Escape From Libby Prison: The Civil War’s Greatest Jailbreak
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2026
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, deep in Richmond, Virginia, a converted warehouse known as Libby Prison held more than 1,200 Union officers during the Civil War. Prisoners survived on rotting cornbread, slept on bare floors, and shared the space with rats that outnumbered both guards and captives. Escape or death were the only ways out. Historian Robert P. Watson, author of Escape!, shares the astonishing and forgotten story of the largest and most daring jailbreak of the Civil War, when Union officers dug a tunnel through raw sewage, emerged onto the streets of Richmond, and risked everything to rejoin the fight.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:14.1 | This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories, |
| 0:17.7 | the show where America is the star and the American people, coming to you |
| 0:21.7 | from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. Much has been written about the |
| 0:27.0 | Civil War and those involved in it. 16,000 books on Abraham Lincoln alone, making him the most |
| 0:34.5 | written about man besides Jesus Christ. |
| 0:38.5 | So it's hard to believe there's anything left to discover |
| 0:41.0 | about our nation's bloodiest conflict. |
| 0:43.9 | But Robert Watson, the author of Escape, |
| 0:47.1 | and a professor at Lynn University in Florida, disagrees. |
| 0:51.3 | He's here to share the story of the largest prison break in American history. It occurred |
| 0:57.0 | at Libby Prison in the heart of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia. Take it away, Robert. |
| 1:03.4 | A few years ago, I figured I would write a book about a prison break, but since there's so many |
| 1:08.3 | out there, I thought, what was the biggest prison break, |
| 1:10.9 | the largest, most successful prison break in American history? And it occurred during the Civil |
| 1:15.9 | War. It occurred on February 9th, 1864, from a wretched, a wretched prison in Richmond, which |
| 1:24.6 | was the Confederates Capitol. And the prison was known as Libby Prison. |
| 1:30.1 | By 1863, midway point of the Civil War, |
| 1:34.5 | the entirety of the South was in a starvation atmosphere. |
| 1:39.8 | They had pretty much run out of food. |
| 1:42.2 | They were running out of medicine, clothing, all sorts of things. |
... |
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