There were two ways out of the most infamous prison of the Confederacy: You could die or you could escape.

This is the story of the largest jailbreak in American history, and it happened during the Civil War.

I'm Ann Bocock, and welcome to "Between the Covers".

Dr. Robert Watson is here.

He's a professor, historian, media commentator, and awardwinning author of, get this, more than 45 books.

This book that we're going to talk about, "Escape!

The Story of the Confederacy's "Infamous Libby Prison "and the Civil War's Largest Jailbreak", has won the Global Book Award Gold Medal in History.

Congratulations for that, and it will also be on television with Morgan Freeman.

So congratulations on both.

Thanks, Ann.

And just let me say thank you for the opportunity to be here again.

We've been doing this for several years.

And thank you also for what you do for the community.

I thoroughly appreciate it.

Thank you.

This book, "Escape", first of all, it reads like a thriller, and then there are pages to me that reads like a horror show.

I would like to take a step back.

Give us a bird's eye view of what Libby Prison was.

So neither the North nor the South was ready for the Civil War in 1861.

Consequently, they didn't have enough food, they didn't have enough anything for the soldiers.

They thought the war would last, estimates were 30 to 90 days.

Therefore, if they didn't have enough food and medicine for the soldiers, they sure didn't have enough of food and medicine for the prisoners.

What happens immediately is there are so many Union prisoners, the Confederacy doesn't know what to do.

So they take these old tobacco warehouses on the James River in the historic Tobacco Row region of Richmond and they turned them into a prison.

A tobacco warehouse is not a prison.

There's no place to bunk, there's no facilities, no nothing.

They're sleeping on open, hard wooden floors.

So this prison was basically warehousing prisoners.

The South ran out of food, ran outta medicine.

They started robbing and stripping the prisoners.

So these men are enduring winters, heated summers, halfnaked, on the floor with nothing to eat, nothing to, it was a charnel house, and consequently, many, many died.

You write very explicitly about these conditions.

The starvation, this was just so horrible, so overcrowded.

I don't think we can put enough emphasis on that.

Tell me how they slept.

You know, as a historian, I always say that history needs to be taught and written with all of its warts, pimples, and horrors.

Could you imagine sugarcoating slavery or the Holocaust or any one of these topics?

So, yeah, it was gripping.

And one of the things that struck me, as you said, was how they slept.

This prison was so overcrowded.

First off, there was no bunks, no place to sleep.

They were on the hard floor.

It was so overcrowded that the men were piled up on top of one another.

So they came up with a solution, by companies or units, they would lie like newlyweds, spooning, side by side in these long rows, if everyone spooned, they could all fit.

Plus, in the winter, it kept them warm and kept them alive.

They were down the skin and bones, skeletal.

So if they laid on their side too long, that side would get welts.

And so every hour, when the guards would yell, two o'clock and all is well, or, three o'clock and all is well, the senior officer of each unit would say, one, two, three, spoon left, or one, two, three, spoon right?

And they'd all roll over at the same time.

That's how packed like sardines they were.

But they found a way to sleep.

They found a way to stay warm.

Tragically, those on the end of the row, closest to the open windows in the coldest months of the winter, they'd wake up in the morning and often find them frozen stiff or dead.

I'd like to get just a little bit of perspective on the prison, on POWs, and how the numbers compare to, let's say, wars that we had since the Civil War.

I guess a couple ways to look at this.

On one hand, every country, every culture, every period in history has fought wars, and everyone has done its absolute worst to prisoners, which is alarming.

Anyone who's a prisoner of war has survived an inexplicable ordeal.

The Civil War must be remembered, was America's bloodiest war.

The official textbook estimates are that 620,000 Americans died.

The leading people in the Civil War today have moved that number up to 700,000.

So 700,000 died.

There were more men in prisons than there were fighting in other wars.

More prisoners died during the Civil War than died in the Korean War.

More prisoners died in the Civil War than died in the Revolution.

Total deaths, not just prisoners.

More prisoners in the Civil War passed than the total number of casualties in the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, MexicanAmerican War, SpanishAmerican War, put together by a factor of several.

That's how bloody this ordeal was.

That is astounding.

Why was the death counts so high?

It's so high for a couple reasons.

One, so many men are fighting.

This is total war.

Basically any male from the age of about 17 to 50 was fighting.

Number two, as I alluded to, both the north and the South ran out of food, ran outta medicine, ran outta clothing, and diseases tore through prisons.

There were some rough prisons in the North.

Elmira, which was called by the prisoners Hellmira.

a lot of Confederates died there.

However, they died from disease, not torture or murder.

If a disease hits a prison and men are packed on top of one another with no medicine, it's gonna wipe out the population.

Tragically, there's another reason why the death toll was so high.

In the Confederacy in the South, northern prisoners died from disease, but they also died from neglect, starvation, torture, and flat out murder.

The blemish, the human rights blemish on the Confederacy, is something that we can never forget and we can never forgive.

In this prison, the commandant, his name was Turner, he was known to just walk through the prison, gloating at the prisoners lying there dying.

And he would come up and kick them in the head or step on their head with a boot, or he would tell his guards, just bayonet this man arbitrarily, just to instill terror and torture on the prisoners.

So again, it was a charnel house.

And the one thing that has always gotten me about this is with these prisoners, starving, dying, crammed into the prison, watching their friends die wholesale, how did they find the will to live?

But amazingly, some not only found the will to live, but to escape.

So there's also a flip side to this horror in that, you know, humanity does its worst in times of war, but also brings out our best in this way.

And several men found a way to keep their spirits high, maintain a sense of dignity and humanity, and get out and live to tell the story.

These prisoners were educated.

There was one in particular that just grabbed me, and that was Thomas Rose.

He was a hero in this book.

He and several others, but I'd like to look at him for a moment.

Even how he was captured is worthy of a story.

Can we start there?

Like you, I fell for Thomas Rose.

He's one of my heroes and I found him to be an irresistible, compelling figure, and to the point where, you know, historians always say, maintain your neutrality and objective distance from your topic.

I don't always do that.

I found myself rooting for him.

I felt the pain.

So Thomas Rose is a compelling guy.

First off, he's a bear of a man, a big burly guy with a big beard, but yet he's quiet and humble.

He grows up around Philadelphia, which was the hotbed of abolition.

So Rose grows up an ardent abolitionist.

He becomes a school teacher and then becomes a principal out by Pittsburgh.

When the war starts, he's so furious with the South for not only slavery, but starting the war that he enlists.

In no time at all, he rises all the way to the rank of a colonel.

And how does he do it?

He's quiet.

Nobody hears him speak.

He leads by example.

There are several instances in heated battles where, if the union line was breaking and the Confederates are beginning to punch through that line, Rose would pull his sword, pull his side arm and run to fill the line, rather than telling his men, Follow me, not telling them to do it.

So he was a great hero.

He gets captured at the Battle of Chickamauga, which is a part of a large southern campaign through Georgia and Tennessee.

When he's captured, he's almost killed.

They put him on a train and they're gonna take him to Richmond, the Confederate capitol, to this horrific prison.

Rose, when the train slows down at night in bad weather, he jumps off the train to escape.

Lands and lands wrong, breaks his foot and ankle, manages to run on a broken foot and ankle, after almost dying in the battle.

He's captured later.

The Confederate guards that capture him beat him over the head into unconsciousness with the butts of their guns.

He survives that ordeal.

Then they take him to Richmond.

And the way they took prisoners to this Libby Prison in Richmond is probably worthy of a book in and of itself.

So you gotta remember that if you're a soldier, you heard stories of Libby.

It's like the boogeyman.

Men talked around campfires about the death toll.

So these men knew they were going there.

They'd stop at the train depot and they would shuttle them down the main street of Richmond all the way to the prison.

And of course, when they get to the prison, they'd see faces looking out in the windows of skeletons, looking at their own demise and their own future.

As they would walk down the street, southerners had a custom, they would line up on either side in a gauntlet, and as these men walked down, people threw feces and garbage.

They ran up and hit them with rocks and bricks and sticks.

They went up and sucker punched them, spit on 'em.

So it was this horrible ordeal.

Men were reduced to tears and were huddled up as they're walking through the crowd.

We have many of the men wrote that even older women would run out, yelling, Shoot 'em all now, shoot 'em all now.

The men thought Rose, Colonel Thomas Rose, had lost his mind because while they're wiping the feces and trash off of them and huddled up, he's walking like a robot all the way down the street.

Someone comes up and spits on him and sucker punches him.

He doesn't even blink or move.

What they didn't know was Rose was counting the steps from the train depot to the prison.

He was memorizing every street where there was a lantern, where there was a dark intersection, the names of buildings.

He was already planning his escape.

He gets into Libby because he's the famous Colonel Rose, the hero who tried to escape.

He's beaten, robbed, stripped, beaten over the head again for a second time with the butts of the guns before they put him inside the prison.

So Rose, to even survive this, he's a remarkable man, but in the prison, he devotes every waking moment to, I'm gonna get out of this prison.

Well, let's talk about that because he's there and there are several others that you detail very wonderfully in this book, and they know they will die there unless they can escape.

So the plan is, okay, let's dig a tunnel.

This seems like the craziest idea anyone could possibly have.

Not to mention it's freezing.

And how do they know what to do?

So take it from there.

Good, so in the late fall, the November, December of 1863, the war starts in 1861 ends in April of '65, by the end of '63, the weather had turned bitterly cold, record cold.

The South had completely run out of food and medicine.

Men were not eating one meal a day.

They weren't eating, you know, but two meals a week and it was hard tack and just, you know, rotted food.

So they knew that they were either gonna die or they had to escape.

The problem for Rose is they put bars on the window and they told the prisoners, anybody that goes up to the window, by 1863, the guards outside were aiming, they'd shoot you.

Rose would do a quick peek out the window, memorizing which way he could dig a tunnel, estimating like an engineer or an architect, the amount of feet and all that.

So Rose gets an idea, it's storming one night, pouring, lightning, and the roof was leaking.

So the confederate guards had put up scaffolding to fix the roof.

With the lightning, they ran away and left it there.

So Rose goes to the window figuring if I can get out, and most people couldn't bend bars, but he's so big he thinks I might be able to do it.

If I can bend these bars, I could jump to the scaffolding, still has the messed up foot and ankle, and shimmy down and run for it.

So he goes to the window and he's trying, he can't get the bars open.

All of a sudden a lightning bolt strikes and illuminates it.

And there's a face right next to his.

He and the other man gasp.

That's Major Andrew Hamilton, and Hamilton had the same idea.

They both gasp, nod, and then sneak back to their bedding.

The next night, Rose gets up and he saw where the guards were going in and out of what seemed to be a dungeon under this building, a basement.

So he goes over and there's a big deadlock door.

Rose is strong enough, he busts the door open, goes into the basement.

Now the basement was horrid.

The sewage system ran through it.

So you're walking in urine and feces ankle deep.

There were so many rats that with every single step, and his barefoot, every single step, he's stepping on rats.

Rats are running over him.

It's a nightmare.

He's feeling his way along the wall to try to figure out where's the sewage system.

If I can dig into the sewer, that will plop me into the nearby James River.

Disgusting thought, float through a sewer, but I can get out.

So he's feeling his way along the wall and he bumps into someone.

They both let out a shriek.

It's Hamilton.

Lightning struck twice.

What's the likelihood?

They both shake hands and say, let's work together.

So Hamilton becomes Rose's assistant for this plan to dig a tunnel all the way out and under the gate, under the guards and pop up and run for it.

So that's where it begins.

And they didn't call this prison Rat Hell for nothing, because it was full of rats.

We're not gonna give it away 'cause we want everyone to read it, but there were a lot of close calls.

This wasn't just dig this tunnel and we're free.

So there's virtually every obstacle you can think of.

In fact, I think if this was a novel, my editor would've told me to take my foot off the gas.

He would've said it, he or she would've said, It's implausible that this happens, and then this and then this and this.

The Confederates realize somebody tried to get into the dungeon and broke the lock.

So the next night when Rosen Hamilton go down, there's three deadbolts on the door.

So they have to figure out how to get to the dungeon.

As they peek out the window of the prison, before a guard shoots, they see hundreds, if not thousands of rats in and outta the sewer.

So they know the angle, they know where they want to go.

How to get to the dungeon?

Hamilton comes up with an idea.

There are a couple of giant black cauldrons in front of an old fireplace, and this is where they would cook the stew, barely edible, that men ate.

Hamilton says, Rose is so big, he could probably push this giant cauldron.

Hamilton steals a little knife and they chip away at the mortar in the fireplace and they dig a tunnel to get from the fireplace dropping into the sewer and the dungeon on top of the rats.

Every morning they have to climb back out, replace brick by brick the mortar.

Rose has to push the cauldrons back and then run upstairs.

The problem is, if they're digging every night, that means they're not sleeping, and they're dying slowly.

So it's a race against time.

They have four different tunnels they try to dig.

At one point Rose successfully digs into the sewer, but it's full and he almost drowns.

He's covered, he almost drowns in raw sewage.

Hamilton has to pull him out.

Now he's got a couple problems.

We need another tunnel.

But it took days to dig this one.

Secondly, he's covered in sewage.

He can't go upstairs.

Everybody will smell it and see it.

He has to hide with the rats in the pitch black in the dungeon.

He doesn't have water or towels.

He has to roll on the dirt and try to get all this feces and urine off of him.

Horrific.

One thing after another before they finally succeed in digging a tunnel out.

But the last tunnel they dug, there's a man in there digging.

He digs up and all the dirt starts to fall down.

He feels the cold rush of the night air, February, 1864, he feels that the cold rush of the night air and he can see the stars.

They're out.

So he runs back and gets Rose.

Rose comes out and finishes digging, pops his head up.

There's a boot of a guard beside his head.

He dug up right next to the sentry.

The sentry hears the noise and turns around with a bayonet.

Rose can't move, he just ducks down into the tunnel.

The century starts bayoneting.

It cuts Rose's face.

He doesn't get hit in the eye, by some miracle.

He can't move, he can't let out a shriek.

Finally the sentry yells, These darn rats, and he leaves.

Rose patches up the tunnel, takes one of his shoes and sets it on top.

The next day he peeks out the window and sees he's just a few feet shy Just a few feet.

But now he knows how far he has to dig.

So the next night they dig out, finally get outta the tunnel.

But it's, you know, we all face adversity in our lives.

But when you face life and death adversity day after day after day, a lesser person than Rose would've given up.

But he didn't.

All right, like all wars, there are spies.

This one, there is a fascinating woman who has my heart.

She's a southern belle.

Elizabeth Van Lew.

She's from a prominent Philadelphia family.

They move to Richmond.

So I'm gonna have you read a little bit about this, but first I'd like you to set it up and tell me who Crazy Bet was.

Okay, like you and I fell for Crazy Vet, Elizabeth Van Lew and she's one of my gals, loved her.

So the Confederacy knows that there's a high placed Union spy in Richmond.

So they spend the duration of the war trying to figure out who it is.

Turns out to be an older woman, a southern belle.

Go figure.

She's probably the wealthiest resident of the city.

She's up on Church Street Hill.

It's a beautiful hill overlooking the city, overlooking the prison.

She's an abolitionist and she works with Ulysses Grant, Benjamin Butler, all these union generals.

They teach her through communiques and through spies coming in and outta the city how to use a codex, how to write with invisible ink, with lemon juice.

So what she does is she goes to the prison every day to see the soldiers and she wants to pass them intelligence: How to escape.

Once you do escape, where do you go?

You're in the middle of the Confederacy.

Williamsburg is 60 miles away.

It's liberated by the Union.

The problem is, how's she gonna get into prison and pass the information?

The guards are starving.

The wardens are starving.

So she brings fresh baked goods and the guards are happy to get it.

She says, I'll give you all this food under one circumstance: You have to let me give the prisoners food as well.

So she hides in hollowed out eggs, she hides underneath the pan, in the middle of a cake, she passes notes and intelligence.

Here's when to escape.

Here's where to go.

She also lets them know where her house is.

If anybody's too weak to escape, they can go to her house and she'll shelter them.

She makes it through the entire war without being figured out or found or caught.

So yeah, Elizabeth Van Lew saved countless Union lives and risked her life on a daily basis throughout the war.

Would you read a little bit of this?

Happy to.

Crazy Bet, Elizabeth Van Lew.

So this is a chapter called Crazy Bet where I'm talking about who she was, her house, and all this.

"Once in the prison, Van Lew passed notes "to prisoners through hidden compartments "in the bowls of food she prepared "and maps sewed up in her servant's clothing "and in hollowed out eggs at the bottom of a basket.

"In turn, the Unionist collected intelligence "from the prisoners and passed it through her contacts "to Senior Union generals at Fort Monroe in nearby Hampton.

"The Van Lew home was a lovely threestory, "14 room mansion on Grace Street "in Richmond's Churchill neighborhood.

"It featured wide hallways, high ceilings, "and from the top floor a commanding view "of the James River, from which Elizabeth could see "the old warehouse that now held Union officers.

"The Van Lew home had become one of the landmarks "of Richmond, hosting a stream of celebrity visitors, "including the famous singer, Jenny Lind, "known as the Swedish Nightingale, "Former Chief Justice John Marshall, "and author Edgar Allen Poe, "who was said to have read his poem, "'The Raven' in her parlor.

"It was from this conspicuous address "that Elizabeth Van Lew took her Sunday walks down "to the warehouse on the waterfront.

"Her spacious home and expansive grounds became "the main headquarters and hiding place "for the city's secret society of Unionists, "the network of spies and both escaped prisoners "and runaway slaves."

I'm gonna leave it at that.

Today, Libby Prison is gone.

But what stands on the grounds is pretty remarkable.

I lived in Richmond, I've worked in news in Richmond, I knew nothing about this.

What's there now?

I love Richmond.

It's one of my favorite cities.

I go there often, the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, the American Civil War Museum.

It's just a great city.

So when during my research I wanted to go to Richmond.

When the war ends in April of 1865, Lincoln goes to Richmond.

He takes his son, Taddy, nickname Taddy, Thomas, and Lincoln wants to see Richmond.

He wants to try to meet with Confederates and say, Let's negotiate.

The Confederates had burned the city to the ground and fled.

Lincoln also wants to go to the Confederate White House where Jefferson Davis governed and he wants to see Libby.

He goes to Libby.

When he goes there, the crowd starts chanting, We will tear it down, cause everybody knew about the horror.

Lincoln said, "No, keep it so that we may be reminded "of the evil that men do to one another."

Unfortunately, even though Lincoln said, Keep Libby, a few years later, a group of investors from Chicago in the 1880s tore it down brick by brick, moved the entire prison to Chicago, and opened up a giant museum called the Libby Prison Museum.

And for a few years it was a money maker 'cause everybody knew about this wretch.

It was like Dracula's castle.

Then it fell on rough times and they went bankrupt.

Sadly, the owners of the museum told any guest, any tourist, anybody visiting, just take bricks, cans, just take everything.

So Libby Prison is now spread across the country, who knows where, whatever.

So when I first went down to visit it, I went to the site right along the James River.

Now there's a like a sea wall to prevent floods coming into the town, and a little arch where people walking their dogs and jogging can go.

I asked everybody for about two hours that went by, Has anybody heard of Libby Prison?

No.

There's a little sign there that says, "Libby Prison was here".

I asked everybody if they've ever even seen the sign.

Nobody has.

What's poetic, on this hallowed ground where countless Union officers gave their life in the most wretched way, it is now the site of the Virginia Holocaust Museum.

What could be more fitting?

What could be more fitting as a way of honoring.

And they did it by chance.

I know one of the people that built it, they got a lease for a dollar a year on this property.

I went and talked to the staff at the Holocaust Museum.

Not a single one of them had ever heard of Libby or knew that this prison is sitting on the bones and the site of this hallowed ground.

So how poetic.

Well, we have about a minute left and I'm gonna switch gears really quickly and find out, 'cause we've talked about escape, I wanna find out a little more about you.

I wanna know the kind of books that you've gravitated to as a kid.

Nature.

I wanted to be a naturalist or a park ranger or something.

I read books on animals, wildlife, mother earth.

And you, not only are you an author and write amazing books, but you also are a professor.

What have you learned from your kids?

You know, I've learned that I'm, you know, it's easy to be a pessimist when you're an historian.

It's, you know, thousands of years of humanity doing the worst.

But this generation of students, they don't have the bigotry, the antisemitism, the sexism, the homophobia that I think has plagued every previous generation.

They want to change the world.

I find them the, their idealism to be inspiring.

The book is "Escape!

The Story of the Confederacy's "Famous Libby Prison and the Civil War's Largest Jailbreak".

It is extraordinary.

It is deeply researched.

It is a page turner.

As always, Dr. Robert Watson, I learn something from you every time.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you, Ann, it's always my pleasure.

I'm Ann Bocock.

Please join me on the next "Between the Covers".