Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
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November 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 7
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
November 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 7
In 1845 there arose in that city near the James River a sturdy and nondescript oblong brick box, three stories high. It served for a time as a tobacco warehouse; in 1861 a large sign proclaimed it the home of Libby and Son, Ship Chandlers and Grocers. War plucked the building, as it did many individuals, from obscurity. Greatness was thrust upon it—if only great infamy—when the Confederate government appropriated it as a prison for captured Union officers. Whether it or its rural counterpart at Andersonville became more notorious in the North would be hard to say. Prisoners held at Libby—over the course of the war there were forty-five thousand of them—complained vociferously during the conflict and afterward of hunger, brutal treatment and theft by their captors, winter cold and damp, and close confinement in overcrowded quarters.
After the war the name of Libby remained instantly recognizable. When a group of Chicagoans visited Richmond in the late 1880s, however, they found the building lapsed into its antebellum shadows and more than its antebellum seediness. “Beside it,” a reporter observed, “the stockyards are a bower of roses.” The company in possession manufactured fertilizer from fish and animal carcasses. Yet underneath the reek and refuse, the traces of the prison stood intact. “The heavy floors,” though ”… thickly covered with dirt,” retained the checker and backgammon boards carved by desperately bored prisoners. The sturdy wooden posts were “thick with soldiers’ names cut deep into the wood.” They struck the visitors as capable of supporting a much more lucrative trade. The Chicagoans arranged to buy the structure. They planned to disassemble it,