Let us entertain you - at Libby Prison

[hoosier]

I volunteer at the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg a couple of days a week.

The museum has quite a number of artifacts that are not on display to the general public, but occasionally groups are invited to behind-the-scenes tours during which they are shown some of these artifacts. Last week I was in the archive room when one of those tours came through.

One of the artifacts shown to the group was an advertisement for a minstrel show to be presented on Christmas Eve 1863 at, of all places, Libby Prison. Everyone involved with the show was either a lieutenant, captain, major, or adjutant, all of whom were Union officers being held prisoner at Libby.

The show included a variety of acts, including a banjo solo, a violin and flute duet, and an aria from the opera "Norma."

At the bottom of the advertisement, it indicated that admission to the show would be free, although children in arms would not be admitted.

I was always under the impression that Libby Prison was a horrific place, with terrible overcrowding, worse food, and nothing whatever permitted in the way of amusement. I wouldn't have expected the prisoners to have in their possession such things as banjos, flutes, or violins. For that matter, I wouldn't have expected them to be allowed as much as a piece of paper for the advertisement to be printed on.

I guess conditions weren't quite as bad as I had believed.

 

[Cavalry Charger]

Here's something of interest I found in relation to the prison, impressions, and surprisingly more leeway being granted to the prisoners of the literary kind:

"What Libby inmates remembered after the war, however, tended not to focus on gastronomic plentitude, but rather the opposite. Dante's Inferno was alluded to in at least two inmate memoirs. Citing the "wasting away of body and mind" he experienced at the prison, Charles Carleton Coffin wrote in The Boys of '61 (1881) that Libby "was the Inferno of the slave Confederacy. Well might have been written over its portal, 'All hope abandon, ye who enter here.'" Such memoirs should be read in context, however. After the war, former Union prisoners were not granted pensions unless they had also sustained injuries or suffered from disease during their service. To muster support for their plight, the veterans mounted a public-relations campaign that included wildly sensationalistic "recollections" owing much to the dime novels of the "Wild West." When the United States government granted universal pensions beginning in 1890, these memoirs virtually disappeared.

Despite the hardships, prisoners published for a brief time an eclectic and sometimes irreverent newsletter called the Libby Chronicle. Written by inmates during the summer of 1863, the Chronicleadvertised itself as "Devoted to Facts and Fun" and was read aloud each Friday morning by its editor, Louis N. Beaudry, chaplain of the 5th New York Cavalry. The publication often interspersed humorous limericks with writing that addressed the prison's harsh conditions. An ironic ode to lice, printed in the Chronicle's first issue, was titled "Homer Modernized": "Of Libby's rebel lice, to us the direful spring / Of woes and pains unnumbered, O ye muses, sing." The third issue, meanwhile, featured "To My Wife," a more poignant composition by Beaudry:

I think of thee when noon-tide bells
Resound o'er wood and lea,
Sore pining in these prison cells,
I think of thee, I think of thee …"

https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Libby_Prison

Also taken from the article, a timeline that might indicate the reason for the show ...

• November 28, 1863 - The New York Times publishes sensational charges of overcrowding and rampant disease at Libby Prison in Richmond.
• December 7, 1863 - The Richmond Enquirer, responding to charges of overcrowding and rampant disease at Libby Prison in Richmond, runs a story proclaiming a holiday feast by which the prisoners will "celebrate their captivity." The dinner is paid for with funds from the North.

Apparently only Officers were housed at Libby at this time: "Libby became a prison in March 1862. It was later converted into an officers-only facility, while also serving as a processing center for all Union prisoners. (Union enlisted men were often routed to Belle Isle on the James River.)"

 

[JPK Huson 1863]

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015071160108&view=1up&seq=10

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t5z60zp4d&view=1up&seq=3

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc1.cu01494600&view=1up&seq=5

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.49015000064841&view=1up&seq=4

There are quite a few other memoirs written by veterans who described their imprisonment at Libby. Thanks to various archives these have been made available to us.

Reading first hand accounts by those who were there is the best way to be there, too. I'm not sure we get to disbelieve these men and others who spoke and wrote of Libby based on one story.

 

[FedericoFCavada]

Libby Life: Experiences of a Prisoner of War in Richmond, VA., 1863-1864