Richmond’s wartime prisons

The old man is given as answering: “I am, sir, Captain Jack Warner, and you are Quartermaster Murphy, and you escaped from the prison at Libby while I was commissary of that institution,” and the stranger as replying that he had indeed boarded with him and given him the slip.

The Courier explained that Murphy belonged to a New York regiment and was captured and sent to Libby, and that prisoners who were practitioners of medicine were allowed to attend the sick in the prison hospital, with the freedom of the grounds, to go and come at will.

The item says a green sentry would not let the doctors pass and was sharply reprimanded by Captain Gibbs, who told him that men wearing red ribbons on their coat lapel should pass unmolested, and that Murphy overheard it, tore a strip of red flannel from inside his vest, pinned it to his coat, got past the guard and reached the Union lines in safety.

The Richmond Dispatch of November 6, 1861 described prisoners of war as consigned to the care of “Capt. Gibbs, the energetic officer commanding at the military prisons.”

The Richmond Dispatch of January 13, 1862 reported that Captain Gibbs, who had had charge of the prison depots in Richmond, had been promoted to Major in the Provisional Army and was going to Salisbury, North Carolina, that morning, and that the Richmond prisons would be kept as a receiving depot under Lieut. Hairston of the 19th Mississippi regiment.

A 1980 master’s thesis on the Richmond prisons states that early in March 1862 prisoners were moved from the tobacco warehouses of Rocketts into the four-storey building owned by Libby and Sons, and that Lieutenant Thomas P. Turner assumed command of the prison.

The Clarke Courier itself printed, twice in 1871, that Captain George W. Alexander had commanded at Castle Thunder in Richmond during the war.