Escape from the Confederacy

They took him in battle. They locked him in a cage by the river. Benjamin F. Hasson was twenty-one years old when Confederate forces captured him in 1864 and dragged him to Belle Island, the notorious Richmond prison camp where Union soldiers starved and died in their thousands. But Hasson refused to become another statistic in a war already drowning in blood. With a handful of fellow prisoners, he hatched a plan so audacious it sounds like fiction: overpower their guards aboard a moving train and leap into the Georgia darkness. What follows is a desperate three-week trek through swamps and forests, with bloodhounds and Confederate patrols always a step behind. Hasson survived because strangers risked everything to help him, including enslaved people who smuggled him toward freedom and white Southerners who questioned which flag truly represented their conscience. This is not a general's memoir or a politician's history. It is the raw, unvarnished account of one young man who wanted only to live, and the ordinary people who decided he would.