One So Kind As He: Anderson House Press

In May of 1865, three Union commanders in Little Rock wrote to a Confederate widow in Missouri. Her husband had died at eleven o'clock the night before - a man so beloved by strangers on both sides of a brutal war that they could only describe him as "one so kind as he."

His name was Major James Parrott, CSA. He never made it home.

Many years after finding his photograph in an old family album, Susan Bailey sat in the Arkansas State Archives and read his letters - love letters, desperate letters, letters that ended with your loving husband until Death, with Death capitalized as if he already knew.

What she found in that archive - and in the trunks, tin-types, and the many rooms of a 17-room house in a little known Missouri river town - became a story she had to write.

One So Kind As He is history recovered one small fragment at a time. It is the story of James and Mariah, of the unnamed man who carried him home, of a Union captain who looked the other way in the dark - and of the woman who refused to let any of them be forgotten.