Deposition D, Case of Albert D. J. Cashier, No 1001132
June 20, 1914: Nettie Rose
I have known Albert Cashier some 44 or 45 years... The first I knew of the sex of Albert being that of a female was when he had his leg broken and I went out to nurse him... In the course of nursing Albert I discovered that the sex was that of a female. He asked me then not to tell any one that he was a woman, that he did not want every one to know it. He told me while he was sick that the reason he assumed the male garb was that he and another man were in love. That both enlisted at the same time; that the lover was wounded and died. That before his death he asked Albert to promise that he would never again wear women’s clothes, and he said he had not….
Deposition B, Case of Albert D. J. Cashier, No 1001132
December 1, 1914: Joy H. Saxton
The first time I remember seeing Cashier was when he enlisted in the same regiment and Company with me. We enlisted two or three days apart. I saw him every day for eight months after that time… I marched day after day with him for the first eight months and I know that I could not be mistaken... He was one of the smallest men in the company and had very small hands. He seemed to be able to do as much work as any one in the Company… While I was in the service I never suspected that he was not a man, and I never heard any talk to that effect.
AUGUST, SEPTEMBER, OCTOBER, &c.—
I continued among the hospitals in the same manner, getting still more experience, and daily and nightly meeting with most interesting cases. Through the winter of 1863–4, the same. The work of the Army Hospital Visitor is indeed a trade, an art, requiring both experience and natural gifts, and the greatest judgment. A large number of the visitors to the hospitals do no good at all, while many do harm. The surgeons have great trouble from them. Some visitors go from curiosity—as to a show of animals. Others give the men improper things. Then there are always some poor fellows in the crises of sickness or wounds, that imperatively need perfect quiet—not to be talked to by strangers. Few realize that it is not the mere giving of gifts that does good: it is the proper adaptation. Nothing is of any avail among the soldiers except conscientious personal investigation of cases, each one for itself; with sharp, critical faculties, but in the fullest spirit of human sympathy and boundless love. The men feel such love, always, more than anything else. I have met very few persons who realize the importance of humoring the yearnings for love and friendship of these American young men, prostrated by sickness and wounds.
HUMAN MAGNETISM AS A MEDICAL AGENT.
To many of the wounded and sick, especially the youngsters, there is something in personal love, caresses and the magnetic flood of sympathy and friendship, that does, in its way, more good than all the medicine in the world. I have spoken of my regular gifts of delicacies, money, tobacco, special articles of food, nick-nacks, &c., &c. But I steadily found more and more, that I could help and turn the balance in favor of cure, by the means here alluded to, in a curiously large proportion of cases. The American soldier is full of affection, and the yearning for affection. And it comes wonderfully grateful to him to have this yearning gratified when he is laid up with painful wounds or illness, far away from home, among strangers. Many will think this merely sentimentalism, but I know it is the most solid of facts. I believe that even the moving around among the men, or through the ward, of a hearty, healthy, clean, strong, generous-souled person, man or woman, full of humanity and love, sending out invisible, constant currents thereof, does immense good to the sick and wounded.
For most of the 160 years since the Civil War was fought, what was considered important about ordinary soldiers was that they fought, not what they fought for. In order to promote sectional harmony and reconciliation between North and South after the war, political and social leaders emphasized the valor of soldiers on both sides of the conflict. They chose to remember shared experiences and values like service, military strength, and sacrifice, rather than focusing on the very different political, social, and moral causes for which Civil War soldiers fought. We think, however, that it is critically important to understand why men (and occasionally women) joined their respective armies and engaged in such a long, bloody, and costly conflict. It is clear from soldiers' letters and actions that competing ideas of race, class, and citizenship were central to the conflict.Â
One of the enduring questions about soldiers' motivations in the war is why did so many non-slaveholding white southerners join the Confederate cause? While it is true that a nascent Southern nationalism played a role for some, understanding the motivations of non-elite white southerners opens a window into mid-nineteenth century ideas about social mobility, class, and race. For white southerners, to get ahead meant to purchase a slave, build up capital, purchase more enslaved people, and to strive towards the economic, social, and political power of the plantation-owning gentry. This is why so many southerners struck out for cheaper lands in newly opened territories, bringing enslaved people and rending enslaved communities in the East, during the 1820s and 1830s; it is why so many supported the war with Mexico in the 1840s and fought bloody conflicts in Kansas in the 1850s. They hoped that new lands would offer new opportunities to get in the slave-holding, plantation-buidling game. This truth about social mobility in the antebellum South, and its dependence on the enslavement of black Americans, explains the quick and fierce loyalty to the Confederate cause on the part of so many poor whites: they fought to preserve slavery in order to preserve their chance to climb the social and economic ladders of their world. Looking at the motivations of white southern soldiers helps students understand the antebellum society they fought to maintain.
When we teach about the motivations of ordinary soldiers, we also see that the North was far from unified in its support for the war. Many disagreed with President Lincoln's aims throughout the conflict—to some he was a tyrant, pushing the nation into a war it did not want, while for others, Lincoln's desire to "preserve the union" did not go far enough in guaranteeing the end of slavery and the citizenship of African Americans. The issuance of the National Conscription Act in 1863 stoked class tensions, as poor and working-class men, many of them immigrants, were drafted into the Union army. Further inflaming tensions was the law's provision that allowed anyone who could pay $300 to avoid military service. In July 1863, violent anti-draft riots broke out in New York City, where a mostly working-class Irish immigrant contingent burned and looted the Colored Orphans Asylum and the draft office, and lynched African Americans. At least a dozen were killed before the riot was quelled by the arrival of Union troops, weary from their recent battle at Gettysburg. The draft riots underscore that deep divisions of race and class were alive and well in the North, as well as the South, and that the war, rather than solving these problems, exacerbated them.
In an 1864 letter to Abraham Lincoln, James Shorter, writing on behalf of his fellow soldiers in the 55th Massachusetts regiment, summarized the motivations of many black soldiers: "We came to fight For Liberty justice & Equality" [sic]. Although initially denied the opportunity to serve in the Union army, African Americans continually put pressure on government and military leaders to enlist black soldiers. After they were finally allowed to join, more than 200,000 black men signed up. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, refused to accept lower wages than white soldiers were paid. In their letters and acts of protest, black soldiers repeatedly claimed that they were entitled to equal and fair treatment to white soldiers. Further, they affirmed their right to enjoy the full privileges of citizenship because of their shared participation in the military struggle. Black soldiers often pointed out that they did not passively wait for freedom to be granted but, as soldiers, helped to win the war that ended slavery.
Once the first shots of the Civil War were fired in Charleston harbor on April 12, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln insisted that the U.S. government was fighting to preserve the Union. He did not want to risk losing the support of four slave states fighting on the Union side: Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland. Consequently, Lincoln went to great lengths to assure loyal slaveholders in these states that the key northern war aim was "union," and not "freedom" (the abolition of slavery). But radicals in his own party, abolitionists, and almost everyone in the African-American community in the North wanted to turn the war for disunion into a crusade for freedom.
In the South, thousands of slaves asserted their own view of the Civil War's primary aim by abandoning plantations and fleeing behind Union army lines. Union generals disagreed about whether to free escaped slaves or return them to their masters. Slaves helped make their own case for freedom by rendering valuable services as laborers, spies, guides, cooks, and nurses while at the same time depriving the Confederacy of its labor. Some of Lincoln's generals argued that escaped slaves should be declared "contrabands" of war--riches the slave-owners lost their rights to when the Confederacy rebelled. By the summer of 1861, the "contraband" policy was adopted. It was a first but timid step toward full-scale emancipation. Lincoln maintained that it was not a policy of abolition but merely a tactic of war.
Then on January 1, 1863, almost fifteen months after the war began, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. It freed more than three and a half million slaves in Confederate areas still fighting against the North but excluded almost half a million slaves in the four slave-holding states loyal to the Union. Despite its limitations, the Emancipation Proclamation set off celebrations among white and black abolitionists in the North and rejoicing among slaves in the South. African Americans, slave and free alike, understood that the aims of the war had been dramatically changed and that the Union was on a new course.
Did Lincoln free the slaves? Did the slaves free themselves? Or was freedom finally achieved due to white and black abolitionists? The answer to all three questions is yes. But historians disagree on who played the key role in emancipation.