Private Nimrod Newton Nash, who’d spent almost a month at home in Mississippi with his wife Mollie, returned to Fredericksburg and the Minutemen of Attala and the 13th Regiment on March 5, 1863.

That Friday morning was clear and cold, the evening cloudy and very windy, according to diarist William H. Hill of the Spartan Band.

Newt probably missed a party given by the regimental band and Hill’s mess, on Saturday night, for Gen. Barksdale and some ladies of the town since he was not a member of either group.

But the Christian revivals were continuing and Newt, the son of a minister and married to the daughter of one, would soon join in.

Indeed, that Sunday, March 7, Hill recorded that the meetings were still drawing so many soldiers that they were moved to the St. Georges Episcopal Church “on account of the Methodist Church [where they had begun] being too small to hold the congregation.”