behind AotW

Thomas M Allen is the model for the soldier atop the Confederate Dead Monument in Oakdale Cemetery, Washington, NC. He may have been chosen for his 6 foot 2 inch stature.

He was 2nd Lieutenant of Company E, 4th North Carolina Infantry when he was wounded and captured at Sharpsburg in September 1862. He was wounded again at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg in 1863. Made prisoner at Gettysburg, he was among the 600 Confederate officers on Morris Island, SC in the Summer of 1864.

The harsh and unusual conditions of their imprisonment inspired one of the captives, John O. Murray, to record his experiences in the 1905 book The Immortal Six-Hundred. The name he gave the group stuck, and today they are still referred to as the ‘Immortal 600.’

After the war he was a farmer in Beaufort County, NC. The picture above is from Douglas J. Butler’s North Carolina Civil War Monuments: An Illustrated History (2013).