January 15, 2010
Before the advent of the Confederacy's notorious Andersonville Prison for Union POWs in March 1864, many captured Yankees were held near Richmond, VA. Those who were officers were held at Libby Prison, a former tobacco warehouse, while enlisted men were held in great squalor on Belle Isle in the James River. The 1200 officers in Libby Prison lacked adequate sanitation, bedding, and food. Crowding at Libby had escalated in 1863 when the Union halted prisoner exchanges that sent their well-fed Southern prisoners back to the battlefront in return for sickly and undernourished Yankees. Former AP reporter Wheelan ("Mr. Adams' Last Crusade") tells us what happened next. Frustrated at the North's inability to free them, determined Libby prisoners spent months tunneling from a rat-infested cellar. On February 9, 1864, 109 men escaped, 59 safely reaching the Union lines about 100 miles away. It's not exactly "The Great Escape", but once Whelan manages to get his story moving he provides a detailed description of the digging of the tunnel and the escape from the prison. VERDICT Civil War buffs especially will want to read about this mass prison break that riveted North and South in the late winter of 1864.Stewart Desmond, New York
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January 1, 2010
The harrowing, little-known story of the 109 Union officers who escaped from a Richmond prison in 1864—an episode that deserves a higher place in Civil War lore.
Former AP reporter and editor Wheelan (Mr. Adams's Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams's Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress, 2008, etc.) fastidiously establishes the circumstances and conditions leading to the desperate actions of Union officers, held separately from enlisted men per conventions of the time, to break out of Libby Prison, a former vast tobacco warehouse on the Richmond riverfront. As the war moved through the fall of 1863, the Confederate economy was fast unraveling, with civilian privation the norm, particularly in cities. Yankee prisoners, even officers, were at the end of the line for the South's rapidly shrinking food supply. (Conditions were far better for Rebel captives held in the North—the author suggests that many were better fed and cared for than they had been in their own ranks.) An ornate system of parole and exchanges had prevailed at the war's outset, offering hope of a short internment for captives of both sides. But with the Emancipation Proclamation from a politically rejuvenated Lincoln, the South rejected leniency. They refused to parole captured black troops, often executing them on the battlefield, and they put white officers on trial for inciting slave revolt, a capital crime. As conditions worsened at Libby, two officers took the lead in finding an ingenious way to get into a cellar through their kitchen fireplace. The first tunnel was scraped with makeshift tools but descended too far and was flooded by a nearby canal. Three others were dug, amid hordes of rats, filth and sewage, before breakout was achieved in February 1864. Some were killed and recaptured, but 52 escapees made it back to Union lines, all with tales to tell.
A true-adventure story that also documents how prisoner abuse and recriminations spurred the federal commitment to the"total war" that ravaged the South.
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February 1, 2010
Author of popular American histories (Jeffersons Vendetta, 2005), Wheelan takes up the Confederacy in this work. Focusing on the Civil War history of Richmonds Libby Prison, Wheelan notes the buildings pre-war existence as a warehouse and, in the course of his narrative, details its configuration and location in Richmond, essential preliminaries to the authors central scene: an ingenious escape through a tunnel by 109 Union prisoners in 1864. The culmination of previously thwarted attempts to escape the overcrowded, fetid misery of Libby Prison, the successful one naturally provoked Confederate manhunts that Wheelan follows to their denouements. That some fugitives were harbored by Richmond resident and Union spy Elizabeth Van Lew permits Wheelan to relate her heroic story; that a subsequent attempt by the North to liberate Libby Prison, a cavalry raid by Ulric Dahlgren, gives the author the same opportunity: both Van Lew and Dahlgren are recognizable to the Civil War readership. The Union escapees, however, are not, so buffs will be intrigued by Wheelans thorough research into their biographies and wartime exploits.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)