They returned the next night with two knives and a chisel Hamilton had lifted from the carpentry shop. Over the next several days, they carefully liberated enough stones from the foundation wall to reach the packed earth behind it.
Soon Rose was tunneling into the earth. Scraping away on his belly, he suddenly noticed he was struggling to breathe. The air is thin underground, he thought.
Then all at once, a large clump of dirt came loose and rained down around him.
The tunnel was caving in!
“Rose?” Hamilton whispered. He could see Rose’s boots sticking out of the crumbled wall.
Kicking and twisting, Rose pulled himself out of the dirt pile. He was covered in soil, coughing and spitting out clumps.
“We need to come up with a better system,” he said, wiping the grime out of his eyes. “Next time I may not be so lucky.”
“If it caves in once, it will happen again,” Hamilton said. “The soil’s too loose here.”
When they returned the next night, Rose and Hamilton chose another part of the cellar wall. They set to work digging. As the week went on, they developed a routine: Hamilton would stand at the mouth of the tunnel, fanning in fresh air with a hat and holding the candle, while Rose dug. Hamilton also held a rope that was tied to Rose’s foot so he could help pull the colonel out in case of another cave-in.
Hamilton was impressed with Rose’s tunneling skills. The colonel dug like a man possessed, burrowing through the ground like a gopher.
“You sure you haven’t done this before?” Hamilton asked. “You can dig tirelessly for hours without stopping.”
“I used to be a schoolteacher,” Rose said. “Compared to dealing with a roomful of rowdy kids, digging out of prison is nothing.”
Lying on his stomach in the dark tunnel one night, Rose scraped at the dirt with his knife. His hand grew sore, so he pocketed the blade and began clawing at the dirt with blood-caked fingers. He did this in darkness—the farther into the tunnel he went, the harder it was to keep a candle lit. Deep in the earth, the air was thin, and he struggled to breathe while he worked.
I hope I don’t pass out, he thought hazily.
As Rose dug, Hamilton fanned air into the tunnel from the east cellar. Every so often, he felt a tug on the rope tied to his wrist. He would then set the fan down and began pulling on the line. Out would come a spittoon (a pot into which people spat chewing tobacco juice) that Rose had swiped from one of the upper levels. It’d be filled with dirt. Hamilton would dump the dirt onto the floor in a corner, then cover the dirt with straw and return the spittoon to the tunnel.
Eventually, Rose emerged from the tunnel. Hamilton could see the sweat dripping off the colonel’s face in the candlelight as he gasped for air.
“I’ve been doing some thinking,” Hamilton said. “I believe we should look into bringing in more men. It’s almost impossible to handle all these tasks while watching and listening for guards.”
Rose nodded. Keeping a lookout was important. Though the stairwell entrance to the cellar was locked up, all it would take was for one curious sentinel to walk into the kitchen, see the stove had been moved, and unlock the door to investigate. In that event, Rose and Hamilton would quickly snuff out their candles, lie on the ground in the darkness, and pray they weren’t seen.
“You might be right,” Rose told his friend. “We could use more diggers too. I thought we’d be further along by now.”
Hamilton looked down at Rose’s gnarled, bleeding hands.
“No two ways about it,” he said. “We need help.”
Despite being in a prison full of starving soldiers desperate to escape, choosing a team that Hamilton and Rose could trust wouldn’t be easy.
“We have to be careful about who we bring in,” Hamilton warned. “I’ve heard tell of guards occasionally posing as prisoners, keeping their eyes and ears open, hoping to catch word of any escape plans.”
Rose looked surprised. “Really?”
Hamilton shrugged. “I wouldn’t put it past them.”
“In any event,” Rose continued, “that can be avoided. We know Lieutenant Bennett is a good man. He helped save my hide when I was stuck. We’ll eliminate the men we don’t know.”
“If only it were that simple,” Hamilton replied. “There’ve been a few cases where prisoners have snitched on men plotting escape. In exchange for their betrayal, Turner traded their toady hides back to the Union.”
Rose was dismayed, but he didn’t find this hard to believe. The North and South would sometimes trade their prisoners. Major Turner decided who would be traded and sent home and who stayed to rot. Libby was such a horrible place that Rose almost couldn’t blame the Yankees who betrayed their fellow prisoners . . . almost.
Despite the potential danger of betrayal, if the escape were going to be a success, they’d need some extra workers.
“One of the men ratting us out to Turner is a chance we’re going to have to take,” Rose said.
Out of the four hundred prisoners cramped into the Chickamauga Room, Rose and Hamilton eventually settled on thirteen new recruits by mid-January.
Anxious to escape, the men immediately agreed to help.
“I was wondering why you boys took so long to ask,” Lieutenant Bennett told Rose.
With their team assembled, that night, Rose and Hamilton led the new recruits down to the kitchen and through the secret passageway. Once they were in the east cellar, he could see the look of horror on the thirteen men’s faces in the flickering candlelight. The rank air combined with the hundreds of rats was a lot for anyone to take. Libby Prison was a house of horrors, but the cellar made the upper rooms look like a fancy New York hotel.
“The walls,” Captain Isaac Johnson, a young man from Kentucky, muttered. “They’re moving.”
“Get used to it,” Hamilton said. “Welcome to Rat Hell, fellas.”
After showing the newcomers the tunnel, Rose explained how things would go. They’d split up into three teams, working in shifts. One team would work on the tunnel one night, while another team would take over the next night. This way, no one got exhausted.
“Because make no mistake,” Rose told them, “by the end of the night, you will be very tired. Each of you will have a job—one will dig while another fans air into the tunnel. One will hide the dirt under the straw while another stands guard. One more of you will be waiting to take over when a digger gets worn out. With enough hard work, I know we’ll make it to the sewer and then to freedom.”
“Only at a place like Libby,” Hamilton noted, “would a man be thrilled about the prospect of entering a sewer.”
The next morning, Bennett approached Rose in the Chickamauga Room.
“I knew it was going to be a challenge,” Bennett said. “But I must admit I had no idea.”
The colonel grinned as Bennett described the previous night’s misadventures. He and another recruit, Major B. B. McDonald, had been among the first of the new team chosen to dig.
“Rats were crawling up my pant legs,” Bennett recounted. “Major McDonald almost lost it after his turn digging. One of the squealing vermin had crawled out of its hole into the tunnel and scratched his face. McDonald scrambled out, sweating and cursing. Thankfully, we were able to calm him down before he got too loud.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be long now,” Rose said. “If my calculations are correct, we’ll hit the sewer sometime next week.”
Bennett ran a dirt-encrusted hand through his hair.
“I sure hope so,” he said.
Captain Johnson approached Hamilton with a disappointed look on his face. The new recruits had worked well together, and the team had made a lot of progress over the past week without a hitch—until now.
“We’ve got a big problem, Major,” Johnson said. “While we were digging we ran into some of the wooden posts supporting the prison. There’s no way we can carve through them with our tools. The wood’s got to be almost a foot thick. Half of the men are ready to quit.”
Hamilton scratched his beard. “Don’t quit yet,” the major replied, giving him a pat on the shoulder. “Let us take a look.”
That night, Hamilton and Rose crept down into the basement. As Hamilton fanned air, Rose went into the tunnel. It wasn’t long before he ran into the large, wooden, dirt-covered posts. He attempted to dig around them on both sides, only to find more posts running parallel and close together. Removing a knife from his pocket, Rose began furiously cutting at the wood. After an hour and many splinters, he had hardly put a dent in one post.
Exhausted, he turned and went back up.
“The war will be over by the time we cut through those posts,” he told Hamilton.
The major shivered and pulled his coat around him.
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to survive another winter in this place,” he said.
As a colonel, Rose knew better than anyone that, among soldiers, once disillusionment set in, it could be hard to shake. While he thought about what to do next, Bennett walked over and crouched next to them.
“I think this could help,” he said, revealing a pocketknife. The sharp edge of the blade had tiny nicks in it, like a saw. “Using the blade of one of the other knives, I’ve managed to carve teeth into this one. It could help with the timbers.”
Rose grinned. “Bennett, you’re a genius. I’ll saw some teeth into another knife as well.”
That evening, Rose climbed into the tunnel. When he got to the timbers, he began cutting with the newly modified knife. The blade immediately started sawing into the wood.
It’s working!
After a few hours, Rose had cut halfway through one of the posts. His hand was sore and splintered, so he was happy to let one of the other men take over. This process would repeat itself over the next two nights. The work was painstaking, but eventually the men were able to cut all the way through the timbers.
With the posts no longer an issue, the dig continued to progress smoothly. Until one night, when Rose was digging through the clay with his hands, he began to feel cold water seeping through the ground.
That’s odd . . . I didn’t think we were that close to the river.
At first it wasn’t much, but after a few minutes he noticed that his trousers were completely soaked. Then, after removing a particularly large clump of dirt, freezing river water began pouring in through the roof of the tunnel!
The tunnel quickly filled with mud and river water, leaving Rose no time to take a breath before he was submerged.
Rose desperately jerked his leg in an effort to shake the rope attached—his signal to the man outside that he was in trouble. But more mud was piling on top of him in the darkness. Soon he couldn’t move his leg anymore.
So this is how it ends for me, Rose thought, as the darkness and mud enveloped him. Drowning in a filthy, rat-infested underground tomb in a POW prison!