Rat Hell: Libby Prison and the Story Behind the American Civil War's Largest and Most Daring Escape Attempt

 “On the night of February 9th, as soon as it was sufficiently dark, the exodus from the prison commenced…”

-from The Memoirs of Captain Morton Tower (1870)

Originally built as a series of three tobacco warehouses and located on the banks of the James River in Richmond, Virginia, in February of 1864 Libby Prison was home to nearly 2,000 Union Prisoners of War, mostly officers.

The Libby warehouses, named for Luther and George Libby who had leased the buildings prior to the Civil War and attempted to convert them into a grocery business and ship supply storage facility, were requisitioned by the Confederate government at the start of the war in 1861 and made into military hospitals.

However, by the middle of 1862 after the North’s punitive and disastrous invasion of the south called the Peninsular Campaign, due to the unforeseen influx of prisoners, the South converted the Libby military hospital into a Prisoner of War camp set aside specifically for Union officers whom the Confederates hoped to be able to ransom.  

Libby as Confederate Hospital 1861

Desperate for manpower, throughout the entire course of the war,  it was always the South’s hope that the Union would engage in some type of prisoner exchange program with the Confederacy.  But President Lincoln, realizing that the Northern armies had a huge advantage when it came to sheer numbers, never gave in to the South’s hopes.

During the Civil War, both sides were caught unprepared for the sheer number of Prisoners of War that were either captured or forced to surrender.  Due to the massive influx of prisoners, a number never before seen in the annals of warfare up to that point, the North and South alike both had to scramble and create impromptu Prisoner of War camps.  For that reason Union and Confederate prisoners were often housed in makeshift warehouses, barns and even open air fields devoid of the most rudimentary shelter and forced to endure the most horrible living conditions imaginable.

Libby Prison was one such impromptu POW camp--a three storey warehouse in the heart of the Confederate capital of Richmond that was its own little special slice of Hell on earth for Union prisoners.

During the war some did make it out of Libby Prison alive.  Upon their release from Libby Prison in 1863 a group of Union surgeons, classified by the Confederacy as “noncombatants” reported of conditions inside the prison that, “All sick or well officers, or privates, are now furnished with an unsuitable diet for hospital patients…prostrated with diarrhea, dysentery and fever to say nothing of startling instances of…horrid pictures of death, sickness and semi-starvation we have had thrust upon our observation.”

Artist's rendering inside Libby Prison 1863

Even the most popular and widely circulated daily newspaper in the Confederacy described Libby Prison thus in 1864:

“Libby takes in the captured Federals by scores, but lets none out, they are huddled up and jammed into every nook and corner, at the bathing troughs, around the cooking stoves, everywhere there is a wrangling jostling crowd.  At night the floor of every room they occupy in the building is covered, every square inch of it, by uneasy slumberers lying side by side, and heel to head, as tightly packed as if the prison were a huge box of nocturnal sardines.”

-from the Daily Richmond Enquirer 1864

Simply called “The Libby” by northerners and southerners alike, by 1864 Libby Prison’s reputation for infamy and atrocity was surpassed only by Andersonville Prison in Georgia, which was little more than an open air death camp for Union POWs in the sweltering heat of the deep south.

Andersonville Prison

Relief efforts were made to help the plight of the Union officers imprisoned behind the walls of the vermin-filled former warehouse.  In one instance the Confederate authorities did even allow food shipments from the North to be brought in under a flag of truce, but as the war dragged on and turned into a total war to the death between north and south, and as basic necessities became more and more scarce throughout the Confederacy in 1864 and 1865, such humanitarian gestures ceased between the opposing sides, and the plight of Civil War prisoners on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line deteriorated even further.

Realizing that to sit idly behind the walls of “The Libby” meant near certain starvation, and also understanding that the war could yet continue indefinitely, during the second week of February 1864, over 100 Union Prisoners of War launched a daring and successful escape from Libby Prison.  The Libby Prison Break of 1864 was the largest and most successful escape attempt of the entire American Civil War on either side.

The mastermind of the Libby Prison Break was Colonel Thomas E. Rose, commander of the 77th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment.  Rose had been captured in September of 1863 during the Battle of Chickamagua.  Upon being sent to Libby Prison, Rose became determined not to die there and to once again return to the front lines and fight against the Confederacy.

Colonel Thomas E. Rose

He concocted a plan to tunnel his way, from the basement and outside the walls of the Libby Prison warehouse to freedom. 

The grounds of Libby Prison encompassed an entire square city block of the Confederate capital city of Richomd.  Rose, along with his main partner in the escape attempt Major A.G. Hamilton noticed that even Confederate guards were hesitant to ever go into the basement of the Libby Prison Compound.

“The Libby” contained three floors and a basement.  The top two floors were for prisoner housing, while generally, the first floor was for Confederate guards, with the basement being partitioned off into three areas.

One part of the basement was a storage cellar, while the middle of the basement was still used by civilians as a carpenter’s and tool shop, while the western end though still accessible to Union Prisoners of War, contained a largely abandoned Union kitchen which had been the site of flooding from the James River in 1863.

Since the flood thousands of rats had infested the one time kitchen set aside for Union Prisoners and the kitchen area had since been nicknamed “Rat Hell” by the Confederate guards at Libby Prison.  Though guards were supposed to, at least in theory, make rounds over every inch of the prison at least every hour, Rose noticed that most of the guards were far too afraid to ever venture into “Rat Hell”.

Once he noticed this lapse in security, Colonel Thomas E. Rose soon began to recruit other Union POWs to his cause and let them in on his plans to dig a tunnel right through “Rat Hell” and outside the walls of “The Libby” to freedom.

Taking turns, a group of 109 Union prisoners began the slow and arduous process of digging through Rat Hell, mostly by hand.  Lucky for them, the floor of Rat Hell was covered by over two feet of straw, which enabled the prisoners to conceal the dirt as they dug.

Each day, Union POWs would scramble to dig their tunnel, with a lookout posted above ground for signs of approaching guards.  At the end of the day that man would then stay overnight with rats, cover himself with straw, and lay on the ground to cover the tunnel’s entrance, and all signs of digging while the claws of the rodents scurried over his body until the next relief party of diggers arrived a few hours later.

Captain I.N. Johnston of the Union Army, who is reported to have spent almost more time in “Rat Hell” than any other man stated, “There was a large quantity of straw there, and but for which our undertaking must have been discovered nearly as soon as it began.”

Major Hamilton stated regarding the rats that, “The only difficulties experienced were lack of proper tools and the unpleasant feature of having to hear hundreds of rats squeal all the time, while they ran over the diggers without the least sign of fear.”

Rats were not the only obstacle faced in the escape attempt.  Colonel Rose noted that, “The profound darkness caused some to become bewildered when they moved about.  I sometimes had to feel all over the cellar to gather up the men that were lost.”

But Colonel Thomas Rose, the man who came up with the idea for the escape through “Rat Hell” even admitted himself that, “The dark and repugnant atmosphere of Rat Hell offered the most effective cover.  On rare occasions guards entered the large basement rooms.  This was, however, so uninviting a place, that the Confederates made their visits as brief as nominal compliance with their orders permitted.”

It took 17 days for 109 Union POWs to tunnel their way out of “Rat Hell” with their bare hands.  When the men finally reached the other side of the Libby Prison gate and popped their heads out into open air beneath a shed of another nearby warehouse, Colonel Thomas E. Rose of Pennsylvania who had led them there declared, “The Underground Railroad to God’s Country is Open!”

In total 109 men would make the journey on the Underground Railroad to God’s Country beneath “Rat Hell” and make it out on the other side of the Libby Prison Gate.

The Confederates, for their part, believed that Libby Prison was escape proof, and as has already been seen were scared as Hell to journey into the depths of “Rat Hell” and had no idea what the escapees were up to the whole time.

It took twelve hours before any of the guards noticed that any prisoners were missing from Libby Prison.  By that time a flood of free Union POWs had already hit the streets of Richmond in the pitch black of night.

Surprisingly, more than half of the 109 escapees, 57 in total, including Colonel Thomas E. Rose would make it north to Union lines and their eventual freedom.  Many of the escaped POWs were familiar with the terrain after having served with the Army of the Potomac in northern Virginia during the Peninsular Campaign of Spring and Summer 1862 and were able to quickly find their way north to friendly lines.  Rose would go on to serve for the remainder of the war and eventually be promoted to the rank of Brigadier General for his bravery in leading the Libby Prison escape.

Though the numbers who escaped Libby Prison in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of POWs who were captured during the American Civil War is infinitesimally small, the impact that the Libby Prison Break had on Union morale cannot be overestimated.

For one thing, the Libby Prison Escape sent the entire city of Richmond, the Confederate capital, into a panic as civilians were gripped by fears of rapacious escaped Union POWs rampaging through the city streets at night and causing havoc.  Though, in reality, almost all the escaped prisoners either made it north to safety or were recaptured within days of their initial escape, the fears of Richmond’s defenseless southern belles drained the Confederate Army of hundreds of soldiers, who were then employed as security at Libby Prison during 1864 and 1865, when they most certainly could have been better employed on the frontlines as part of the Army of Northern Virginia.

Additionally, the men who tunneled through “Rat Hell” and lived to tell about it, were able to draw attention to the plight of Civil War Prisoners of War, and ensure that atrocities committed against both them and their compatriots were not only known about, but also documented by the appropriate authorities and remembered by posterity.

Emaciated POW Released from Libby 1865

Today, it is easy to forget the suffering of POWs during the American Civil War.   In the twenty-first century, given all the suffering around us in the world; all the atrocity that is committed on a near daily basis, it is easy to think that we today have a monopoly on suffering and on inhumanity towards one another.  It is easy to give up hope.  But our countrymen, the brave men who served during the American Civil War, knew indescribable suffering and indescribable horror.  They knew what it was like to tunnel through places like “Rat Hell” and to come up on the other side.  Perhaps, today, the story of the brave Americans who took part in the Libby Prison Escape of 1864 can serve to give all of us just a little bit of hope.