CANDICE SHY HOOPER

discusses her book

"Delivered Under Fire:
Absalom Markland and Freedom's Mail"

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https://youtu.be/plTm8hmLcmY


Zoom presentation to the
Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia
Novermber 9, 2022

Q&A period follows the presentation


About the Topic:

Candice Hooper will talk about her book, Delivered Under Fire: Absalom Markland and Freedom’s Mail. It is the first biography of Absalom Markland, a childhood friend of Ulysses Grant. Markland was the courageous, innovative, self-made man who - at Grant’s request - developed the infrastructure of the United States military mail service during the Civil War and aided Grant’s fight against the Ku Klux Klan during his presidency. 

Harold Holzer said this about the book:

“Readers and writers who rely on Civil War-era letters to animate history have seldom given a thought to how such mail got delivered so reliably and promptly. Now Candice Shy Hooper has dispatched a true surprise package: the unusual and compelling life of General Grant’s military postal agent A. H. Markland, a truly unsung hero of the Union cause. One will devour this absorbing life story not only wondering how Markland did his unheralded job so well, but wondering why we cannot find another Markland to run the U. S. Postal Service today! Here is a special delivery treat for anyone who thinks there is nothing new to learn about the Civil War.”


 Ms Hooper's website also includes the following about the book:

During the Civil War, his movements from battlefield to battlefield were followed in the North and South almost as closely as those of generals, though he was not in the military.  

From Fort Donelson in 1862 to City Point in 1865, he traveled with Ulysses Grant’s armies, assuring the swiftest possible delivery of mail, sometimes even as bullets whizzed overhead.

After the war, his unprecedented response to Ku Klux Klan violence sparked passage of a landmark civil rights law, though he was not a politician.  

When he died in 1888, his death was reported in newspapers from coast to coast, though he’s all but forgotten today. 

He was the man who delivered the most valuable ingredient in Union soldiers’ fighting spirit during those terrible war years – letters between the front lines and the home front. 

 He was Absalom Markland, Special Agent of the United States Post Office, and this is the first time his story has been told.

 

For more information about Ms. Hooper, her publications, and how to pre-order her upcoming book, visit www.candiceshyhooper.com 


About the Speaker:

Born on Guam to a U.S. Navy Hospital Corpsman and his intrepid Hoosier wife, Candice Shy Hooper attended more than half a dozen schools before her high school graduation. The one constant in her nomadic life were libraries from Saipan to Norfolk, Virginia, which her parents made the family’s first stop after every household move. 

Ms. Hooper received her undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Illinois and a law degree from Georgetown University.  After a career on Capitol Hill as aide to the late Congressman Charlie Wilson (“Charlie Wilson’s War”) and as a lobbyist with her husband, Ms. Hooper “discovered” her true intellectual passion.  Returning to school in 2006, she earned an MA in history, with a concentration in military history, from George Washington University.
Ms. Hooper’s work has appeared in the New York Times, The Journal of Military History, and The Michigan War Studies Review.  She has spoken at the Society for Military History annual conference, Film & History annual conference, and the Society for Civil War Historians/  She has also lectured at the U. S. Naval Academy and George Washington University.

In addition, Ms. Hooper is an award-winning poet, whose work was selected for inclusion in District Lines, an anthology published by the renowned independent bookstore Politics & Prose.

Ms. Hooper serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of The Journal of Military History and is a member of the Ulysses S. and Julia D. Grant Historical Home Advisory Board in Detroit, Michigan. She has served on the Board of Directors of President Lincoln’s Cottage at the National Soldiers’ Home in Washington, DC, and is past president of the Johann Fust Library Foundation in Boca Grande, Florida, where she spends half the year with her husband Lindsay.  They spend the other half in Lindsay’s home state of Wyoming.

Ms. Hooper's previous book, Lincoln’s Generals’ Wives: Four Women Who Influenced the Civil War, for Better and for Worse, won three national awards.



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