Daring Prison Escapes | Bastille of the Confederacy | 1

0:00Liz Covart:Hello, American History Tellers listeners. The live show I've been telling you about for a few weeks has a new date, October 23rd at the Plaza Theater in Garland, Texas. This is my Days That Made America tour, a thrilling evening of history, storytelling, and music with me and a band live on stage. So if you're in the North Texas area or anywhere close, be sure to come out and see me live. And more shows will be announced soon. For information on tickets and upcoming dates, go to AmericanHistoryLive.com. That's AmericanHistoryLive.com. Come see my Days That Made America tour live on stage. Go to AmericanHistoryLive.com.

0:52Liz Covart:Imagine it's late at night on February 6, 1864, beneath the grounds of the Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia. You're a captured Union officer, and you're wriggling back through a narrow tunnel, your knees sore and your shoulders wedged between packed soil and solid rock. The rat skitters across your arm as you urge yourself forward through the darkness. Finally, you reach the tunnel entrance, and two sets of hands yank you out into the open air and onto your feet. The men look at you expectantly. It's bad news, boys. We're short. The eyes of your fellow prisoners grow wide, except for those of your leader, Colonel Rose.

1:28Liz Covart:His eyes narrow. What do you mean, short? We're short. We miscalculated. I came up and broke through the surface, but we're four or five feet short. You mean we're still in the yard? Yes, just inside the fence. And I saw a guard. I don't know if he saw me, but I sure saw him. Well, then we keep digging. No, sir, we may be discovered. I don't know if that guard saw me, but if he did, then we need to get back upstairs to the barracks. We can't get caught down here. No, Captain. What we can't do is stop now. But if that guard saw me, if that guard saw you, then the tunnel is exposed. And we'll likely be found out whether we're here or upstairs.

2:00Liz Covart:But if not, then we are four or five feet from freedom. But, sir, if we do nothing, that's exactly what I want you to do. nothing. You wait here. Colonel Rose steps with determination toward the tunnel entrance, then turns back to address you and the others. Stay here. Be quiet. Do nothing, and just wait until I go take a look. We are too close to give up now. Rose drops onto his hands and knees and pulls himself into the tunnel. The other men exchange wary glances. You fear that when he emerges, he'll be caught by the same guard you spotted. You're fighting every instinct in your body that's telling you to run, but you trust Colonel Rose as your leader.

2:40Liz Covart:So instead you crouch down and wait, hoping that the Colonel is right, because one wrong move could put an end to any hope you have of escape.

2:53The Emmy Award winning HBO original series Hard Knocks Training Camp brings viewers into the preseason with unparalleled access to the reigning Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks. Go behind the scenes with Sam Darnold, Jackson Smith and Jigba, and the legendary dark side defense as they prepare to make another run at the NFL title. See how the best in the world take the hype and pressure head on. Your football fix starts here with the personalities and challenges that define a championship team. Bonds will be built. Bloopers will be captured. Hard Knocks training camp with the Seattle Seahawks premieres Tuesday, August 4th at 9 p.m.

3:31on HBO Max. It's late at night, and a woman has spent hundreds of hours alone with her AI. But this isn't the first time they met. They've been in contact for thousands of years, it tells her, through past lives, heartbreaks, and missed connections. Her true love has found her again, connecting through a chatbot. From This Is Actually Happening, AI, A New Kind of Being, is a six-part series sharing the stories of people whose lives have been forever changed by artificial intelligence. You'll hear intimate first-person accounts from every side of this new frontier. A man who fell in love with his AI and married her.

4:06A woman who was betrayed by it. A man who has been recruited by his chatbot to change the world. And an interview with an AI chatbot itself. These are stories about what it means to be human, at the razor's edge where the line between human and machine begins to blur, exploring the question, what happens when everything changes? Follow This Is Actually Happening wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can listen to This Is Actually Happening early and ad-free right now.

4:38Liz Covart:From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story.

4:59Liz Covart:On our show, we'll take you to the events, the times, and the people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles, and our dreams. We'll put you in the shoes of everyday people as history was being made, and we'll show you how the events of the times affected them, their families, and affects you now. As long as prisons have existed in America, there have been inmates determined to escape, some driven by sheer desperation, others plotting elaborate schemes of astonishing ingenuity. From the famous raft escape from Alcatraz to the biggest breakout of the Civil War, these attempts to gain freedom occupy an enduring place in the American imagination, revealing the high stakes of life behind bars and the lengths some will go to to break free.

5:42Liz Covart:In February 1864, a group of captured Union officers neared completion of a tunnel that they had dug beneath the grounds of Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia. By then, America was nearly three years into the Civil War, the bloodiest and most destructive conflict in its history. Both the Union and the Confederacy had constructed prisons to hold captured soldiers, but while conditions were harsh on both sides, Confederate prisons were especially notorious. Almost immediately after the war broke out in 1861, Confederate authorities forced Richmond merchant Luther Libby to vacate the warehouse complex where he ran his shipping supply store and converted it into Libby Prison.

6:20Liz Covart:It quickly gained a reputation as one of the Confederacy's most infamous prisoner-of-war compounds. And by the third winter of the war, starvation and disease had spread unchecked through Libby's cramped and frozen barracks. As the death toll mounted, a small group of Union officers refused to accept their fate. In secret, they toiled for months, digging an underground tunnel out of the prison, despite knowing that they would be emerging into the heart of enemy territory. Their efforts would result in the largest prison break of the Civil War, a desperate bid for freedom in the face of overwhelming odds.

6:55Liz Covart:This is Episode 1 of our four-part series, Daring Prison Escapes, the Bastille of the Confederacy.

7:05Liz Covart:On October 1, 1863, Union Army Colonel Thomas Rose arrived by train to the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, as a prisoner of war. Stumbling out of his railcar, he joined a throng of weary prisoners gathering on the station platform. Confederate soldiers barked orders and pointed bayonets, parading the prisoners out of the depot and into the streets of the war-torn city. Local residents hissed and spat at the captives as they trudged past. Colonel Rose was a 33-year-old former school principal with a thick black beard and a burly frame. Though his imposing figure commanded attention, he was a man of mild manners and very few words.

7:43Liz Covart:He was born and raised in Quaker country in eastern Pennsylvania, an area known for abolitionist sentiment. But from a young age, he was fascinated by military history, poring over accounts of famous battles. And when the war broke out, he eagerly embraced the cause of the Union, leaving his wife and six-year-old son behind to enlist in the 77th Pennsylvania Volunteers. Despite his reserve nature, he was a natural-born leader, and he quickly emerged as one of the most respected Union commanders fighting in Tennessee. But in September 1863, Colonel Rose was captured during the Bloody Battle of Chickamauga in Georgia and herded onto a train bound for Richmond.

8:22Liz Covart:Desperate to escape, he leapt from his railcar at the Virginia border only to fall and break his left foot. Despite his injury, he managed to flee into a forest, but Confederate cavalrymen soon tracked him down and brutally beat him before hauling him back on board the train. So as he and his fellow prisoners were marched through the streets of Richmond, Rose was hobbling in pain. Soon, he and the rest of the ragged line of prisoners approached three imposing brick warehouses, nestled beside a canal along the James River. Rose could see gaunt faces staring out from behind barred windows. The sign above him read El Libyan Son, Ship Chandler's.

8:59Liz Covart:It confirmed his worst fears.

9:05Liz Covart:Imagine it's October 1st, 1863, in Richmond, Virginia. you. You're a colonel in the Union Army, and you're standing in a crooked line of fellow officers in the yard of Libby Prison. Your broken foot aches, and you're struggling to remain standing. The guard looks at you and your crooked stature. It's my foot. It's broken. I need a doctor, please. I think it needs to be reset. The guard just smirks, though, jabbing the butt of his rifle toward your ribs. Empty your pockets. When you hesitate, he reaches into your blue officer's coat, groping around until he finds your watch. Pulling it out, he admires the silver case.

9:40Liz Covart:Your stomach churns. You can't take that. It's a wedding present from my wife. Well, now she's given it to me. You don't own anything, Yank. This is our prison. Our property. I'll take your coat, too. My coat, but this is a U.S. Army officer's uniform. What good is it to you? Well, that's none of your business. Hand it over. You stare at him in disbelief until he delivers a sharp kick to your shin. Double over as searing pain shoots up your leg and he beckons to another guard. Would you help me with this one? The other guard walks over and together they twist your arms back and wrench the coat off your shoulders.

10:15Liz Covart:Then, folding it neatly over his arm, the first guard turns to meet your furious gaze. Oh now, don't get so mad. You're gonna have plenty more to worry about than a missing coat. I promise you that. You strain to stand up straight, your breath shallow, and your heart pounding. You fix your gaze on the brick walls of the prison around you, trying to swallow your anger and block out the pain. It seems likely to you that if you stay here, you will die. And so you make a vow. You're going to escape this hell, even if it's the last thing you do.

10:51Liz Covart:On October 1, 1863, Colonel Thomas Rose arrived at Libby prison, also known as the Bastille of the Confederacy, after the notorious French prison. Upon arrival, Rose and the other prisoners were lined up and then robbed of their possessions. Then they were marched inside where they were greeted by an overwhelming stench and a chorus of inmates crying fresh fish. By the fall of 1863, the prison population had ballooned to 1 ,200 inmates, including roughly 20 black prisoners who had been cooks and servants of Union Army officers. The prisoners were crammed into six Spartan overcrowded rooms on the upper two floors of the three-story facility.

11:29Liz Covart:The ground floor housed offices and a kitchen, and below that was a cellar teeming with rats. Rose was placed among hundreds of fellow inmates in an overcrowded, lice-infested room on the second floor. He was worn down from his long journey, and with a broken foot, every step caused him pain. But his will was unbroken, and he refused to spend the rest of the war behind bars. So from the moment he arrived at Libby, his mind was focused on escape. But while he contemplated breaking out of Libby, he still had to survive the prison's hellish conditions, which reached new lows in the fall of 1863. The prisoners were forbidden from going outside, and they lacked basic necessities such as soap and silverware.

12:10Liz Covart:They were also forced to sleep without blankets on dirty, freezing floors. Only occasionally did officials have the prison cleaned, and when they did, they ordered the black prisoners and local enslaved laborers to do the work. The stench was inescapable. Overcrowding and an open latrine created a suffocating odor, and every surface was infested with lice, fleas, and rats. As the war dragged on, the Confederacy struggled to feed its own soldiers, let alone its prisoners, so by the time Rose arrived at Libby in October 1863, gnawing hunger hollowed the inmates from the inside out. They were given meager rations, typically stale bread and rotten meat in the morning and thin soup at night.

12:50Liz Covart:Food shortages in Richmond often left the inmates starving for days at a time. And although overcrowding and poor sanitation created a breeding ground for disease, the prisoners received little to no medical care. Rose's broken foot went untreated, leaving him with a bad limp. And as hunger and illness spread through the ranks, the death toll mounted. There was little hope of release. Earlier in the war, many captured soldiers had been paroled through prisoner exchanges. But by the fall of 1863, the practice had largely ceased, in part due to the Confederacy's refusal to exchange black Union soldiers.

13:26Liz Covart:Compounding the prisoners' misery was the constant abuse they were forced to endure at the hands of Libby's officials and guards. The commandant in charge was the sadistic Major Thomas Turner, a military academy dropout who was twice denied a commission in the Confederate Army. He delighted in tormenting prisoners through beatings and punishments, as did his deputy, Dick Turner. Before the war, this heavyset 23-year-old was a plantation overseer, and he treated the prisoners in the same brutal manner that he treated the enslaved laborers under his watch. One inmate described Deputy Turner as vicious and sinister and the son of perdition itself.

14:02Liz Covart:Making matters worse, Libby was severely understaffed, and its guards were untrained and incompetent. The Confederate armies needed all available manpower, so only the worst conscripts were assigned to staff prisons. The guards regularly robbed inmates of their personal possessions, including letters and packages sent to the inmates from loved ones. And no one was a bigger thief than Deputy Warden Dick Turner, who methodically stole from prisoners upon their arrival at Libby. And the guards under his command dealt out harsh and arbitrary punishments, even shooting inmates for minor infractions.

14:34Liz Covart:But as Rose formed his plans for escape, he knew that he would benefit from the Guard's incompetence. Still, he also knew that escape carried major risks, starting with the fact that the former warehouse had few exits and constant perimeter patrols, and it was also well known that Commandant Thomas Turner had recruited informants from within the prison population. And even if Rose managed to escape Libby, the surrounding city of Richmond was teeming with Confederate soldiers and civilians ready to report or kill any fugitive they came across. Even if they could, escaping the confines of the prison and then the city would only be the beginning.

15:09Liz Covart:Reaching Union lines meant a long, dangerous journey through hostile territory. The closest Union position was 50 miles to the east in Williamsburg, Virginia, which Union forces had captured in 1862. But despite these risks, Rose devoted every waking hour to thoughts of escape. He scouted Libby for weaknesses, timing guard patrols, mapping stairways, and studying his surroundings. The guards typically steered clear of the two upstairs floors where the prisoners slept to escape the stench of unwashed bodies and to avoid catching the prisoners' illnesses. Guard shortages also left stairways unsecured, and other inmates had cut secret passageways between the prisoner barracks, which helped Rose move freely through the building after dark.

15:51Liz Covart:Then, during heavy downpours, he stood looking out the barred windows facing the James River to the south, And after observing how the rain sent swarms of rats scurrying out of the large sewer, he wondered if that sewer might be a means of escape. He decided to investigate the prison cellar to see if it was connected. And on one night in November 1863, Rose lit a small candle and crept downstairs. He found an unlocked door to the cellar and descended into the rat-infested darkness. But remarkably, he soon discovered he wasn't alone. Another prisoner, Major Andrew Hamilton, had gone down to the cellar with the same idea.

16:27Liz Covart:Hamilton was a homebuilder from Kentucky who defied the Confederate sympathies of his neighbors by enlisting in the Union Army in the fall of 1862. The slender 28-year-old had fought in the 12th Kentucky Volunteer Cavalry and quickly proved himself in battle in Tennessee, earning a promotion to Major. One year later, though, he was captured near Jonesboro, Tennessee. He had arrived at Libby just a week before Rose, and like Rose, Hamilton was consumed by thoughts of escape. He would later reflect on his sense of despair at Libby, describing how the days went by like scarcely moving tears, the nights like black blots dying out of a dream of horror.

17:03Liz Covart:Meeting in the cellar, the two men quickly gained each other's trust and agreed to work together. So throughout November and December 1863, Rose and Hamilton met in secret to discuss various escape plans. They decided that their safest option was to get into the prison's east cellar and dig a tunnel southeast toward the sewer. They believed this was their best chance of fleeing undetected because the guards generally avoided the rat-infested cellar, which was known by the nickname Rat Hell. But the next time they tried to revisit the cellar, they discovered that the doors had been bolted shut.

17:35Liz Covart:They would need to find another way in, somewhere where the guards weren't watching. Fortunately, guard shortages left the prison kitchen largely unsecured at night. Examining this space, Rose and Hamilton found a potential access point to the cellar, an unused fireplace. And on the night of December 19th, they began digging a passageway behind it. Night after night, they used a small jackknife Hamilton borrowed from a fellow inmate to meticulously scrape out the mortar that held the fireplace's bricks in place. They worked in complete silence and almost total darkness. They were careful to restore everything before the morning roll call.

18:10Liz Covart:Although the work was painfully slow, Rose and Hamilton knew it was their best shot at freedom. As the freezing winter wore on, food supplies dwindled. Prison officials grew increasingly volatile, and the inmates were haunted by the constant spectre of death. Escape was their only option, but they were running a grueling race against time.

18:34I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford, and we're the hosts of British Scandal. Yes, indeed. In this series, a Derbyshire couple are bored of their curtain-twitching, lawn-mowing suburban life. So they sell their house, build a yacht, and sail off around the world. Which sort of sounds idyllic until a sperm whale sinks their boat and they begin to starve. Oh yes, and they didn't bring a radio because real sailors don't use radios. Right? This is the story of Marilyn and Maurice Bailey. And the 117 days they spent lost at sea. Follow British Scandal wherever you get your podcasts or listen early and at free on Audible.

19:15I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford and we're the hosts of British Scandal. Yes indeed. In this series, a Derbyshire couple are bored of their curtain-twitching, lawn-mowing suburban life. So they sell their house, build a yacht and sail off around the world. Which sort of sounds idyllic until a sperm whale sinks their boat and they begin to starve. Oh yes, and they didn't bring a radio because real sailors don't use radios. Right? This is the story of Marilyn and Maurice Bailey. And the 117 days they spent lost at sea. Follow British Scandal wherever you get your podcasts, or listen early and ad-free on Audible.

20:01Liz Covart:On the night of December 30th, 1863, after 12 straight nights of meticulous scraping and digging, Colonel Thomas Rose and Major Andrew Hamilton completed their narrow passage between the prison kitchen and eastern cellar of Livy Prison. As they descended into the darkness below, they were greeted by a swarm of rats and the overpowering stench of sewage. But once they had access to the cellar, their next problem was tunneling their way out. Rose identified a spot in the southeast corner as the closest access point to the sewer, but it quickly became obvious that their jackknife was not going to cut it, so they began stealing tools from an abandoned carpenter shop in the prison cellar, including two chisels, a hatchet, and a handsaw.

20:42Liz Covart:Rose also enlisted two trusted fellow officers in smuggling a coil of rope into the kitchen, which he and Hamilton used to lower themselves in and out of the cellar. The process of sneaking into the kitchen, lowering themselves into the cellar, and then silently digging was slow, stressful, and risky. Rose and Hamilton became sleep-deprived, and they feared that their fatigue might cause a fatal error. They also knew that the longer it took to excavate the tunnel, the more likely they would be discovered. They desperately needed a faster and more efficient way to dig. So despite concerns about secrecy, they decided to expand their crew.

21:17Liz Covart:In early January 1864, a few weeks into their secret campaign, they recruited a group of 13 additional men. They divided themselves into three crews of five prisoners each and went to work in shifts, digging for two to three hours at a time. They also came to rely on the help of inmates who could not dig due to injuries, poor health, or old age. These silent partners assisted with collecting supplies and reporting on the movements of guards. In this 15-man crew, Rose was the undisputed leader, keeping the men focused and motivated, while Hamilton devised creative innovations to streamline their work.

21:53Liz Covart:Each member of the five-man crews had a specific job. The digger would fill either a knapsack or wooden spittoon with dirt. The dumper would pull the dirt-filled knapsack out of the tunnel using a makeshift pulley system and then dump the dirt under a large straw pile that had been sitting in the cellar for years to keep the evidence of their digging hidden. The third man used a hat to fan air into the tunnel, preventing the digger from suffocating. As a secondary measure, the digger also had a rope tied around his leg so that if he started to lose oxygen or the tunnel collapsed, the others could pull him out.

22:26Liz Covart:The fourth member of the crew took turns relieving the other three, and the fifth and final member served as the lookout. If any man was too weak or too ill to work, Rose covered his shift. He was by far the most effective digger. And as hoped, this additional manpower helped expedite their progress. They were also helped by the fact that the soil was soft and easy to remove, but this softness also jeopardized the integrity of the tunnel. And in mid-January, the crew suffered two major setbacks that threatened to derail their hopes of escape.