In the dead of winter, under the crumbling floorboards of a rat-infested Confederate prison, a group of Union officers clawed at brick and clay by candlelight, carving a passage to freedom beneath the streets of Richmond. Their tools? Pocket knives. Table spoons. Bare hands.
Their enemy? Not just the guards above—but darkness, disease, and despair.
And against all odds, they pulled it off.
This is the true story of the Libby Prison escape of 1864—an audacious feat of courage, engineering, and deception that remains one of the most successful prison breaks in American history. That you’ve probably never heard of it only makes it more incredible.
Richmond’s House of Torment
Libby Prison stood three stories high, stretching an entire city block along the James River. Originally a tobacco warehouse run by ship chandler Luther Libby, the Confederate government seized it in 1861 and converted it into a prison for captured Union officers. The sign bearing Libby’s name was never taken down—a detail that, ironically, immortalized a man who had nothing to do with the prison’s infamy.
Inside, it was a waking nightmare. Overcrowded rooms held hundreds of men, crammed shoulder to shoulder, sleeping on bare wood floors. There were no beds, barely any blankets, and a constant stench of disease. Water flooded the lower level. Food rations were so poor that starvation was common. And rats—thousands of them—had overrun the building’s basement.
That basement became known as Rat Hell.
Welcome to Rat Hell
By early 1864, Libby’s captives were exhausted but not broken. Among them was Colonel Thomas E. Rose of the 77th Pennsylvania Infantry—a man with a battered body and an unyielding will. Captured at Chickamauga, Rose arrived at Libby in October 1863 and immediately began planning his escape.
He found an unlikely ally in Major A.G. Hamilton, a Kentucky officer with a mind for logistics and a talent for improvisation. Their escape hatch? The abandoned eastern cellar—Rat Hell—a chamber so infested with rodents and floodwater that Confederate guards avoided it altogether.
To reach it, Rose and Hamilton chiseled through a fireplace into a sealed-off kitchen space below. From there, they organized three-man digging teams, rotating shifts every night. Their tools were scraps: spoons, penknives, bits of wood. For lighting, they used stubs of candles. For air, they poked vents into the clay.
As they tunneled under the city block, rats scurried across their bodies, and the air grew foul. One man nearly suffocated. Another had to be rescued when he became disoriented and lost in the pitch-black warren. Captain I.N. Johnston later described burying himself in straw to hide during the day, breathing quietly as guards passed above. “No tongue can tell,” said Lt. Charles Moran, “how the poor fellows passed among the squealing rats.”
The first two tunnels collapsed. The third reached a sewer. The fourth? That one would change everything.
The Tunnel to “God’s Country”
On the seventeenth day of digging, Rose finally broke the surface—just beyond Libby’s wall, beneath the floorboards of a nearby tobacco shed. They were 50 feet from the prison, but still inside the city.
On February 9, 1864, the first men slipped into the tunnel under cover of darkness. Two by two, they crawled through the mud-slick shaft and emerged in enemy territory. One hundred and nine men made it out before Colonel Harrison Hobart, a former Wisconsin legislator, wisely stopped the escape before daylight exposed the route.
Confederate guards were none the wiser. One even remarked on the noise of the escape: “Somebody’s coffeepot must’ve tipped over.”
When roll call came the next morning, it took the guards multiple attempts to realize something was wrong. They assumed it was a prank—Yankee officers often “repeated” themselves during headcounts to frustrate their captors. But when the numbers stayed off, panic set in.
Richmond exploded into chaos.
The Great Flight Across Enemy Lines
The escapees scattered in all directions. Some disguised themselves as civilians. Others dressed as Confederate soldiers or simply relied on darkness and their wits. Many, including Rose, had served in McClellan’s 1862 Peninsula Campaign and knew the terrain.
Following the North Star, they moved by night and hid by day. Confederate cavalry, bloodhounds, and local militias were dispatched in every direction. Roads were blocked, bridges watched. Even so, 59 of the 109 men made it back to Union lines—some after days, others after weeks. Two drowned in the James River. The rest were captured and returned to Libby—where the prison regime grew even harsher.
Colonel Rose himself was recaptured just miles from safety and thrown into solitary confinement. The Confederates feared him too much to keep him. He was later exchanged for a Southern colonel and returned to battle.
The Fallout
The escape humiliated the Confederacy. The Richmond Enquirer lamented that the prisoners “had gotten rather too much the start of the pursuers.” Major Turner, the prison’s commandant, was reportedly so unnerved he began standing with his knees close together, lest anyone “slip out between his legs,” as one prisoner joked.
Inside Libby, morale surged. For weeks, roll calls were interrupted by jumpy guards and false alarms. A sentry once raised an alert after mistaking his own shadow for an escapee. The prisoners, despite their hunger and illness, quietly laughed.
Why We Don’t Remember It
The Libby Prison escape never became a household story. No best-selling book. No blockbuster film. No statue in Washington. Yet it remains one of the most daring and successful prison breaks in American history.
Fifty-nine men reached freedom through a tunnel dug by hand in a rat-infested cellar, beneath a fortress deemed escape-proof. It was a triumph not just of strategy—but of will, teamwork, and grit. And it’s time the rest of the country remembered it.
