Joseph Wheelan - Libby Prison Breakout: The Daring Escape from the Notorious Civil War Prison

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Table of Contents

For my wife, Pat, and our daughters, Sarah and Ann

PROLOGUE

EARLY SUMMER,1863

After enduring several weeks in Richmonds Libby Prison, 1st Maine cavalryman Edward Tobie was being released. He had been captured weeks earlier at Brandy Station, Virginia, during the wars biggest cavalry battle. Now he was benefiting from the prisoner exchange system created by the warring sides a year earlier. On this warm morning, the Confederates marched Tobie and more than a dozen other Union officers from the prison overlooking the James River to the Richmond railroad depot. There they crammed the officers and enlisted parolees into sweltering cattle cars. Then the train clattered over the river bridge and entered the green rolling hills stretching south of the Confederate capital.

After traveling twenty miles, the train stopped at Petersburg, and the prisoners were permitted to briefly leave the boxcars and buy food. When they returned, the train traveled northeast for another ten miles, finally stopping in City Point. Located at the confluence of the James and Appomattox rivers, City Point was a small but important river port established in the seventeenth century during Virginias early colonial days.

Tobie and his comrades detrained and assembled at a wharf to await the flag of truce boat, which routinely plied the river between City Point and Union-occupied Fortress Monroe, located at the Jamess estuary in Chesapeake Bay. The boat represented a rare rapprochement between the enemies. It ferried paroled captives, mail, and boxes of foodstuffs from North to South, and from South to North.

The parolees sought the shade of the leafy hardwood trees along the river for relief from the oppressive Southern sun. As they waited, they cast withering looks at the white-livered Confederate flag barely stirring in the heavy air.

The war was in its third year, and neither the Union nor the Confederacy had yet gained a decisive advantage. The Union had prevailed at Shiloh and Antietam, but the Rebels had triumphed twice at Manassas, as well as at Fredericksburg, and most recently, at Chancellorsville. Neither side could feel confident of achieving a culminating victory. Each successive battle brought a steeper butchers bill and a flood of new war captives to the Richmond prisons.

Caring for the prisoners would have been burdensome for both sides had it not been for their agreement in July 1862 to systematically parole and exchange war prisoners. City Point was one of the two designated sites where paroled Union captives embarked for home, and where Confederates released in the North arrived in the South. The other exchange site was on the Mississippi River, near Vicksburg. The first prisoner exchange took place on August 3, 1862, on the James River, with the paroling of six thousand Union and Confederate captives.

Since that day, about two hundred thousand soldiers had been sent home from prisons in the North and South. When the cartel was operating smoothly, captives were held for relatively brief periods, and were, for the most part, decently housed and fed.

Although it was important to both the Union and Confederacy to recover their captured soldiers, the Rebels needed them more urgently than did the Yankees. The Souths free population of 5.5 millionits 3.5 million slaves were ineligible for army servicewas just one-fourth the Norths 22 million residents, nearly all of whom were free. Moreover, it was a struggle for the Confederacy to provide for the prisoners, and so they were anxious to parole the Yankees as quickly as possible. The Union, with its vaster resources, had no problem feeding and caring for its Confederate captives.

Even in the spring of 1863, when the cartel was functioning well, Confederate officials, beset by shortages, had triaged food distribution, ranking the needs of the war captives well below providing for the Confederate Army and Southern civilians. I would rather they should starve than our own people suffer, wrote the Confederate exchange commissioner, Colonel Robert Ould.

A plume of smoke appeared downriver, and the soldiers could hear a laboring engine and churning water. It was the flag of truce boat, sailing under a standard of stars and stripes. The Yankees cheered; tears streaked their grimy, bearded cheeks.

Before getting on the boat, where they would receive medical care and a meal of bread, boiled ham, and coffee, the parolees had to wait while the Confederate parolees debarked. Lieutenant Clay MacCauley of the 126th Pennsylvania, taken prisoner at Chancellorsville, noted a stark contrast between the returning Confederates and his fellow Yankees. The Rebel prisoners, he wrote, were a well-fed and vigorous re-enforcement for the armies of the rebellion [while] our government authorities [got] a famished, exhausted, crippled, and seriously injured body of men.

Even as the exchange cartel was sending Tobie and MacCauley home, it was breaking down. President Abraham Lincolns Emancipation Proclamation and the Union Armys subsequent aggressive recruitment of thousands of black soldiers had struck a raw nerve in the Confederacy. The Confederate government declared that it would exchange neither captured black Union soldiers nor their white officers.

Because the Emancipation Proclamation had signaled the Unions determination to end slavery, the Lincoln administration would not accept the Confederacys position. War Secretary Edwin Stanton was poised to announce the cartels suspension.

As accusations flew between the adversaries, the Union captives in Richmond steeled themselves to pay for the governments obstinacy.

The Confederate Capital

Death held a carnival in our city. We lived in one immense hospital, and breathed the vapors of the charnel house.

Sally Putnam, describing Richmond during the Seven Days battles of 1862

SEEING RICHMOND for the first time in 1861, a smitten T. C. DeLeon wrote that the city burst beautifully into view, spreading panorama-like over her swelling hills.... No city of the South has [a] grander or more picturesque approach.

Indeed, when the war began, the stately City of the Seven Hills was an island of peace and hope in the tempestuous South. One of the last holdouts against war, Virginia had tried to broker a peace on the very day that its sister states met to form the Confederate States of America. Its capital, Richmond, instead became the iconic symbol of a bloody, fratricidal war. No other nineteenth-century American city would experience so many giddy triumphs and crushing losses in so brief a period.

Built on amphitheater-like hills along a curve in the James River, 125 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, Richmond was the Souths third largest city in 1861, with 38,000 people. It had succeeded Williamsburg as Virginias capital city in 1780, just when Americas first colony was becoming the main theater of the Revolutionary War. A year later, Richmond was burned by British troopsthe same hard-handed treatment that British soldiers, thirty-three years later, visited on Washington, D.C., Richmonds Civil War doppelgnger.

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