Escape from New York
Here is New York City on July 4, 1861. Amid loud revels, “the firing of guns,” pistols, cannons and rockets “chasing each other though the skies,” the city salutes the eighty-fifth birthday of the United States with patriotic displays: concerts, illuminations, pyrotechnic “tableaux formed by burning blue, green and yellow lights.”120 Though celebrations light up the night streets, on some corners, in some alleyways, there is blood-borne anger: man-on-man anger, mob-on-citizen anger as the combustible mix of Northern and Southern sentiments explodes. New and old Yankees fired to a fever by the Fourth vs. fixed and defiant Rebels.
Somewhere late in this roiling night, at 11:32 p.m., William Alvin Lloyd was—or so he claimed—cornered by “a mob of twenty one scoundrels . . . a committee of Black Republicans.” He said the mob “ordered me to leave the state of New York and join my Rebel friends in the South within twenty-eight minutes or take the Oath of Allegiance to the Lincoln government.” Writing to General Robert E. Lee and Confederate Adjutant General Samuel Cooper from a hellish durance in a Savannah prison, telling them the band of fanatics blamed “my writing and publishing articles against the abolitionists and sustaining my own country the truth [sic], branded me a base rebel.” Ordered to take the Oath, or else, “I refused,” he wrote. “I left the city in the time allowed me.” Claiming he was given twenty-eight minutes to get out of town—imagine one of the mob looking at his watch as it ticked away toward midnight—Lloyd added, “I was not allowed time to go to my office at 83 Centre Street . . . and of course I have lost everything—my office, type, plates, maps—and all.”121
And as T.H.S. Boyd later swore that the mob threatened to hang Lloyd, it was die, or flee into the night when “[y]oung America was jubilant with firecrackers, pinwheels, torpedoes and Roman candles,” the air thick with black powder and sulfur. Fireworks falling on wooden buildings—the ready tinderboxes studding the city streets—sparked thirty-eight blazes throughout the day and evening. There were structures burning on East Broadway, Bleecker, Washington, Grand, Cedar, Broome, Horatio, Greene, and others that brought the sturdy dray horses lumbering to their rescue, dragging brass-belted wagons manned by brawny, ham-fisted Irish firemen to flood the flames.122
The city swirls and smokes around Lloyd. And if he is spotted near his Centre Street office as he moves or runs or hunkers down among the sodden revelers who have stumbled along Bowery into the Five Points, he will not stay. Strewn about the rotting warrens, saloons, and whorehouses was the embattled turf of the street gangs: Dead Rabbits, the Forty Thieves, the Roach Guards, and Swamp Angels, their shivs, long knives, snub-nosed revolvers, and brickbats at the ready. This killing field—a thug’s war within a national war—unimaginably bloody and endless, was no place for Alvin Lloyd, a gentleman to all outward appearances. Like so many who’d come by foolish design or accident, he’d be robbed of his money and his weapon, stripped of his hand-tailored clothing, and beaten. Or killed.
So he must be afoot elsewhere as midnight passes and his Yankee Doodle birthday is over. Even if he’d celebrated July 4 as had many in the South as a right, a true American paean to the founding fathers who would have been outraged at the disemboweling of the country they’d birthed, Lloyd would not have joined the party. But he did, of course, in print and in person, damn the public, the prying press, and the Yankee authorities that he claimed had recently suppressed his beloved guide. He would defend his stance thusly: His writings were meant for his Southern readers, for all those who wished to voyage through Dixie.
Has he slipped past to catch a last omnibus at the terminus just near the City Hall? The car would have been full, crammed with sots and red-eyed whores. He’d left scum like that in the Louisville gutters, where the memory of mornings when he’d likely found his father passed out and urine-stained would have pained him. Or revolted him. Lloyd would not linger in such a conveyance. He wends his way through the last of the celebrations, the remains of the “annual jubilee.”123
American flags flutter from rooftops; cannons salute the heralded De Kalb Regiment commanded by Colonel Von Giles, among the last remaining out of the seat of war, and the men of the Rhode Island Battery waiting for the enemy in their entrenchments just across from Virginia—all reminders of a young war Alvin Lloyd was too old to fight and too fired up not to. There were many New York denizens silent in darkened houses, with no Union flags or illuminations in their night—the secret and not-so-secret Rebels like Lloyd all over the city, some far more prominent than he was: the spies sending intelligence to Confederate troops massing across the Potomac, the wealthy merchants fed and fattened by the cotton trade. But had a mob gone after Mayor Fernando Wood that night, their demands would have been met with the mayor’s toughs and hard-eyed silence. For Wood ran the city and encouraged sedition. The Copperhead Democrat, in the guise of a peace advocate who wanted to fly a new, independent New York City flag, seceded from the Union. Dependent on and nourished by the fortunes made by cotton trade with the South, along with the arms traffickers who’d flocked to New York to get rich supplying the Confederacy, the insurgent rebels themselves were not the enemy as many in New York City were sympathetic to their cause. Rather the chaos of war and the blockade of southern ports by the Union authorities made the cotton trade and arms dealing very difficult. So it was the very war itself, not the south that was the enemy. And the signs of that war and the traders and traffickers’ imminent ruin were everywhere. And hadn’t Lloyd publicly declared himself a true Confederate? Was it such a surprise that some people in the fractious city had had quite enough? Or was his violent mob encounter only partly true?
At some point, he would have reached his destination: the Metropolitan Hotel, his lair, his trysting spot where according to 1860 census records, he’d been living with a woman who passed as his wife, a Mrs. W. A. Lloyd, age twenty-five, born in New York. She was certainly not seventeen-year-old Virginia, as the ages and places of birth of these women differed greatly.124
Unless he’d secreted yet another wife, which was possible, perhaps this Mrs. Lloyd was the daughter of a wealthy New York merchant hiding from her family. If Lloyd committed the crime of bigamy with her, as was his wont, he would not think of it as a crime. He would rationalize his compulsion; call it saving women from starvation of the spirit, from dullness of heart, from ordinary men, from an ordinary life.
But in the end, for Alvin Lloyd, far more than the protection of his women preoccupied him. Failure stalked him, the stink of failure. Lloyd’s Minstrels was over, dead as a doorstop. Closed up. At Niblo’s Saloon, where his troupe had many a glorious night of minstrel magic, and where his ingrate star, Cool White, had gotten wild applause for his Othello and Macbeth, and Percey, and Fox too, he’d damn them, damn all their hides for abandoning the great William Alvin Lloyd. Where would they go? They would never do better than Lloyd’s Minstrels. Top of the bill. Without William Alvin Lloyd they’d be booed and damned, pissed on. Without him. But the troupe’s demise was all about him.
Remembering Colonel T. Allston Brown, journalist and editor of the Yankee Clipper when he wrote “Business was very bad with the party in May, 1861, which was attributed to fact of the manager [Lloyd] being the proprietor of a Southern publication,” it was high time Lloyd left New York. He was broke and desperate, though he’d been in similar fixes in the past when he’d crisscrossed the South, selling ads for his guide, pandering to railroad executives and bankers over champagne and lobster, promising them space in his glorious guide, cheating and being cheated as the ads didn’t appear, or his customers didn’t pay. So with promises, penny notes, and profits, empty pockets or on a good day payments in gold, he’d hopped a train or boarded a steamboat. He’d been forced to leave towns before—police, irate businessmen, and husbands hot on his heels. But he’d usually outrun them and moved on.125
Now he needed a new plan. One sure thing: He must have some kind of revenue. Somewhere. One option would have been to go back down south to collect the monies advertisers owed him for his guides. But the South was the Confederacy now, and he couldn’t sally forth as before, on and off trains, climbing aboard a riverboat, hearing the calliope over the chug and slap of paddle wheels and smelling brandy fumes and the perfumes of ready women. He’d need a pass to travel south through the lines and go deep into the Confederacy: the defiant new country. Passes, or passports as they were sometimes called—printed or handwritten documents with the name of the person and the purpose of his trip—were certainly issued this early in the war. But there were restrictions. On July 1, 1861, a “Military Regulation, concerning Passports” was issued “ . . . by permission of the chief executive . . . that no passport, by whomever signed or countersigned will entitle any person to pass the lines of the United States army, unless the same be also countersigned by himself or the commander of a military geographical department.”126
In spite of the mob, and with his usual defiance, Alvin Lloyd would not flee in utter haste. It appears that he lingered at least six days in the city, or spent part of that time with Virginia and Clarence in Westchester County. After that, he wrote Confederate President Jefferson Davis that he left for the Confederacy, not just to support the cause, but because he’d been “written against so much in the New York Tribune, Times and World.”127
He would get his affairs in order, his clothing, his day diary, his roster of those owed and owing. Picture him with a new girl in tow, dressed for the leaving: He in a wide-brimmed hat placed just so, a tan linen topcoat, a jeweled stickpin—an emerald gleaming atop a long gold shaft, stuck smartly at just the right angle in the collar of a light, white woven cotton dress shirt, perhaps the last of his fine clothing and accessories. Was the girl a new Mrs. Lloyd, or an imposter-wife garbed, perhaps, in a silken, wide-skirted day dress with a lightweight cape and hood to hide her face, as she, too, was on the run?
Lloyd would go to Washington City, straight to the White House, attempt to see the President himself, and hope he was far too busy to have caught wind of his published excoriations of Lincoln and all he stood for. It had to be Lincoln. Alvin would not seek out some minor official to scrawl on a card, with a nod or an officious sneer to send him on his way. No, he’d see the rail-splitter himself. Nothing less than a pass from the president would satisfy Alvin Lloyd. In fact, Abraham Lincoln issued numerous passes, many as favors, and some as necessary for various parties to cross the lines. Alvin would enter the executive mansion like a spit-polished Kentucky gentleman, leave and go south, go home where he would serve the Confederacy his way and serve it well.
The New York and Hudson River Railroad depot loomed, a solid brick sentinel at 30th Street and Ninth Avenue. The sweeping roof, the separate waiting rooms for gents and ladies, the gabble and shouts of the meat-pie vendors, the tearful good-byes, the wives, mothers, and children embracing their crisp, ready soldiers as they sent them off to war. Onboard, the black locomotive shuddered and heaved as the furnaces were fired and the engine rumbled to life. Inside, the car was a mix of mahogany and burled maple leather-studded wood paneling. Cigar smoke and the smell of sweat choked the air, even with the windows wide open. It was hard to converse on a train at the best of times, what with the crush of passengers and the grinding of the wheels on rough tracks. And as for sleeping, the constant huzzahs of the soldiers rendered that luxury impossible. For any traveler, it was an arduous, twelve-hour trip to Washington City that involved three separate trains. The first leg was on the Philadelphia & Wilmington Railroad into Philadelphia, where they would transfer to the Baltimore & Ohio just as the newly elected Abraham Lincoln had done on his whistle-stop route through towns from Springfield, Illinois, on February 11, 1861, amid fears of an assassination plot.
Detective Allan Pinkerton’s field operatives, who’d gleaned pieces of this plot hatched by fanatical Baltimore secessionists to prevent the president’s inauguration, were alarmed. Pinkerton, who’d been hired to monitor railroad security of bomb and assassination threats along Lincoln’s route through Baltimore, was warned that “on his [Lincoln’s] arrival at Baltimore, during the rush and crush of the crowd . . . by knife or pistol, the assassination was to be effected.”128
On the night of February 22, 1861, though the president-elect did not want to take drastic security measures, Pinkerton ordered the telegraph lines to Baltimore cut so the conspirators would not be able to communicate. When Lincoln left Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on a special train, he was reluctantly in the company of Pinkerton detective Kate Warne. Draped in a long shawl with a “scotch cap” hiding his face, the president, as Warne’s “invalid brother,” slipped through the darkness. At the West Philadelphia Depot, because a special ordinance did not allow rail passage through downtown Baltimore, any traveler, including the president, had to take a horse-drawn carriage between President Street and Camden Street stations to the Washington-bound train. On February 23, in Baltimore, with Lincoln nowhere to be seen, as he had already passed safely and had arrived in Washington City, a greatly relieved Pinkerton sent a partially coded message to Samuel Felton, the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad president who’d employed the detective: “Plums delivered nuts safely.”129
As for Lloyd, in the absence of furious mobs or angry fathers, on or about July 11, 1861, the train carrying him and his young lady pulled into Washington City. All arriving passengers would go into the long, low-slung brick-and-stucco brownstone at the corner of New Jersey Avenue and C Street, the B & O Railroad depot. Around them swarmed state militia men from New York, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, and Massachusetts, answering the president’s call for three months, just three months. The hive of volunteers as young as sixteen and as old as fifty were gathered by state, trying out smart salutes and hefting bags over their shoulders. They would gladly muster into regular army regiments as Abe Lincoln had deemed it necessary and ordered it so.
Washington City—overcrowded, swampy, pestiferous, and disease-ridden—was irrevocably altered by war. “No one can imagine the deplorable condition of this city,” wrote Edwin Stanton to General John Adams Dix on June 11, 1861.130
New York City diarist George Templeton Strong, returning home from a visit to Washington, was repelled. “Of all detestable places, Washington is the first . . . heat, bad quarters, bad fare, bad smells. Mosquitoes, and a plague of flies . . .”131
With the threat of a Rebel invasion from Confederate forces massing on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, there were warnings that there would surely be a collision in the coming days. “God grant our first battle not be a national defeat,” Strong wrote.132
To the White House, then, for W. A. Lloyd, a man on a mission. The most common route would mean hailing a carriage at D Street, across New Jersey Avenue, continuing along D to Pennsylvania Avenue, past Willard’s Hotel at 15th Street, making a sharp left at the Treasury Department Building, arriving at the left side of the semicircular drive that fronted the mansion. As there is no record of the girl accompanying Lloyd to see the president in any of the later testimonies that report the visit, in all probability she would have been deposited at a boardinghouse or hotel along the route. But we will soon find out just who this hapless young woman was.
“The White House and its surroundings . . . had much the appearance of a Southern plantation—straggling and easygoing,” wrote Lincoln bodyguard William Crook.133
And within this sprawl of outhouses, stables, and goats nibbling at the grass just outside the president’s window, Lloyd would have to approach the grand porticos, walk through the entry vestibule, past a group of soldiers, perspiring, half-awake in the July heat, and, as did most visitors, negotiate his way up a flight of stairs through people from all walks of life—office seekers, favored friends, and mothers pleading for a deferment for their sons. Secretary of State William Seward described the crowds clamoring for an audience with the president: The “grounds, halls, stairways, closets, are filled with applicants, who render ingress and egress difficult.”134
“Our city teems with spies,” Presidential Secretary William O. Stoddard wrote, decrying the “male and female traitors” that slipped by, noting that “the very air is full of rumors,” and though danger lurked, at that time, Lincoln’s private office was guarded not by an armed soldier but by his dour, officious, and very young private secretary, John Hay. John Nicolay, known as “the bulldog in the anteroom,” was “sour and crusty,” but his assistant John Hay was the dragon at the gate. “President Lincoln . . . is a little thinner and paler than on the day of his inauguration . . . at times weary and harassed,” Stoddard reported.135
Although we know that Lloyd did receive a pass, either by request to Hay or in an actual meeting with the president, the procedure was often arduous and frustrating. According to California journalist and friend of Lincoln’s, Noah Brooks, “the name . . . being given to the usher by the President, that functionary shows in the gratified applicant who may have been cooling his heels outside for five minutes or five days.”136
Imagine the scenario: Perhaps after vigorous congratulations on the president’s election and prayers for a speedy end to the war, Lloyd told the president what he needed and why: A pass to go south because Lloyd was a publisher and well acquainted with all the railroad executives and business owners throughout the Rebel states. He’d done trade with them, placing ads for their establishments and railroad lines all over the south. But alas, with the war, in order to collect the money Lloyd was owed, he must travel south. He must.
“With admirable patience and kindness, Lincoln hears the applicant’s request . . . asked a question or two in his quiet but shrewd way . . . and takes a card on which he writes . . .” Using a steel-tipped double-nib pen he dips in gall ink, and in a large scrawl that covered the length of the card, “Please allow the bearer, Mr. William Alvin Lloyd to pass our lines south and return on special business. A. Lincoln, July 13, 1861.”137
After leaving the White House and stopping quickly to pick up the girl, for they were surely together now, Lloyd went straight back to the depot and boarded a night train, stopping in Cincinnati, then on to Louisville. Yes, Lloyd knew once they were truly south, and after they crossed the lines, he must secrete the pass. Should it be found, it would be most incriminating. Skilled tailor that he was, it is reasonable to assume he fashioned a tiny hidden pocket to conceal the pass.
Thus ticketed, they climb aboard, hurtling into the unknown.