‘I HOPE YOU WILL COME HOME’
On the eve of the Civil War, Thomas Cahill was well-established in New Haven, Conn., a bustling industrial city of 39,000 residents. Cahill was born in Boston in 1828, the son of Irish parents who came to the United States in the early 19th century. The family relocated to New Haven in the 1830s, and Cahill grew up there and did well. He made his living as a mason and owned his own construction business, which provided a comfortable middle-class life for his wife, Margaret, and their two children, Mary and Eddie, who were ages 2 and 1, respectively, in 1861. They had weathered the anti-immigrant fervor that rose with the Know Nothing political party in the mid-1850s, and in the years before the war he was awarded substantial contracts from New Haven’s town government. ¶ Cahill was the captain of a largely Irish-American militia unit, Company E (the Washington-Erina Guards) of the 2nd Regiment Connecticut State Militia. Nativism affected his participation in the martial organization in 1855 when the state passed an act disbanding all militia units composed primarily of foreign-born men. Local papers affiliated with the Democratic Party remonstrated against the ban, noting that Cahill was American by birth, the rank and file was “industrious and skillful,” and with unintended foreshadowing, boasted the militiamen were prepared to “shed their blood and sacrifice…in defense of American liberty….” Colonel Cahill and the 9th Connecticut marched off to war in the fall of 1861 amid pageantry that celebrated their Irish-American pride. “Hard cases” in the ranks, as Cahill called them, however, tarnished the regiment’s reputation from the start.
, in 1856, the ban on foreign-born men in the Connecticut militia was lifted, and just five years later when the war began, many of the men of Cahill’s unit were absorbed into the 9th Connecticut Infantry and elected Cahill colonel of the regiment. Irish-born and first-generation men born to Irish immigrants dominated the 9th Connecticut, the Nutmeg State’s only ethnic regiment. The unit joined Maj., edited by Ryan W. Keating, reveal the ethnic and religious loyalties of a couple who strongly identified with their Irish Catholic community in New Haven. ¶ But the letters exchanged by the Cahills also reflect the pressures that battered most middle-class military families, regardless of religion or ethnicity, as the war dragged on. Margaret (“Mag”) Cahill was left to care for her young children and manage her husband’s business as best she could, exhausting and challenging tasks that left her little time to be involved in patriotic duties on the home front. Her letters capture the limits of her willingness to sacrifice for Union, while Thomas Cahill’s correspondence highlights the frustrations of command, especially for a volunteer citizen-officer. These challenges led him to consider resigning his commission and returning home to Margaret on several occasions, but Cahill remained in uniform through October 1864, compelled to serve the men of the 9th Connecticut and the Union cause, perhaps in that order. Their letters reveal a wartime family motivated less by the cause of liberty than their sense of duty to their community in New Haven and in the 9th Connecticut volunteers. The Cahill’s phonetic misspelling has been maintained in the letters, and in some cases bracketed text has been inserted to enhance clarity.
