Libby Prison Breakout: The Daring Escape from the Notorious Civil War Prison
Joseph Wheelan has written a winner of a book. The majority of books written about Civil War prisons history have focused mainly on Andersonville and the horrors endured by inmates on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. Former POWs in their memoirs often penned exaggerated accounts of their incarcerations. Wheelan’s narrative clarifies some misconceptions of the Civil War prison saga and breaks new ground relative to the Civil War’s “Great Escape.” Perhaps most striking is his revelation of an organized “underground network” of Richmond Unionists, black and white, male and female, who not only provided crucial intelligence to the North but also collaborated with the Union officers who fled the confines of rat-infested Libby Prison. On the cold night of Feb. 4, 1864, 109 of the 1,200 Union officers confined to Libby crawled through a 55-foot tunnel to freedom. Of that number 59 reached Union lines and safety. The Confederates rounded up 48 while two others drowned. Wheelan provides extensive background in the first third of the book. Here readers learn about the complexities of the POW question during the Civil War. Neither side anticipated the scale of the war and the subsequent difficulties that POWs would present. Shortly after the war began, German immigrant Francis Lieber, a witness to the impact of the Napoleonic Wars in his homeland, devised a humanitarian code for POW treatment that was accepted initially by both sides. For the first two years of the war, a POW cartel operated efficiently between the Union and Confederacy. As the war ground on and became both a total war as well as a conflict waged by the North to liberate the slaves, the cartel system collapsed. Wheelan lays the blame for the failure to exchange POWs squarely on the North and the Lincoln administration which, in his opinion, used the cynical excuse that Confederate POWs would no longer be exchanged because Confederates refused to exchange captured black Union soldiers. He contends the Union was keeping pressure on the Confederacy to both feed and care for POWs while at the same time managing armies in the field. It was a recipe for disaster as the Confederacy could not effectively do both. Playing a part here was the Union concern that releasing Confederate POWs would simply mean returning these men to fight against the Union. What moves Wheelan’s account so well is his vivid narrative, particularly with regard to the culture inside Libby Prison and the subsequent escape. Readers literally feel as if rats are scurrying over them, their fingernails are caked with dirt as the tunnelers claw their way through the soil using their bare hands and small improvised tools, and they are breathing genuinely fresh air as they make their way through the exit hole. No detail is missed, and the pages turn quickly. Perhaps most importantly these men are given identities as Wheelan brings to life the protagonists by craftily resurrecting their lives before the war and what they endured inside the converted tobacco barn. In doing so Wheelan provides pathos, excitement and insight into the yearning of all POWs for freedom. Reviewer: James A. Percoco James A. Percoco is the author of Summers with Lincoln: Looking for the Man in the Monuments and is History Educator-in-Residence at American University.
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Illustrated, photographs, bibliography, notes, index, 282 pp., 2010, Public Affairs Books,