with your period on the road: throwing bloody rags on the fire was part of the routine, and everybody’s clothes were wrecked. Everyone was also starving and overworked, walking hundreds of miles, experiencing the kinds of conditions that stop menstruation anyway, that make you skinny and muscled, that make your breasts shrink.

  The volunteers cobbled together what military experience they had, looking at the books they were given on how to be a soldier. They read “Revised Army Regulations” and “Tactics” and tried that stuff out. They stuck around Illinois drilling and prepping for two and a half months, learning how to march in formation, how to load and fire their muskets, where to stick a rebel with a bayonet. Then they took off for Kentucky to join the Army of the Tennessee under Ulysses S. Grant. It was a great time to fake being a man. How does a man march fifteen miles with a heavy knapsack in new country? How did he crowd into a freight car or board a steamer in the middle of the night with his new friends? None of the men had done anything like this before. There wasn’t ever anything like this to do. Like Al, they came forward when Lincoln called for more troops. They got cash money, new uniforms, knapsacks full of coffee and hardtack, and a musket. They also got a chance to learn from each other, to meet other soldiers from other states, other countries. Not just to study how to be an American man but to define what American manhood was going to be going forward.

  AS FOR THE 95th Regiment, the men spent a lot of time on steamers, positioning themselves up and down the Mississippi. Steamers moved troops to wherever they were needed throughout the war. They’d spend whole days standing around waiting to board these cavernous, wooden riverboats. Or they’d rush the dock late at night, trying to keep rebel spies in the dark about troop movements. They’d fill the underdecks with horses and mules and wagons and artillery, then fill in the top with themselves, often with just enough room to stand. The regimental history recalled one late-night boarding like this: “Everything was in an uproar, everybody was mad, and somebody must have been drunk.” This may be my favorite observation on the Civil War.

  During Al�
��s three years of fighting, passing through dangerous country on steamers with names like Universe, Meteor, Dacotah, or White Cloud, the men of the 95th would line the decks with hay bales and crates of hardtack to protect themselves from Confederate musket fire. The sharpshooters in the 95th, the snipers, scanned the banks and picked off rebels with “admirable coolness,” often so near to the enemy that Confederate shots and shells went over the boat. It was too close to get hit.

  Of the 983 men who signed up with Al in Illinois in 1862, only about half made it to the end of their three-year tour, mustering out together in Mississippi: 190 were discharged early for disability and disease; 83 died from wounds received in action; and 177 died of disease. So these men needed to be brave, needed to cultivate fearlessness. Good hygiene would have been a plus, but they didn’t often have the information or means to make that a reality. Maybe Al’s need for privacy kept him cleaner, exposed him to fewer germs and risks than those unlucky 190, 83, and 177.

  The ones who made it through needed loyalty, connection, things to fight for. They loved most of their leaders and told and retold stories about why: when rebels suggested Major McKee surrender, he replied, “I don’t scare worth a damn. We are ready for you.” They loved General Smith for drawing his saber on men from another regiment when they cut in line at a pontoon bridge. They loved him for drinking and swearing, getting his men on the steamers by arguing “in his effective, though profane phraseology, that ‘These boats, sir, by G-d, sir, can carry these troops, sir, and five thousand more, by G-d, sir.’ ”

  These men needed a sense of humor. When the 95th gathered for reunions later, they’d pass around that photo of Cashier, the littlest man in the regiment, under a pup tent with Gleason, the tallest. Men gave each other shit and didn’t grumble.

  In Mobile once, the Union commanders tried using the regimental bands to trick the Confederates. The plan was for the bands to play three different reveilles each, so they sounded like twelve regiments coming rather than four. But one band was so famously crappy, a last-minute band of guys who couldn’t actually play, that they couldn’t pull it off. After three other bands played nine distinct versions of reveille, the drum corps from the Missouri 44th produced their usual discordant, horrible effort. And then they tried to do another version, and it came out the same pathetic way. All of the men, thousands, spread out camping in the woods for miles around, cracked up at once with “irrepressible laughter, making the woods ring for a long distance around. Thus this event, which furnished the men with so much merriment, may possibly have disclosed to the rebels the real character of the present expedition.” They didn’t care.

  They made fun of themselves, of their troubles. And they loved making fun of soft people, civilians who couldn’t hack it. Outside Nashville, needing some defensive structures built in a hurry, the general conscripted locals to pitch in. “To see the clerks and city dandies, and other non-combatants, provided with haversacks well filled with hard bread, and marched out to the front where an opportunity was afforded of developing their soft muscles by work upon the forts and other defenses, was the cause of much merriment among the boys in blue.” Being an American man, a soldier, was better than being a city-dandy civilian. You belonged. Imagine how much better that was than being a lady civilian—a poor lady civilian, no less! Albert was not some loser Irish immigrant girl. He was a fighting infantryman who was proud of his service.

  OF COURSE, STAYING strong and healthy was crucial. They came to see the constant marching as a sort of tonic rather than a chore; stuck in camp, disease was a killer. More men died of dysentery, typhoid, pneumonia, measles, TB, and malaria than the minié balls. Al had only one bout of dysentery bad enough to put him in the hospital—he was there less than a day. He was part of a group prized for its snipers and known for its bravery and over-the-top attention to detail with dress parades. He seemed to specialize in the new American manhood they were inventing together: staying alive and healthy while messing stuff up for your enemies. American ingenuity and flexibility, an early draft of “by any means necessary.”

  Being a man in the Union Army meant doing the things that needed doing, starting with Vicksburg, which Lincoln called the “key”: “The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket.” It took forever, but the Union finally did it. Grant’s plan meant dredging canals through the swamp around the city, making it possible for big boats full of soldiers to slip quietly behind rebel lines. Al’s battalion provided details of men day and night to do that sloppy, swampy digging and clearing—horrible work. And they MacGyvered their way through the muck, coming up with new steam-driven underwater saws to cut cypress trees at the base, going through whatever they couldn’t go around.

  On May 22, 1863, moving on Vicksburg, they slithered through their network of ravines filled with logs and branches while their snipers covered them, or tried: most casualties occurred within those first hours. Driven back to just outside the city, they waited for more than a month while the citizens of Vicksburg dug caves, starved, ended up eating even their mules. One time, doing a little recon in the area, Albert got captured. But don’t worry: he grabbed a guard’s gun, knocked him down, got away. No problem. How cool is that?

  On the day of Vicksburg’s surrender, July 4, 1863, Al’s regiment was one of the first to go in. “With the victorious stars and stripes unfurled, and with music playing the national airs, these dusty, scarred, and war-worn battalions, keeping step to the music of the Union, marched through the streets of Vicksburg.”

  But ultimately, the history of the 95th Regiment speaks less about glory like that and a lot more about drinking, carousing, and pillaging. Early on, they were encouraged to “supply the men” using those very skills. They got started with Grant’s notion of feeding his army on the fly, taking hams and chickens and pickled vegetables and whatever else they could carry from the plantations they passed. These enemy plantations, they discovered, were surprisingly well stocked, which gave Grant the idea to keep going with the steal-the-food plan. Grant was making it up as he went along too.

  When winter supplies dwindled, and they had to eat the horses’ corn, they made corncakes and popcorn, joked that next they’d get harnessed and eat rations of hay. In April 1865, on the two-hundred-mile march from Mobile to Montgomery, a lot of them ended up barefoot, the hard road having worn right through their soles. So they cheered each other on with joking signs posted on trees en route: “To Selma, one hundred and fifty miles, sore feet or no sore feet.” “To good living, one hundred and ten miles.”

  They had gotten so accustomed to “gleaning” meals from Confederate homes that when they came across some unoccupied country, where they couldn’t easily rustle up supper, they remarked on it. On the way to Montgomery they caught and ate a snake: “a monstrous reptile, fat, sleek, and scaly, and its appearance demonstrated fully that if human beings could not find enough in that barren country to grow fat on, rattlesnakes could.” It was delicious, but they didn’t often need to resort to snake-tasting. They usually had better luck, though by the end of the war they were boasting about their abilities as scroungers, not giving credit just to luck. Both armies were depending on stolen civilian supplies at that point, but the Union soldiers of the 95th prided themselves on being better. “Though the rebel army had been through this section twice within a short time, and nearly drained the country of supplies, yet the Union soldiers, by the exercise of their characteristic inquisitiveness, succeeded in securing from the neighboring plantations plenty of fowls and rasters, which, in connection with hard-tack and coffee, furnished the officers and privates with respectable Christmas dinners.”

  The officers saw what side their bread was buttered on. After the rules changed and called for restraint, if ever the men were caught red-handed with stolen goods for “a sumptuous evening meal,” Colonel Avery protected them. Oh, that chicken? Colonel Avery would say. That one over there? Nah, they picked that chicken up in Brownsville. They’ve been carrying
that chicken a hundred miles. “For this cunning manner in which the colonel shielded his men from accusations of foraging which, if traced up, would, in many instances have been found true: they called him Colonel Pap.”

  It makes me very happy to think of Albert leaving the famine of his childhood behind and having so many new friends to kick through plantations with, so many of the enemy’s hams and chickens and lush gardens and liberated bottles of wine. The reporter Charles Dana wrote of the Union experience of Vicksburg,

  We were in an incomparable position for a siege as regard the health and comfort of our men. The high wooded hills afforded pure air and shade, and the deep ravines abounded in springs of excellent water, and if they failed it was easy to bring it from the Mississippi. Our line of supplies was beyond the reach of the enemy, and there was an abundance of fruit all about us. I frequently met soldiers coming into camp with buckets full of mulberries, blackberries and red and yellow plums.

  The confederates were down to eating rats and songbirds, but Albert could have all the berries he could eat.

  Scrounging is a hard habit to break. On one long steamer journey to New Orleans, commanders couldn’t keep men on the boats. Every time they stopped for fuel or fresh orders, “a few mischievous and unruly soldiers scoured the area for food and goods to take.” When they arrived in New Orleans just after St. Patrick’s Day, they saw rebel forts made entirely of oyster shells. This delighted them almost as much as the oyster beds they were camping by at Cedar Point, where, according to one account, “the surf was alive with wading soldiers, skirmishing not with rebels, but after oysters, of which they brought skiffs-full to the shore, and furnished the camps with large supplies of this luxurious article of food.” Can’t you smell the wood fire and the water, the roasted oysters and beer I hope they had? I love knowing about this night for Albert, loving this sweet dinner at a journey’s end, all the careless laughter and sandy hair.