A Day Escaping Libby Prison, 1864
Time Surfing: Graphic History
Time Surfing: Experience History.
Historical Backdrop
By the winter of 1863–64, Libby Prison — a converted ship-chandler’s warehouse on Cary Street in Richmond, Virginia — held roughly 1,200 captured Union officers packed into eight bare rooms with no beds, no chairs, no heat, and rations that had shrunk to a fist of coarse cornbread and a swallow of water. Men died of dysentery, pneumonia, and starvation. Colonel Thomas E. Rose, a 34-year-old former Pennsylvania schoolteacher captured at Chickamauga in September 1863, arrived in October and began looking for a way out almost the moment he came through the door. With Major Andrew Hamilton of the 12th Kentucky Cavalry, Rose organized fifteen officers into digging shifts that cut through the back of a kitchen fireplace, dropped into the rat-infested east cellar the prisoners called “Rat Hell,” and — after three failed tunnels that flooded or struck sewer stone — drove a fourth shaft about 50 feet under a vacant lot to a fenced yard.
Date/time and location: February 9, 1864 — 4:50 a.m., upper east room (”Chickamauga Room”), Libby Prison, Cary and 20th Streets, Richmond, Virginia
You have not slept. You lie on bare plank flooring in a room a hundred feet long, packed rib to rib with four hundred officers sleeping spoon-fashion, all turning together when the man at the end calls “spoon.” The cold comes up through the boards. Your hands throb — nails split, palms raw and weeping from six weeks of scraping clay with a chisel. Three hours ago you climbed out of the cellar and told Hamilton the tunnel was through. Air. Real air, and the smell of tobacco stems, and a sentry calling half-past one and all’s well. Now you stare at the black ceiling and count sentry beats in your head. The room stinks of unwashed men, wood smoke, and the open latrine trough at the far wall. Somewhere a man coughs the wet, tearing cough that means he will not see spring. Tonight, you think. Tonight or never.
Date/time and location: February 9, 1864 — 7:35 a.m., upper east room, Libby Prison
Roll call. You form up in four ranks with the rest, and Erastus Ross walks the line with his pencil and his little leather book, counting by twos, singsong, bored. He does not know that behind you, in the second rank, men are shuffling. The count has been rigged for six weeks — “repeaters” duck low, cross behind the ranks, and get counted twice to cover for the diggers hidden in the cellar below. This morning nobody is missing, but you keep the drill perfect anyway. Habit. Discipline. You stand still, eyes front, face flat as a barn door, while a clerk half your age walks past close enough that you can smell his hair oil. He does not look at you. In eleven hours you will be under his feet.
Date/time and location: February 9, 1864 — 8:40 a.m., ration issue, upper east room, Libby Prison
Rations come up the stairs in a wooden tray. A brick of cornbread the size of your fist, ground from unbolted meal with the cob milled in, so it cuts your mouth going down. A gray shred of boiled beef, mostly gristle, for every second man. Water from the James, carried in a bucket that also serves the latrine detail. You take your piece, and instead of eating it you break it in half and push half into the tarred canvas haversack under your coat. It is the fourth day you have done this. You can feel your belt at the last hole. A lieutenant from Ohio watches you do it and says nothing, because he is doing the same thing, and because by now half the building suspects something and nobody will say the word out loud.
Date/time and location: February 9, 1864 — 10:15 a.m., barred east window, upper east room, Libby Prison
You stand back from the bars, where the sentry below cannot see you and shoot. Men have been killed at these windows for less. From here you can see the whole board: the vacant lot east of the prison, fifty feet of frozen mud and cinders; the high plank fence; the tobacco shed with its shingle roof and open gate onto Twentieth Street. Under that shed, three feet down, is the mouth of your tunnel. You watch the sentry on the east beat. Twenty-eight paces down, turn, twenty-eight paces back. Sixty-one seconds. You count him nine times to be sure. Beyond the fence, wagons grind up Cary Street, and the canal water lies flat and brown, and a locomotive whistles down at Rocketts. Everything you need is a hundred feet away and it might as well be Pennsylvania.
Date/time and location: February 9, 1864 — 11:30 a.m., stair landing between floors, Libby Prison
