Delivered Under Fire: Absalom Markland and Freedom’s Mail

More than 70,000 books about the Civil War have been published since 1861, and almost every one of them quotes from letters exchanged by family and friends, but there has never been a book about how those letters were delivered — until now.

Absalom Markland, a native of Kentucky and a Special Agent of the U.S. Post Office Department, was the man who delivered the most valuable ingredient in U.S. soldiers’ fighting spirit during the four terrible Civil War years—letters between the front lines and the home front. At the beginning of the war, at the request of his Kentucky childhood schoolmate, Ulysses S. Grant, Markland created the most efficient military mail system ever devised, parts of which are in use today. He met regularly with President Abraham Lincoln during the war and carried important messages between Lincoln and Generals Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman at crucial points in our nation’s peril.

When the Ku Klux Klan waged its reign of terror after the Civil War, Markland’s decisive action was the tipping point that President Grant needed to combat the Klan. Nearly every biography of Lincoln, Sherman, and Grant includes at least one footnote about Markland, but his important, sometimes daily interaction with them during and after the war has escaped modern notice, until now. Delivered Under Fire tells his amazing story.

Candice Shy Hooper served on the editorial advisory board of The Journal of Military History and on the board of directors of President Lincoln’s Cottage at the National Soldiers Home. She is a member of the Ulysses S. and Julia D. Grant Historical Home Advisory Board. Hooper is author of Lincoln’s Generals’ Wives: Four Women Who Influenced the Civil War – for Better and for Worse, which won three national awards.