On the night of the Libby Prison escape, 109 of the 1,200 prisoners made it out. Of those, 59 managed to evade recapture and make it to safety. The prison break remains one of the most successful and ingenious wartime escapes of all time.
Robert E. Lee, the general of the Confederacy, surrendered his army at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. The North simply had too many resources at their disposal, and the South was outmanned and outgunned. By the end of the war, many of the Confederate troops were underfed and in tattered clothes. The Civil War was officially over. The North had won.
Robert Ford managed to escape Libby in 1864 after surviving a punishment of five hundred lashes ordered by Dick Turner. Ford got a job in the US treasury department, where he worked until his death five years later, which many attributed to internal injuries from the lashing.
Confederate troops abandoned Richmond, setting fire to the city on their way out. As Richmond burned, one man remained at Libby Prison—Major Thomas Turner. He torched any documents that could incriminate him for his treatment of Union soldiers, then—realizing that Union troops would be out for vengeance—he fled the country. First he went to Cuba, then Canada. Thomas Turner died in 1901.
Warden Dick Turner, on the other hand, wasn’t so lucky. He was caught by Union troops as he tried to escape. One of the men in the squad who captured him had spent time in Libby.
“I think I have a good idea where we can keep this dog,” the Union soldier said. “Let’s put him up in Libby’s dungeon.”
“No!” Turner screamed. He begged and pleaded, but nobody listened.
Warden Turner actually managed to escape the hell he had left so many men to rot in. With a smuggled knife, he carved through the few wooden bars that hadn’t been replaced with iron and ran off into the night. He was recaptured soon after, however, and scheduled for execution. Ultimately, Libby’s old warden was saved when Thomas Turner managed to torch the files that would have incriminated them both for war crimes. Like his former boss, Dick Turner also died in 1901.
Many in the Union wanted to burn Libby to the ground, but for the next thirty or so years, the prison was kept as a landmark. In 1889, it was dismantled and rebuilt in Chicago as a museum. Major Hamilton was one of its first visitors. Then in 1899, it was dismantled for the final time and its bricks and timbers were sold off as building materials. It’s believed to survive in barns and other structures around Illinois to this day.
After the war, Major Andrew G. Hamilton penned an account of the escape that was widely published and could be bought for a dime (as what was known at the time as a “dime store novel”) at the Libby Prison Museum in Chicago. Hamilton died in 1895 when he was shot and killed in an argument with another man near Morgantown, West Virginia.
After regaining his health, Rose continued to fight for the Union, serving in the Atlanta campaign. Once the war ended in 1865, he elected to stay in the regular army, where he served until retiring in 1894. Despite his fame as the mastermind of the Libby Prison escape, Rose didn’t like to speak about the breakout. He died in 1907 at the age of seventy-seven. Part of his gravestone reads: “Engineered and Executed the Libby Prison Tunnel.”