Daring Prison Escapes | Escape from Libby Prison | 5

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0:47From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham. And this is American History Tellers, our history, your story.

1:10As we heard in the first episode of this series, during the Civil War, the Confederacy sent captured Union officers to Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia. Formerly a warehouse complex, this prison sat along the James River in the Confederacy's capital. Around a thousand prisoners of war languished in unsanitary and overcrowded rooms. The men dreamed of escape while they suffered terribly from cold, hunger, lice, vermin, and the whims of a sadistic commandant and his guards. But in February 1864, Libby Prison became the site of the largest escape in U.S. history, with 109 men desperately trying to make it to Union lines.

1:50My guest today has spent a great deal of time researching who they were and how they tunneled out. Dr. Robert P. Watson is a distinguished professor of history at Lynn University. He's the author of Escape, the story of the Confederacy's infamous Libby Prison and the Civil War's largest jailbreak. Our conversation is next.

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3:28Dr. Robert Watson, welcome to American History Tellers. Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be here. So you have written nearly 50 books, including three about prison escapes. I'm curious why prison escapes are interesting to you. And why did you write about Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia, in particular? One of my sweet spots, I guess you could say, is the history we don't know or the history that we get wrong. And to think that the country's largest prison break from a harrowing, an absolute charnel house, this prison was wretched and a high death toll. To think that this isn't written about, to think that we've forgotten about it and don't know much about it, that to me was irresistible.

4:07I had to tell that story. To me, this idea of a prison and a prison break, on one hand, it really gets to the essence of human nature. To think that brothers did this to brothers. These were Confederates towing this to Union soldiers. A second thing is not only does this allow us to really get to the human condition, but aren't prison breaks just irresistible? Irresistible. Think of Escape from Alcatraz. Who doesn't like a prison break story? And it's even better when the prisoners are the good guys and when they manage to get out. And what makes it absolutely irresistible is when the prison announces that it is escape proof.

4:47You add all those ingredients for each of these three books that I wrote, including the book Escape on the Libby prison breakout. Irresistible is right. This is a story of great stakes and human consequence. And in our series on daring prison escapes, we featured some of the Union soldiers held inside Libby Prison. Colonel Thomas Rose, who organized the escape. Major Andrew Hamilton, who invented some devices to aid in the escape. Tell us some things that you learned about these men in your research and writing. Who they were, their personalities. What were they able to do that really sticks out to you?

5:19Well, as is so often the case with extraordinary acts of heroism and bravery, they were ordinary men. Thomas Rose, who you correctly noted, was the ringleader, I guess you could say. He orchestrated the prison break. He was a schoolteacher from eastern Pennsylvania who became a principal. Hamilton was a homebuilder. And these men rise to extraordinary heights in the face of almost certain death. So I'm always inspired by the fact that so many of these wonderful heroes end up being just very common people beforehand who just rise to the challenge. Now, turning to prisoners in the Civil War in general.

5:57Now, we are familiar with foreign agents or nationals fighting in the American Revolutionary War, the Hessians, for instance, on the side of the British or the French on the side of the Americans. What's not known so well is that foreigners fought on both sides of the American Civil War as well. And when they were captured, of course, they went to prisons, Confederate prisons, including Libby. Who were some of these men and what motivated them to fight in the American Civil War? Well, yeah, so you're right. There's a long history of this dating to the Revolutionary War and even before that in Europe.

6:29One of these folks was a fellow named Cavada. He was Cuban, and he saw the institution of Southern slavery as similar to the Spanish colonialism that the people of Cuba were experiencing. So for principle, he wanted to fight. He goes to Philadelphia and enlists in the war. He is an engineer. He operates these large balloons that they would fly around in, and the person in the balloon would then get a view of the battlefield, and they could then provide intelligence to their commanders. Unfortunately for him, he's shot down at Gettysburg, and he's imprisoned. That ended up being, I guess, an inadvertent positive thing for me because Kavada speaks multiple languages.

7:13He's very smart. He's a great observer, and he survives this hellacious imprisonment at Libby, and he writes about it. So his journal was a treasure trove for me, and it was also inspiring to think that someone like him would fight for this cause. There was a couple of Hungarians that inspired me. They were dealing with, in 1848 and beyond, the Russians and others were just abusing the Hungarian people. They were on the losing side of a brutal war in Europe, and a lot of them were put to death. Some of them fled for their lives and came to America. When they arrive here, they see the institution of slavery as akin to the kind of atrocities they faced in Europe.

8:02So in principle, they fought as well. So you have all sorts of soldiers that are fighting, all sorts of officers, and this incredible mix of humanity finds its way into Libby Prison during the war. So speaking about Libby Prison, it's hard to know the exact numbers, I'm sure, but at its height, we figure that Libby held as much as a thousand Union soldiers prisoner. Our series shared some of the terrible conditions they faced, but from your research and reading the diaries and personal accounts of these soldiers, share with us what you know about the conditions inside Libby. Yeah, so the numbers were that high.

8:38One of the problems was there was not enough space, physically not enough space. Libby had been a warehouse. It was three warehouses that were on the James River, which is that vital river that runs from Richmond toward the Potomac and Chesapeake. They didn't have beds. They didn't have bunks. There were no toilets or facilities. There was no nothing. It was just hard floors and open windows, which they eventually put bars on. So the cold, the snow, the rain, the summer heat, the humidity, the bugs, everything came in. There was so little space that men were literally piled up on top of one another.

9:17In order to sleep, one of the things the soldiers had to do was they would, by unit, they would all lie down together and spoon like a newlywed couple or something. They would all line up spooning so that that way they could all fit. Plus, they were almost naked. They were freezing, and that kept them warm. Then every hour when a Confederate sentry would yell, two o 'clock and all is well, the commanding officer or senior officer would announce to his unit, okay, three, two, one, spoon left or spoon right, and they'd all roll over. That kept them moving during the night, which helped keep them alive.

9:54The men had welts on one side of their bodies, so by rolling over, it mitigated that. That's how crowded it was. The other thing about it was the South, the entire Confederacy, by the middle of the Civil War, so by late 62, 1863, they're in a starvation atmosphere. They had pretty much run out of food. They had run out of medicine. They were running out of clothing. They were running out of everything for a variety of reasons. One, the Union wisely blockaded Southern ports, which prevented them from exporting, importing, trading. Two, Jefferson Davis and Confederate leaders were grotesquely incompetent, and they ran the economy into the toilet.

10:38So if you're in a starvation atmosphere, and you cannot feed your people, and you cannot feed your soldiers, why would you try to feed the prisoners? So by around December of 1863, the officers, the soldiers in Libby knew that it wasn't if, but when they would die from starvation. That prompted Colonel Rose to try to find a way to escape. What are some of the ways Union soldiers spent their time and kept their morale up in these grim conditions? So Libby was not only the central receiving place for all prisoners, they would be brought by foot, by wagon, by train to Richmond, processed. And if you were an enlisted soldier, you'd be sent out to another prison.

11:24But if you were an officer, lieutenant all the way up to general, you stayed in Libby. So because they were officers, there were a lot of impressive men. Ivy League educations, there were playwrights, there were men who were famous musicians, who were mathematicians. So they decided they needed to keep their spirits up in the face of almost certain death and hopelessness. So they organized what they called the Lyceum, a play on the ancient Greek academy, only because the men were just bitten, harassed, and overrun by pests and lice. They called it the Lyceum, because they were covered in lice.

12:04So they had classes, For example, some of the Hungarian officers I mentioned earlier, they gave classes in European languages, European history. Kavada, the Cuban intellectual, gave classes on Spanish. He gave classes on engineering. They even put on plays. Now, the problem for them was that the warden, a guy named Turner, who was just raw evil, If he heard them talking or appearing to have fun, he would have soldiers, guards bust into the warehouse and just arbitrarily beat or put officers in solitary confinement. He was known to bash men's heads in with his boot. So what they had to do was they had to whisper their lines if they were doing plays.

12:52But it was a remarkable intellectual gathering. Fortunately, there were a few journalists who were inside there, and they kept meticulous notes with the little pieces of scrap paper and a half-broken pencil that they managed to smuggle in. So we have a darn near day-to-day detailed diary, if you will, of all these activities that the men did in the prison. You've just brought up Major Thomas P. Turner, commandant of the Libby Prison. Who was he? And what sort of regulations should he have been following in terms of the treatment of prisoners of war? Turner is the perfect villain in so many ways.

13:31He's physically not an impressive man or imposing man. He's a very small and weak man, but he's evil. He has a chip on his shoulder. Turner wants to be an officer and a hero, but apparently he's such a despicable person that every time he applies or tries to gain a promotion or a command, they all say no. So he's sent to Libby to be the warden. And in some ways, he's, I guess, the perfect warden because he is so brutal and evil that Libby eventually, in his hands, becomes kind of a psychological weapon of terror. In fact, the Confederacy do not try to keep the horrors of Libby a secret. On the contrary, he and Confederate leaders encouraged Richmond newspapers to write about it, to say that they captured this general, to say that 10 men were carried out dead the other day, to say that men are starving in hopes that it would lift Southern spirits to know that they're exacting such a horrible toll on Union officers.

14:33they were hoping that the word would get out, whereby you can almost imagine, Lindsay, a group of Union soldiers sitting around a campfire the night before a battle. And you can almost imagine them looking at each other saying, oh my gosh, if we get captured, we're going to go to Libby. And there's only one way out of Libby, and that's horizontal. If you and I could take a time machine back to 1863, 1864, everybody knew about Libby. Whereas ironically today, it's largely been forgotten. And much of the horrors were not only because the Confederacy ran out of food, not only because Libby was never a prison, it was a warehouse, but because of Commandant Turner, just such a wretchedly evil man.

15:16I'm interested in how the Confederacy viewed Libby Prison as a propaganda tool. You mentioned that the press often ran stories about the treatment of prisoners inside Libby. And, you know, let's not forget also that Libby Prison was seated right there in the capital of the Confederacy in Richmond. Yeah. So it's location, location, location, as realtors would say. Richmond is the Confederate capital. Richmond had multiple railways, multiple roads, and the James River. So it was a transportation hub. It was about the only manufacturing center in the Confederacy. And of course, you know, Jefferson Davis is there.

15:50And the Libby Prison is a stone's throw away from where the president of the Confederacy was governing. And Richmond had about four newspapers, and they wrote about Libby almost on a daily basis, which was a treasure trove for me. I had details on how many prisoners were brought in on a certain day, how many died on a certain day, what everybody was saying about them. So that form of propaganda. Here's probably the most alarming form. The soldiers inside the prison referred to Libby as the Libby Zoo. So what Confederate authorities did was they would invite citizens or officers to tour Libby. And you would walk through the prison and they would point out, just like you're going to a zoo and seeing an animal.

16:33Here's this famous general from Gettysburg. And he's down to 115 pounds and he's in his own feces and he's half naked on the floor. So they would laugh. They would throw things at him. It was used to imbue Southerners with the sense that, gee, we must be winning the war. because this dreaded Union general stuck in Libya, and he doesn't look so tough after all. So what an insult for the prisoners. One, to be humiliated on a daily basis. Two, to just face the prospect of beatings, and you're going to die in a prison. But to have people walk through and leer at you like you're a zoo animal in a cage.

17:12So yeah, all that was this form of Southern propaganda, if you will, to make it a psychological form of terror. Thinking about this time in the Civil War, you know, beginning of 1864, what was the state of the Confederacy? What were things like at Libby and in Richmond? We mentioned the dire need for food, but what else was happening? It became clear by the end of 1863, early 1864, that it was not if, but when. The war was going to end for the Confederacy. They simply could not put enough men in the field. They were running out of everything. By early 1864, you have Union forces in almost every Confederate state.

17:51You have multiple Union armies advancing through Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia. By early July of 1863, Ulysses Grant had seized Vicksburg. Vicksburg was important because it was the big fort that overlooked the Mississippi River. So now the Union controlled the Mississippi River. The South was in trouble, and the soldiers in Libby understood that. Whenever a new officer would be brought into the prison, the first thing that happened after they were processed, often stripped, robbed, beaten, when they were put into the warehouses, all the other officers would run up and debrief them, I guess you could say.

18:32And they kept learning that the war is going on, the unions losing, the unions winning, this, that, and the other thing. So the soldiers knew that even though on paper this war should be ending, it still could drag on, and they were out of food, out of medicine, and dying. Therefore, the only option is to find a way to escape.

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20:52So Colonel Rose, Major Hamilton, and a small group of other men decided that enough was enough and escape was the only option. So they began digging not one, but eventually three tunnels until they could find their freedom. Remind us how they did it and how grueling this process must have been. Yeah, so remember, they didn't have shovels. They didn't have construction equipment. Basically, Hamilton, Major Andrew G. Hamilton, who's kind of a MacGyver person, he comes up with all these cool inventions. He steals things. They find part of a shovel. He steals a small knife. He steals some rope. He steals a spittoon.

21:29And they use all this to dig these tunnels. Remember, you're digging a tunnel in pitch black conditions, dozens of feet through rock and hard soil. Oftentimes, they run into the roots of a tree or the foundation of the building. So it's a grueling task. But the idea came from something really interesting. So Colonel Rose, who's this big bearded bear of a guy, he looks like today he should be sitting on a Harley Davidson. Rose was the officer that would lead from the front. If his line was being broken by a Confederate assault, Rose would pull his pistol and sword and charge into the sea of gray uniforms.

22:09He also was captured at the Battle of Chickamauga, and he's put on a train, and the train is taking him to Richmond. What Rose does is when not all the guards are watching, he jumps off the train, tries to make a run for it. He lands wrong and fractures his ankle. So Rose is in the prison with a broken ankle that's untreated, and he's going to dig out and try to run to freedom. he goes to a window of the prison and he peeks out of the window because if you put your head in the window, a guard would shoot you. He peeks out of the window and he sees swarms of rats going in and out of the river. He can smell and knows that there's a sewer in the basement.

22:50So Rose has this idea, if I can get down into the sewer and dig into the sewer, I could float through that raw sewage, nobody would think of that, and plop into the James River and then run. So Rose does the digging. Hamilton hooks up a knapsack, a spittoon, and rope, ties it to Rose's ankle, so that when Rose fills it with dirt and rock, Hamilton can pull it out, dump it, and then pull it back in. That way, Rose doesn't have to come in and out of the tunnel every couple of minutes. Also, if Rose passes out because he's so far underground, he's not getting enough oxygen, Hamilton can drag him out.

23:26At one point, Rose digs into the sewer and almost drowns because it floods it. They pull him out half dead. As soon as they revive Rose, what does he do? He crawls back in and starts digging again. At another point, he digs into a dead end. What are we going to do? Everybody says, what are we going to do? Rose says, I'm going to start a second tunnel. So he is indefatigable. His courage inspires the other men. and they dig till they can finally come out, hopefully on the freedom side of the wall around Libby. Listening to you and your characterization of Rose, it seems like he's an inspiring and driven character.

24:05And he eventually digs three tunnels after failing twice before. This is arduous, grueling work. I'm wondering why he continued in the face of failure like this. Was it that he is an inspiring, driven person and this is the only thing he could do? or was it merely an act of desperation? I think it's both. I think you're spot on. So to make it even more grueling, what they do is they need to dig the tunnel at night while the other soldiers sleep. So as soon as the last roll call and lights out, if you will, is announced and all the soldiers bunk down, that's when Rose and Hamilton sneak down into the basement and start digging.

24:42What that means is neither of these men is sleeping. So they know that they're running themselves down physically because they're digging all night. Moreover, imagine the conditions in the basement. Thousands of rats, raw sewage, horrific conditions. They haven't eaten and now they're not sleeping. So there was something special about Rose. And Rose just managed to reach down inside himself and grab a hold of his courage and his conscience and not let go. And he was just single-minded. And there were a couple of times when the other men said, you know, after the first tunnel or second tunnel didn't work out, give it up.

25:19But Rose, he didn't give him a pep talk. He just grabbed a piece of a shovel and grabbed a jackknife and crawled into the tunnel and started digging again. So, you know, you wonder in those kinds of conditions, we all need something to keep us going. Rose found the task of trying to escape. That's what motivated him. He stuck with it and it worked. So then finally, on the night of February 9th, 1864, Colonel Rose, Major Hamilton, and ultimately 109 men in all escaped Libby Prison. But that was just the beginning. Once they're outside of Libby, what was next? Yeah, it's one thing to dig out. It's another thing to manage to escape.