[music] i'm anne boccock and this is between the covers summer edition with a spotlight on south florida writers dr robert watson is a professor historian media commentator and award-winning author with 45 published books his book escape was just picked up by the history channel for its upcoming season of great escapes with morgan freeman and i want to get right into escape dr watson if you would give me a snapshot of libby prison thank you ann it's it's good to be back with you always enjoy your show and enjoy being on it um so um war brings out the best in humanity but it also brings out the worst and we often times see that in prisons tragically during the civil war which was brother against brother and what we did to our own countrymen so the problem was there were over 56 000 americans who died in prisons during the civil war that's a number pretty much equal to the total number of americans that died in the vietnam conflict it's more than we lost during the korean war conflict and the problem was there were so many prisoners the south was so broke and no one thought the war was going to last very long so instead of building prisons the confederacy chose these massive tobacco warehouses in richmond the capital of the confederacy raid on historic tobacco row so they picked these massive tobacco warehouses and they just filled a thousand men in each one of these uh warehouses so there was no bedding there was no facilities there was no bunk they didn't have blankets they had nothing they were just warehoused in these uh charnel houses and consequently the death toll was shocking they were so crowded i i what you wrote there they were so cruel to these people is there a way to make a comparison to anything else in history that was like this yeah you know sadly this is not an isolated incident uh if we look back through history we find that people treat one another horrifically in prisons no country no culture no period in history has been immune from this yet one of the challenges inside this libby prison which the prisoners called rat hell because it was overrun by thousands of rats literally the prisoners said all day long rats were just pouring over them they also called it the castle of despair which gives you some sense and the view that is the only way out of this place was horizontal in a box but as you noted it was so crowded the men couldn't even lie down what they had to do especially in the winter months because as you can see from the picture of the prison the windows just had bars but they were open snow rain and freezing winds blew in the prisoners were beaten robbed and stripped when they checked in so they were lying half naked on a hard floor there were so many men that what they did in the winter to stay warm and to be able to lie down like a newlywed maybe they would spoon they would amend by unit would line up back to back to back to back spooning to keep one another warm in these massive rows and that way if they were wedged up against one another they could all lie down on the floor and they had room then every hour the commander would announce three two one spoon right and they would all turn to the next side and then turn back to the left an hour later uh that not only kept them warm kept them alive and everybody got to lie on the floor but they were down to skin and bones so by moving every hour they didn't have welts on one side of their body because they're on a hard wood warehouse floor they were richmond was not in good shape here it's i've you said skin in bones the townspeople are running out of food so i can only imagine that the prisoners are at the very bottom of the pecking order to get any food at all you're absolutely right so the exact midpoint of the civil war is 1863. by 1863 the entirety of the south was in a starvation atmosphere they were running out of food every able-bodied man was fighting the war uh countless enslaved workers ran away from the plantations they weren't able to make food the union was was destroying or capturing uh roads railways so there was no way to transport whatever food was produced uh lincoln wisely ordered that all the ports be blockaded the union had a better navy so the confederate soldiers were not eating the confederate the people living in the south and living in richmond the capital were not eating thousands of people flooded to richmond when it became the capital at the beginning of the war consequently if your army and your people aren't eating you're sure as heck not going to prioritize prisoners so on a daily basis i added up the caloric intake it wasn't really enough to keep someone healthy and alive if you ate each day there were many days where they didn't eat so ironically inside this prison if you ate you were going to die a slow death and of course if you didn't eat you were going to die a quick death so it was a gruesome and painful experience and everybody was at a point of starvation every day of the year inside this prison there is another story it's a side story but i think it needs its own book and maybe you will write this one next and it has to do with a female spy yeah i'm a huge fan of her so um there was a uh she's on my list of great heroines from history so uh the confederacy figured out that there was a a high-placed union spy right in richmond the capital and the spy was able to infiltrate the prison infiltrate jefferson davis's uh office the president of the confederacy so they spent the entirety of the war trying to find out who the spy was they didn't find out until after the war it was a woman it's an older woman named elizabeth van lu lew they called her crazy bet they called her crazy bet because she believed in women's rights and was an abolitionist but she also played crazy think about the genteel south in the 1860s nobody's going to suspect a woman nobody's going to suspect a crazy older woman so what she would do is she would go down to the prison with food she had she was probably the wealthiest resident of the city so she was able to get food she would bake fresh fresh cakes and pies and cornbread and then she would go down and tell the guards i'll give you some under one commission you let me give some to the prisoners the guards were starving so they took her up on it she passed along the food that the prisoners had not only kept them alive but she would pass them notes and intelligence telling them where when and how to escape she even had secret compartments under her dishes and a union general named butler benjamin butler sent her a codex and taught her how to write an invisible lemon juice ink so she was basically the james bond uh of the civil war and risked her life on a daily basis to save these prisoners i seriously think she needs her own book just keep that in mind we're switching good we're switching it up a little bit we're gonna find out a little more about you so here's a quick lightning round your very first job my first job i worked on a farm in fifth grade and i did that until i got out of high school i was a farmer a farmer the most interesting city you ever visited vienna i just love the architecture and then the culture in vienna something you had you wished you had learned earlier in life more languages i have just passable french and spanish but i wish i was fluent in several languages the historical figure that you're most inspired by oh harry truman he's my hero uneducated simple and uh as humble as he was the day he was born on the day of his death never even considered himself to be the president he was just harry and i'm going to this is not a question this is sort of like jeopardy i'm going to give the answer here but something that someone might not know about dr robert watson historian author is that you're in a band yeah i i like basketball and music are my two i guess hobbies i i play with two bands and and love to play music it's a release from my 15 18 hour days researching and writing well this book is escape this is such a story i seriously knew nothing about and it will take your breath away and as we said been picked up on the history channel dr watson thank you so much it's a pleasure anne and thanks for this show i always enjoy your show i'm ann boca i'll see you on the next between the covers