- In a deadly prison,
deep behind enemy lines...
- You're in the enemy capitol.
It's filled with guards and soldiers looking to capture
anybody that tried to escape.
- One man leads the biggest escape attempt
in American history.
- Rose never gives up.
His stoicism, his strength-- he was undeterred.
He was a machine.
- Can they break out and make it back
to friendly territory alive?
- Rose got stuck.
He got stuck hard. He thought he was going to die.
[dramatic music]
♪
- Some of the greatest stories ever told start behind bars...
♪
Locked up in the most notorious prisons
in the world,
spied on by guards and fellow prisoners.
It takes a devious mind to find a way out.
♪
It could lead you to freedom.
Or it could cost you your life.
- [grunts]
- But wouldn't you try when you have nothing left to lose?
♪
[prison door slams]
♪
After decades of rising socioeconomic frustrations
between the North and the South,
in 1861, tensions over slavery
finally boil over into the deadliest war
in American history.
[gunfire, explosions]
♪
An estimated 620,000 men will lose their lives
fighting in the Civil War.
♪
But for those who find themselves
in the hands of the enemy,
their fate is often worse than death.
♪
Over 200,000 Union POWs will be forced
to endure hell on Earth
as they fight to survive the notorious
Confederate prison camps.
♪
Dark, damp,
bone-chilling--
welcome to Libby Prison,
known to its inhabitants
as The Castle of Despair.
At the height of the Civil War,
over 1,000 Union officers
are packed like sardines into this building
in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy.
With windows open to the elements,
sanitation nonexistent,
an infestation of rats,
and a starvation diet,
it isn't a question of if Libby will kill you,
but when.
♪
- Five men died per day on average.
So if you do the math, easily at least 1,000 prisoners
perished inside Libby.
- But Libby doesn't start out as the South's
most notorious wartime prison.
- Libby held Union officers.
This was not a place where the average,
run of the mill soldier would go.
Tens of thousands of people
would eventually be held there.
- There were roughly 1,000 at a time in the prison.
That meant it was so crowded
that men could hardly sit down.
They could hardly lie down.
They were literally piled on top of one another.
Libby was three stories on the land side,
four stories high on the water because it sloped down a hill
to the canal and the James River.
The first floor contained the offices
for the warden, the guards,
and the kitchen, and the hospital.
- On the bottom floor, on the river side, is the cellar,
often referred to as The Dungeon.
- They also cleared the area around the warehouse,
so if anyone tried to run out of the warehouse,
they would be seen in the open.
They even painted the bottom part of the warehouse white,
a bright white, so that at night,
if a prisoner was walking along it,
they would be silhouetted against the white
rather than the darker color of the original warehouse.
At any time, 24/7, there were several guards
with armed muskets patrolling the perimeter of the prison.
So if a guard outside the window
saw someone even looking out the window, they would shoot.
- Anybody that appears to be doing suspicious activity
is right away watched even more closely
or separated from others.
- They only put prisoners on the second and third floors,
and they put iron bars on the window.
So it would be very difficult to escape.
♪
- Even if you were able to make it out
of the building past the armed guards
and over the perimeter fence without getting shot,
you would then have the pleasure
of being right in the heart
of a very hostile enemy territory.
- The geographic location of Libby
actually made it difficult to escape.
On one side is the city of Richmond.
So you're in enemy territory, the enemy capital,
filled with guards and soldiers.
On the other side of Libby was the canal and the James River.
Now, even if you could swim, the problem for the prisoners
is they were so weak, so starved,
that they didn't think they could make it
across the river.
- There's dysentery.
There are all kinds of other types of bowel problems.
In fact, some of the most famous images
of Civil War prisoners
were actually taken from Libby.
It's almost skeletal because of the starvation
that was taking place.
♪
- But on October 1, 1863,
a new inmate enters the prison
determined from day one to escape.
His name, Colonel Thomas Rose.
♪
- You couldn't pick up a more compelling hero
than Colonel Thomas Rose.
[rock music]
He was an abolitionist.
He's a very quiet and mild-mannered
schoolteacher and principal.
But he is a physically big,
powerful, and imposing man with a big beard.
He would look at home today on a Harley-Davidson.
♪
Rose enters the war as a private.
Within no time at all, he rises from private
all the way up to colonel.
Why?
Not because of things he said.
He wasn't an inspirational speaker.
He was an inspirational doer.
The men loved Rose.
He was an officer who led from the front.
- Rose is captured at the Battle of Chickamauga,
the second bloodiest battle of the war.
And straight away, he's determined to break free.
- They put him on a train, and they set off by train.
It's at night. It's raining.
Rose decides he's going to try to escape.
He's on an open flat car.
He jumps off the train,
misjudges the landing, breaks an ankle.
Still, he manages to run.
The Confederates go after him.
He eludes them for hours until he's caught.
♪
He's beaten savagely to a point of unconsciousness.
♪
- Rose is assigned to the central room
on the third floor, dubbed the Chickamauga Room.
That night, a fierce thunderstorm rolls in,
forcing the normally trigger-happy guards
to find shelter.
This allows Rose to search for potential escape routes.
- The first time that Colonel Rose
decides that he's going to try and escape,
he noticed that there was a scaffolding
up against the building.
The guards had been working on the roof,
and a storm had moved in rather quickly.
And so, they didn't bother to take the scaffolding down.
- He's a big, strong man.
If he can break those iron bars,
he could jump onto the scaffolding,
climb down, and just walk out of the prison
at night in the storm.
He's trying to open up the bars when lightning strikes.
And a bolt of lightning on a moonless night
brightens the whole scene.
Rose gasps.
There's a face right beside his.
- It's the face of a man by the name of Major AG Hamilton.
♪
- Major AG Hamilton was from Kentucky.
He was a member of the 12th Kentucky Cavalry,
and he rose through the ranks just like Rose.
- A dashing fellow.
He looks a little bit like a musketeer.
He's also a very charismatic individual.
♪
- When they met for the first time,
they were both planning to escape.
In the end, they figured that the scaffolding
was too far away from the building.
They couldn't leap out to it safely.
And so, they decided to end their attempt there.
- Escaping on the scaffold is a non-starter.
But Rose is just getting started.
♪
- The very next night, Rose sees what looks like
a sewage line that runs into the canal
and the river behind the prison.
So he realizes, if I can get into the basement,
and if I can get into the sewer,
as repulsive as it is, he could swim through raw sewage
and plop down into the canal or river and escape that way.
- Colonel Rose sneaks downstairs to the kitchen
on the first floor.
Sentries patrol just a few feet
on the other side of the wall.
If guards catch him in the kitchen after hours,
he'll be lucky to just be beaten.
Searching in near-total darkness,
Rose finds an unlocked entrance to the basement.
He cracks open the door and is greeted by a stench so foul,
he almost vomits.
Rose has just discovered the sections of the dungeon
known as Rat Hell.
♪
- Thousands of rats were down in this awful, dank cellar
with just a layer of straw.
Imagine the terror.
- Once deep in Rat Hell away from prying eyes...
[dramatic music]
Rose searches for the perfect spot to dig towards the sewer.
- As Colonel Rose is exploring the cellars
of the Libby Prison, turns out, he's not alone.
♪
- As the figure approaches,
Rose scrambles to extinguish his light.
[blows]
Is his escape attempt over even before it began?
♪
[dramatic music]
♪
- Libby Prison, October 8, 1863.
A daring escape is being attempted by a Union officer.
♪
Colonel Thomas Rose has just been spotted
sneaking around the basement of Libby Prison
looking for a way out.
As the figure approaches, he braces for a fight.
But out of the shadows comes a familiar face.
♪
- Rose and Hamilton, they both had the exact same idea
on two consecutive nights.
That's when they shake hands and agree that they're going
to work together to escape.
- Rose shares his plan with Hamilton
to dig through the basement wall to the sewer pipe
just a few feet from the foundation.
The sewer would then lead them to salvation
by way of the river.
Hamilton suggests a simpler approach.
- The cellar had large doors that fronted on Dock Street.
So Hamilton said, if we could get down in there,
we could sort of time the guards' path,
and make a dash for it, and be free.
- They make their way across the rat-infested basement
to the doors that lead to Dock Street and freedom.
- As he got up close to the door,
he waited for the guard to pass right by--
I mean, literally right past where he was standing
and started to-- you know, to poke his head out
and start the escape when he was spotted.
- Rose and Hamilton dash upstairs before the guard
can ID them.
- Rose and Hamilton gave that idea up almost immediately.
They're never going to try that again.
- The two Union officers regrouped
and decide to attempt Rose's plan
to tunnel out of the sewer.
♪
Problem is word of the previous night's disturbance
has made its way to the warden.
- Thomas Turner was the warden.
He was a vicious, inhumane individual
that took delight in torturing, beating, kicking,
starving the prisoners.
Turner wanted to be promoted to the ranks
of colonel or general.
He wanted to be a hero during the war.
If prisoners escaped from the highest profile prison
of the entire Confederacy,
he knew he would never achieve his goal.
So Turner cracked down viciously.
- When Rose and Hamilton make their way back down
to the cellar door that night,
they discover more of Turner's handiwork.
- Turner locked the door. It's double dead bolted.
So we can't break the door open,
or they'll realize he's there.
He needs another way to get into Rat Hell.
- Hamilton had an idea.
♪
- In the kitchen, there were a couple of huge
black wrought-iron cauldrons
that they would boil the inedible food in.
Behind them was an unused fireplace.
That fireplace, the location, they estimated,
was not far from the point in the dungeon
they needed to get to.
So Hamilton says, if we can remove brick by brick
each of the bricks from the fireplace,
then each morning when we go back upstairs,
replace the bricks brick by brick.
But there's problems.
One problem is how do you move those huge cauldrons?
These things weighed an enormous amount.
Second problem is they can only dig a tunnel so wide,
and they have to make it like the letter Z,
and then it'll cross down, over,
and then drop straight down into the dungeon.
There's another problem.
They had to remove all the bricks.
- Freedom hanging in the balance,
Rose and Hamilton will let nothing stand in the way
of their escape.
They quickly get to work
solving their list of problems.
♪
- Rose was strong enough that he could actually
pick up those cauldrons out of the way.
- With one problem in the rearview,
Hamilton gets to work solving problem number two.
- Hamilton's resourceful.
He's almost a MacGyver kind of figure.
He steals things, comes up with innovative plans.
And he steals a little jackknife.
♪
- It's time for the men to put their plan into action
in hopes of solving their biggest problem of all:
getting out of Libby.
♪
- So they don't have a lot of time each night.
They have to wait until the guards
do the last roll call at night.
And then, they need to wait until
all the prisoners are fast asleep.
A thousand prisoners with nothing to do,
there's a lot of curious and prying eyes.
Hamilton, he chips away at the mortar in between the bricks.
They save the mortar. They go brick by brick.
Each morning when they came out,
they had to replace all the bricks,
replace the mortar so no one would see it.
And then, Rose would push the giant cauldrons back in place
so that nobody saw it when they came down to eat
the next day.
- For more than two weeks, the men take out the bricks,
dig the tunnel down towards the dungeon,
then put back the bricks to cover their tracks,
until finally, the fireplace tunnel is complete.
♪
- Once they got to the edge of it,
they had to plop straight down in pitch black.
They were worried that if they fell and landed wrong,
what if they broke another ankle?
Plus Rose's ankle never healed.
- Hamilton realizes that the drop
from the tunnel exit to the ground
is too high to safely leap from.
Knowing full well what was at stake if Rose
were to reinjure his bad ankle,
the MacGyver quickly gets to work.
- Hamilton had stolen enough twine and rope that they made
a rope ladder that they would tie on
so they could actually climb down several feet
to get down to the ground.
- Rose goes first.
And immediately, there's a problem.
- Rose is so big, he becomes stuck inside the tunnel.
And he's stuck at an awkward angle
because he slips and falls part of the way down
on the vertical part of the Z,
which means his knees are up against his chest.
He's having trouble breathing.
He's losing consciousness.
Hamilton can't get in to pull him out.
- He got stuck.
He got stuck hard. He thought he was going to die.
- Rose is dying.
But he can't cry out, or they'll get caught.
Hamilton's mind races.
How can he save his friend in time?
[dramatic music]
♪
- Colonel Thomas Rose is trapped
in the tunnel behind me.
He can't breathe, and he's quickly losing consciousness.
His escape partner, Major AG Hamilton,
has only moments to decide how to rescue him.
Make the wrong decision, and their escape is over,
along with Colonel Rose's life.
♪
- Rose got stuck.
Every motion that he took, his chest is being compressed.
He thought he was going to die.
♪
- Hamilton can't get him out of this passageway.
- If Hamilton leaves Rose to die in the tunnel,
the escape plot will surely be discovered,
and all hell will be raised in the prison.
But Hamilton recruits other prisoners for help.
- He confides in them. They come down.
They quickly dig out a little larger hole,
and they pull Rose out.
They resuscitate him.
Rose lives through it.
- Rose's life and his escape plot are spared.
- But now they have a new problem.
They took people into their confidence.
They have to make sure that they're getting
the right people that they can trust.
- There's no time to lick their wounds.
The party of four immediately get to work
removing the bricks and widening
the tunnel in the dungeon.
♪
After weeks of work, they break into the dungeon.
One tunnel down, another one to get started on.
- Once they're in the dungeon,
they have to try to get into the sewage system.
- If they could tunnel into the sewer,
they can follow that right on out.
- But they have to break through the dungeon wall
to get started on the next tunnel.
- So you've got to get through the wall first,
which turned out to be very tedious.
- The men search for anything that can help them dig faster.
- They realized that there was an old carpenter shop
in the dungeon, and they left part of an old shovel
at the old carpenter's area.
Hamilton steals that and hides it in the dungeon.
So now they have a little jackknife and part of a shovel
to dig out of the tunnel.
- But even with the extra set of hands and an extra tool,
progress is still slow.
- So Rose and Hamilton realize several days
into this that it's taking a lot longer to tunnel
out of Libby than they otherwise thought.
- All the while, the threat of detection
hangs over their heads.
- They have to wait until the guards
do the last roll call at night.
Then, they've got to get back upstairs
before the morning roll call, which meant they only had
a few hours each night to dig.
- Even with the two new members of their escape team,
Rose and Hamilton decide they have no choice
but to bring in additional help.
- They ultimately pick 13 men.
So with the two of them, they have a total of 15 men.
- But bringing in new members to the crew
also brings some very valuable information.
One of the newly inducted members
is in contact with a spy.
- Intelligence was at a premium inside the prison.
In the genteel South of the 1860s,
you're never going to suspect that a woman is a spy.
- That woman is a highly intelligent
and well-connected Union spy.
Her name is Elizabeth Van Lew.
♪
- Elizabeth Van Lew is
a very wealthy woman who lives in Richmond.
As the war was progressing, she feigns mental illness.
So they end up calling her Crazy Bet.
- She would show up at the prison with plates of food.
The deal was this.
She would give the food to the guards and officers
if they allowed her to give some food to the prisoners.
They took the deal because they themselves were starving.
And so, when she fed the prisoners,
she had a hidden compartment under one of her dishes
where there were notes.
She gave the prisoners intelligence.
Here's how you escape.
Here's where the guards are and are not.
And here's how to get to Williamsburg.
- Van Lew's intel will be vital for the men
once they escape the hell that is Libby.
But before they can worry about making their way
to Williamsburg, they will first
need to focus on tunneling their way out
of this damn building.
- They decide to work in three five-man crews.
That way, at least Rose and Hamilton can get some sleep,
and they can make more progress in the tunnel.
- But with more progress comes more problems.
♪
First of all, the deeper they get into the tunnel,
the less oxygen there is.
- Rose got about 15 feet in.
Now, there's no circulation of air at all.
And he's got this little candle, and so, you know,
the candle would start to sort of flicker
and eventually die out.
He knew, ooie, this is bad.
If you did pass out from lack of oxygen,
how's anybody going to get in there
and get you out before you die?
- They need a way to get oxygen into the tunnel.
Hamilton steals a broad-brimmed straw hat,
and he steals twine and pieces of wood.
With the broad-brimmed straw hat,
he ties the wood to it so it makes a rigid brim around it.
He stands at the entrance and does a fan.
He fans air into the tunnel to keep Rose from passing out.
- The other issue the men face
is what to do with all of the dirt they're excavating.
Now, Rose and Hamilton have a system in place
with their five-man teams.
One man digs.
Another fans air into the tunnel.
A third hides the dirt.
A fourth is on the lookout.
And the fifth man steps in where needed
to give the others a break.
♪
- Ultimately, this entire project,
Rose does the lion's share of all the digging.
For several nights digging into the dirt,
Rose finally gets to the edge
of what is obviously the sewer,
and he starts chipping away.
- So as he's digging, digging, digging, digging,
all of a sudden, it just bursts.
♪
It just bursts upon him with these gallons
and gallons of sewage that are inundating him.
Now he's got to somehow not drown and then get out
of where he is, because he is
literally going to drown in sewage.
- Colonel Rose is trapped in a river
of unimaginable sewer-smelling foulness.
And he has just seconds before he drowns in human excrement.
[intense music]
♪
- While attempting to dig his way out of Libby Prison,
Colonel Thomas Rose has pierced a sewage line,
unleashing a torrent of foulness
that now threatens his life.
- The entire system collapses.
There's so much water and sewage,
it fills the tunnel.
He's gagging. He's drowning.
Hamilton has to drag him out by the feet.
Rose almost dies, and he comes close to it,
but eventually, Hamilton resuscitates him.
- But there's no time to celebrate Rose's survival.
If the men cannot plug the rapidly-spewing sewer,
then guards will be alerted to the leak,
and the escape plot will be foiled.
- And it emitted this terrible odor, alerted all the guards.
So they had to reseal the thing.
- The men begin to fill the tunnel with dirt
in order to stop the leak.
After a frantic few moments,
the sewage leak is halted.
But their path to freedom is now closed.
And now they have another problem.
- In a moment, not only are his plans dashed,
but now he's got another problem,
which is he's covered in raw sewage
and how is he going to explain this to the prison guards?
- So Rose has to strip down and rub in the dirt
to try to rub all the sewage off
and go basically half naked back to his floor to sleep.
- After months of digging,
the plot to escape Libby has gone down the toilet.
The sewer was the last chance for freedom.
- They weren't caught.
But at that point,
a lot of the other men dropped out of the project.
- Their dreams of life as free men
have been buried in the bowels of Libby.
- Hamilton was dejected. He was ready to give up.
He proposed to Rose, maybe we just give up
the effort to escape and just try to live.
But Rose would hear nothing of it.
He immediately starts planning another tunnel.
♪
Rose again looks around.
He's looking around for weaknesses.
He spends a fair amount of time looking out the windows
at the surrounding areas and notices
that on the other side of the perimeter fence
is a small shed.
And he figures if he could dig a tunnel
out past the perimeter fence,
he could use not only the fence,
but the shadows of the shed
to hide him and to hide all of the other prisoners
that are going to come out.
- Compared to the last tunnel,
this new plan will be a colossal undertaking.
At least 50 feet long,
it will be over triple the length of the last one.
Plus, they'll be aiming for a precise point
with no surefire way to check
if they'll come up in the desired location.
- How do they measure that?
There must have been some serious math involved.
- Time is of the essence.
[thunder rumbles] [soldiers shouting]
- As the war progressed in the South,
Richmond began to run out of food.
And, of course, the prisoners of war
are not going to be the first recipients
of any food that there is available.
♪
It became more and more dire, the situation.
What the prisoners were receiving
was not enough calories for the day
to even keep them alive.
- Libby becomes a horror show, an absolute horror show.
- This was their last chance.
Make it out alive or starve to death.
♪
- Rose and Hamilton realizes it's a race for time.
If they're working and digging around the clock,
they can get out quicker
before they all starve to death.
- But there's no way Hamilton and Rose
can perform this monumental task on their own.
Knowing they will need all the hands they can get,
Rose gives one last impassioned speech
to his former conspirators.
- So at first, it's just Rose and Hamilton.
Slowly, you see this prison party develop
of about 12 men total.
The idea was that once they started tunneling,
you'd have three work parties of four men.
And that way, it would be easier
to keep work going constantly,
but also not make it such that
12 people were missing at any given time.
- The problem now is Turner starts
imposing roll calls throughout the day
all the way from sunup till sundown.
- Rose and Hamilton come up with a simple yet ingenious
way to hide the fact that four men
are secretly digging in the basement at any given time.
- When the guards tried to count heads,
the prisoners would take a hat off and hold it up
with their hand next to them,
or they'd duck down and run and pop back up
that very rarely did the roll calls turn out accurately.
- Over the next several weeks,
the digging continues unabated.
- So Rose is digging.
Now, the trick is, how do you know you've gone far enough?
Everything they've been doing has been done by guesstimation.
And so, they took the measure.
They thought, I think we've got it.
And so, they began to dig up.
♪
- But just when it looks like
Rose has solved the escape puzzle,
the whole plan starts to fall apart
right in front of his eyes.
- He comes up.
He's on the wrong side of the fencing.
There's a Confederate guard, a boot,
and a leg right there where he comes up.
The guard sees the hole and yells to another guard,
come over here, there's something here.
Rose can't move. He can't turn around.
He has to back out, but he doesn't want to make a sound.
So he freezes.
- Rose's estimations are grossly miscalculated.
His tunnel to freedom has come up
inside the perimeter of Libby
and right at the feet of two Confederate guards.
- The other guard comes over
and with a bayonet on the end of his musket,
he starts jabbing into the hole.
The bayonet cuts right across Rose's face,
almost went in his eye.
Rose can't cry out.
He just lies there in the tunnel and takes it.
- Staring death in the face,
all Colonel Rose can do is watch and pray.
[dramatic music]
♪
- Colonel Thomas Rose is digging the exit of his escape tunnel
from Libby Prison.
Only, he's come up short.
Instead of being on the far side of the perimeter fence,
he's inches away from two Confederate guards,
one of whom has sliced the colonel's face
while searching the hole with his bayonet.
If he cries out in pain, the entire escape plan is ruined.
♪
- Rose is right there next to a guard in the tunnel,
in the dark.
- One slight move, and it's curtains for Rose.
- Finally, the guards say, ah, there's nothing there.
It must have been those rats
that are always tunneling in and out.
And the guards leave.
Rose makes it.
- Once again, Rose's life and escape plot are spared.
As soon as the guards are out of sight,
Rose marks the hole so he can measure his progress.
- Colonel Rose stuck a shoe and a shirt
up through the ground cover, trying to cover up the fact
that there was a hole there.
- The next day, he peeks out the window to see the shoe.
So now he knows how many feet he has to dig.
- The target point behind the shed
is still another 12 feet away,
a devastating blow for the diggers.
The men are growing weaker, and after so many close calls,
the escapees' morale is at an all-time low.
- From the time that they had come up short until
Colonel Rose hit a fence post, and he knows that he's close,
so he continues the tunnel to what he knows
is the other side of the fence, where he would
be blind to the prison guards.
He clears the fence.
He starts digging upwards.
♪
- Colonel Rose emerges in the shed beyond the prison fence.
For the first time since his capture,
he tastes the fresh air of freedom.
♪
- He walks down to Canal Street, looks both ways,
figures out that there's not a lot of traffic there.
And it's already pretty late in the evening.
So despite what must have been an overwhelming desire
to run towards freedom, he doesn't.
He gets back in the tunnel that they've dug,
climbs back out into the cellar,
and tells everyone.
- Rose came out and said,
but we're not going to leave tonight.
We don't have enough time. We're exhausted.
We need a whole day of resting.
We need to sleep. We'll leave tomorrow night.
All the while, Rose was encouraging men
to save a little bit of food.
- Ample food and protection from the elements
were not the only issues the escapees needed to plan for.
♪
- They needed to know where the Confederate guards were.
They needed to know where the closest Union line was,
which, in this case, was Williamsburg
about 60 miles away.
- It's not like it's a straight shot to Williamsburg.
There are only a few roads that go all the way there,
and those roads were heavily picketed.
The prisoners who are escaping cannot travel by the roads.
♪
- Rose ordered that the men all gather in the kitchen.
He gave them instructions.
He had made a map from intelligence
from Elizabeth Van Lew.
So now they knew where to go.
♪
- Rested, clothed,
and with Union spy Elizabeth Van Lew's information
about the path to Williamsburg in hand,
all that was left to do was escape.
In groups of twos and threes,
the men crawl through the tunnel they have spent
the last 53 days digging.
♪
- Rose and Hamilton pop out of the other end of the tunnel.
♪
It had been five months since they've been able
to stand outside of the prison
and breathe free air.
♪
There is no time to wait, however.
Rose ran, then Hamilton followed him.
They're working their way through Richmond.
- The men used their map and the intelligence from Van Lew
to try and navigate past the city guards.
But it quickly becomes apparent
that Rose's injured ankle is slowing him down.
- Rose and Hamilton had developed a fast friendship.
They were brothers-in-arms by this time.
Hamilton would never abandon Rose,
and Rose would never abandon Hamilton.
But at one point, they turned a corner,
and there was a group of Confederate soldiers.
Rose decides to stop.
One, he wants Hamilton to get away.
Two, he realizes he can't run.
Rose walks up to the soldiers pretending that
he's a local resident and just starts
talking about this and that with them
as Hamilton's running.
Hamilton looks back and sees, oh my gosh, Rose is captured.
- After nearly six months of pining for freedom
from an unimaginable hell, Rose,
a man of sheer will and brute strength,
must now rely on his wit if he is to avoid being imprisoned
or, even worse, killed.
[dramatic music]
♪
- Colonel Thomas Rose has spent nearly five months
tirelessly leading an escape from Libby Prison.
He's almost been caught or killed several times.
Now, on the night of the prison break,
he's waylaid by a group of guards.
And his right hand man, AG Hamilton,
must choose between saving his friend
or saving himself.
- Hamilton then slinks away in the dark
and continues to run by himself to Williamsburg.
It's hard to imagine how horrific Hamilton must have felt
running and turning around and realizing
Rose is sacrificing himself so that Hamilton could escape.
- But Rose isn't giving up that easily.
- Rose had a disheveled look,
but everybody in Richmond looked disheveled
from this point in time. People were not eating.
So Rose managed to play that he was a local resident.
- It turns out Colonel Rose is wittier
than he had ever been given credit for.
The sentries, disgusted by Rose's filth,
send him on his way.
- Rose then turns, and walks down a dark alleyway,
and continues his run.
- The escapees will have 12 unfettered hours
before there's a roll call, and almost everybody gets out
of the city itself before the Confederates
are able to organize any kind of response.
- 109 prisoners make it through the tunnel that night.
But when the sun rises the following morning...
♪
All hell breaks loose.
♪
- Turner is bound and determined
to catch every single man.
It's the largest prison break in American history.
109 men make it out of the tunnel.
The Confederate authorities are bound and determined
to capture everyone.
This is an embarrassment.
So they're going to do everything they can.
They have teams of soldiers on horseback
with dogs combing the area.
All Confederate sentries surrounding Richmond
are put on full alert, look for the soldiers.
- Once free of the city, it's a mad dash
for the Union lines at Williamsburg.
- Hamilton was one of the first
to make it to Williamsburg.
And therefore, he alerted everyone
in Williamsburg that prisoners of war from Libby
are on their way.
So Union soldiers on horseback
started fanning out in the area
to look for runaway prisoners to help them.
- Of the 109 escapees,
59 make it safely back to friendly territory,
48 are recaptured,
and two drown attempting to ford the river.
So which fate awaited Colonel Rose,
the hero of the escape?
♪
- Rose is alone,
and he decides he's going to run by night,
hide by day.
He follows the James River all the way to Williamsburg.
It takes him over a week.
During this time, he doesn't have anything to eat.
He's starving.
He runs out of the morsels that he was able
to take with him two days into it.
- As he closes in on Williamsburg,
he comes to a wide-open field that offers little cover.
- He knows there's going to be Confederates everywhere.
So he gets to the edge of the woods,
and he lies down, and waits, and just watches the field.
He sees and hears the noise from the Union camp.
He sees the smoke rising from the fires.
He smells the food cooking.
That's how close he is,
but he can't cross the field until he's sure.
After several hours, he realizes
he doesn't see any guards.
So Rose runs low and fast.
And he starts racing across the field to Williamsburg.
He gets about halfway across the field,
and five Confederate guards stand up.
They were in the high grass.
He fights them.
He knocks one of them down.
But eventually, he is recaptured.
- Rose's dreams of freedom
have now become the ultimate nightmare.
- He's taken back to Libby.
And in a cruel irony, Turner orders him
beaten again and put back in the dungeon.
Only this time, he's in solitary confinement
in a cell in the dungeon where he had spent 53 days,
nights, digging and digging.
Rose is denied food.
He's denied water. He's denied medical attention.
And he's beaten regularly.
- At death's door, Rose is saved by the tales
of his heroic deeds.
- By now, Rose was something
of a minor celebrity anyway for his heroism.
Hamilton, by then, had told everyone his story.
The Union wants him out.
They organize prisoner exchanges
at the very end of the war, and Rose is exchanged.
Typical Rose, he's given time, downtime.
He can leave uniform and recuperate.
He stays in uniform, re-enlists,
rises to the rank of general,
and spends the rest of his career in the military.
♪
- On April 3, 1865, the Union captures the city of Richmond.
And in an ironic twist, the former Confederate jailers
at Libby Prison are locked up within its walls,
prisoners of the United States of America.
♪
The story of Colonel Thomas Rose, AG Hamilton,
and the hundred-odd men they helped to escape Libby Prison
is a tale of grit, determination,
and sacrifice under the most extreme conditions.
Colonel Rose embodied all of these things.
But most important of all,
he always knew there was something inside him
that no one could ever take away--hope.