Thomas Garland Jefferson

Jefferson was a son of John Garland Jefferson and Otelia Mansfield Howlett of Winterham.^[2] He was their oldest son, one of 14 children, on a plantation growing cotton and tobacco.^[3][4]

On May 15, 1864, at the Battle of New Market, Major General John C. Breckinridge reluctantly ordered the charge of the young cadets to fill a gap in his right wing; the cadets pushed further and overran a Union artillery position, ensuring their place in the Confederacy's last major battlefield victory of the war.^[5]

Jefferson was shot in the stomach. When two fellow cadets ran to assist him, he told them to carry on fighting, reportedly saying: "You can do me no good."^[6] He died three days later, resting in the home of a local resident, Lydie Clinedinst, after he was found by Cadet Moses Ezekiel, wounded and laying in Clinedinst's farmhouse.^[7][8] Ezekiel (who was Jewish) read from John 14 by his bedside as a makeshift last rites. He is buried below the statue of Virginia Mourning Her Dead sculpted by Ezekiel in his later years.^[9]