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Living Through Rat Hell: The Lives And Escape Attempts Of Soldiers At Libby Prison, Blake Davis

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

This paper examines the lives and experiences of the men who survived the horrors of the Confederate prisoner of war camp, Libby Prison. Located inside the Confederacy’s capital city, the camp housed captured Union officers from its establishment in 1862 until the fall of Richmond in 1865. Under the command of the Major Thomas Turner and the dreaded Warden Richard Turner, Libby foreshadowed the horrors of concentration camps which would be run by other Germans eighty years later. Unlike a normal officer’s prison, the conditions faced by the officers at Libby were incredibly deplorable. By the war’s end, the camp …