Camp Barksdale, near Union City, TN, June 7, 1861.

“Our company rebelled last night and carried our point,” Co.I (D) Pvt. Newton Nash wrote his wife Mollie. “We received some orders that we could not obey because they were given as though we were a set of fools. The officer of the day came to our camp with a file of twenty men to arrest some of our men; but we rose as one man and told them that we would die before we would submit to be carried to the guard house. They then let us alone for the night. Every man got up this morning with the determination [to] stand by each other to the last. [Col. Barksdale] had us drawn up this evening and made a few remarks in a very gentlemanly manner and thanked [us] for our kind attention. [He] said the Minutemen [of Attala] would do to tie to.”

Newt Nash’s letters are available in Jess McLean’s book on the regiment as well as at the Mississippi state archives. My set of the letters was a gift from one of Newt’s descendants because one letter mentions my great grandfather, Ed Stanley, who was also a private in Co. I (D), the Minutemen of Attala.