Albert D. Richardson's Escape
A Northern War Correspondent Captured by Confederates
Journalist Albert D. Richardson reported on the Civil War from behind enemy lines, and was captured for a war criminal. His escape was his greatest story.
Journalist Albert Deane Richardson’s greatest contribution to reportage of the Civil War was his own personal story of being held captive as a prisoner of the Confederacy.
Richardson was from Massachusetts, where he worked briefly as a schoolteacher. He headed west, and became a journalist. He covered life on the frontier, eventually reporting on the Kansas conflict between abolitionists and pro-slavery contingents. Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune, hired him in the summer of 1860.
In May of 1863, Richardson and Junius T. Browne, also of the Tribune, and Richard J. Colburn of the New York World together tried to run Confederate batteries at Vicksburg in order to reach Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant, but were taken prisoner by Confederates. Richardson would spend the next two years in Confederate prisons.
At first, the newsmen were put in the Vicksburg City Jail, then Libby prison, then nearby Castle Thunder. After a nearly a year, Richardson got word that his wife and his youngest daughter had died.
In February, 1864, he and Browne were sent to a penitentiary at Salisbury, North Carolina to be held for the duration of the war as criminals. The Tribune had a particularly despised reputation among the Confederates for its opposition of slavery, of the Confederacy, and for vilifying the South. Because the disease, the over crowding that forced the prisoners outside in the winter, and the food shortages that hit hard all of the South, not merely its prisoners, the inmate deaths ranged from 20 to 48 daily.
Browne and Richardson were placed on hospital duty. Richardson's job was to remove the clothing off dead prisoners, and distribute it among the living ones. Improbably,
Richardson, Browne, and a Union officer on hospital duty with them, Captain Thomas Wolf of Connecticut, managed to escape.
Browne and Wolf had passes allowing them to unload medicine from supply wagons outside the prison gates. The prison contained an inner perimeter and an outer perimeter of fencing. Since Browne and Wolf were well-known among the guards for frequently retrieving supplies from the wagons, their passes were not always checked. On December 18, 1864, Browne gave his pass to Richardson, who first went alone with a box of empty medicine bottles to the supply wagon outside the inner perimeter of the prison. Not known to the guards, his pass was checked, and okayed. Richardson hid in an outbuilding, waiting for Browne and Wolf, who passed through the guards at the inner perimeter easily. The three waited until about midnight, then donning gray blankets and slouch hats, they passed through the less secure outer perimeter as Confederates.
Their escape was made easier by Lieutenant John R. Welborn, a Confederate officer who belonged to a secret society called the Sons of America, which assisted Union soldiers escaping to the north. He relieved the guard at the outer perimeter at midnight, and likely arranged for the trio to hide in the nearby barns and slave cabins of sympathizers, and connected them with guides who led them to safety.
On January 14, 1865, Richardson reached Knoxville, Tennessee and telegraphed the Tribune dramatically, “Out of the jaws of death; out of the mouth of hell."
Prisoner exchanges were against Union policy. Richardson testified before a Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War and lectured on the cruelty of this position for the Christian Commission, a YMCA-sponsored organization. The US War Department resumed prisoner exchanges, and along with most of the remaining prisoners at Salisbury who were released by the end of February, thousands of prisoners from both sides went home.
Bullard, F. Lauriston, Famous War Correspondents. Boston: Little, Browne and Co., 1914.
Cooper, George. Lost Love - A True Story of Passion, Murder, and Justice in Old New York. (NY: Pantheon Books, 1994.)
Crozier, Emmet. Yankee Reporters 1861-65. NY: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956.
Emery, Edwin & Michael, eds. The Press and America. Englewood Cliffs, NY: Prentice-Hall, 1978.
Richardson, Albert D., Secret Service-The Field, the Dungeon, and the Escape. Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1865.
