7

The Memphis Caper

The Ohio River was rising on the morning of July 15, 1861, and there was only one steamer from Cincinnati to Louisville, and that was the Major Anderson, a new, wooden three-masted bark: A gleaming ship, fresh and new, as was the probable, hasty marriage of Lloyd and his newest victim. Leaving Cincinnati and the free state of Ohio where abolitionists gathered and the Underground Railroad—the tunnels, homes, and churches—provided the way stations to freedom for so many fleeing the slave state of Kentucky, the Major Anderson brought Alvin Lloyd home.138

The place where he’d sprouted to manhood was no longer the half-savage town, the old jumble of wild men, whiskey, and empty pockets. Their arrival was noted. “W. Alvin Lloyd, the publisher of railroad papers and periodicals . . . passed through this city . . . with his new paramour,” the Louisville Daily Journal announced.139 Paramour? Had he married her around July 13, somewhere between Washington City and their brief stop at Cincinnati? It is likely.

At first look, it was obvious that the town’s male population was depleted. Thousands had gone away to the Union or Confederate army. Ads were running in the papers for able-bodied men to make up the numbers of this company or that brigade, the pay between eleven and twenty-three dollars per month, board and clothing included. Just go down to the recruiting office on the corner of Shelby and Market, or, if you were interested in joining the Garvin Rifles, go to Lieutenant J. M. Smith’s store on Market Street.140

The Tiger Rifles, an artillery company of Confederates from Louisiana, were still in town, just having paraded a day or two before, with their caps bearing the prominent initials T.R. “Turn & Run,” the Union men, the defamers, said.141

As for lodgings for the couple, good ones abounded. The beautiful and just renovated National Hotel was on the corner of Main and Fourth, in the very heart of the downtown business district of Louisville, with its ground floor and four floors of rooms, with horse-drawn streetcars plying by it at all times. One dollar and fifty cents a day.142

Or there was the Gulley House, on the north side of Market, between First and Brook. A dollar a night, or three dollars a week.143

There was good food, if you could afford it: C. C. Rueffer’s St. Charles Restaurant, that week offering their famous young grouse received daily by express, fresh clams, crabs, frogs’ legs, squabs, and specialty of the day—young squirrels—all washed down with Mr. Rueffer’s celebrated Dayton ale and porter.144

And around the corner, at Sixth Street and Court Place, opposite the city courtrooms and open for business day and night, stood a saloon and restaurant owned by Annie Shaw’s betrayed husband, George T. Shaw.145

But with a new woman on his arm, the Shaws were the least of Lloyd’s concerns. Alvin’s own father was somewhere around Louisville ministering to the intemperate, warning of the evils of drink—old T. G. Lloyd who’d tossed away his family before he saw sobriety, saw the light.

And Lizzie, the very first Mrs. William Alvin Lloyd, she was there too. And his daughter Belle, and the younger child, Charles W., not yet born when he’d run off to join the minstrels. If Lloyd had seen them when he’d passed through Louisville—his sometime stopping place, no longer his home—there is no record of when, or for how long. If he’d fretted over this, and if the quick stabs of guilt he might have felt pained him, for now—though they would later reappear—his Louisville family must remain a gauzy tableau, frozen in place.

And with warrants out for his bigamous offenses, the police might be tailing him, but, he would likely argue, shouldn’t they have better things to do than chasing after a man who rescued women from the drudgery of rolling bandages and pie dough and gave them a great adventure?

But now Lloyd needed to keep moving. Alone. The woman, once a passing pleasure, was seemingly a distraction. He had to focus on his work. His salvation. Or maybe, and this would surely be a great fear, he’d get nothing at all. What if his chief clients, the railroad execs, had become casualties of war and couldn’t pay up? Yes, they’d grown fat like Christmas geese from their travel profits, but what if the boon years were over? And the mill owners, what about them? How was business in Georgia and the Carolinas? The great mill states, if they were not faring well, then what? How would Lloyd manage?

The war was changing everything: a devil wind creeping along the banks of the Ohio River, bringing blood and ruin and sure to bring more. And though Lloyd was surely rooting for the Confederacy to smash the Yankees and end it, end it quickly, he and other like-minded partisans prayed that the South would never fall easily, submit to the bluecoat savages, the Lincoln-loving curs. Unlike some Kentuckians—a lot of them in fact—who sided with the Yankees, even as Lincoln was forcing the state to remain in the Union, Lloyd’s southern sentiments grew even stronger.

He couldn’t help but see the Union flag flying from the Louisville courthouse. A man of his leanings would cheer on secessionist Governor Magoffin as he refused to send militias when “the ape in the White House, the abolitionist,” called for them. Magoffin had stood up to Joseph Holt, thought to be Lincoln’s pawn when he was sent to his home state of Kentucky to gin up support for the Union. Holt “directly criticized Magoffin for his ‘hostile and defiant refusal to send troops to the Union’s aid.’ ” And so this Kentucky son went on the stump for the president and the Union. Lincoln, Holt declared, “has the courage to look traitors in the face.”146

Had Lloyd been there to hear Holt, he might have slung a bottle at his head. How could slave-holding Kentucky be divided, or worse, at the start of the war, neutral? Kentuckians, many Rebel sympathizers felt, were lily-livered. And now that Union soldiers were flowing into the city, how long would it be before the trains Lloyd rode like a sultan were commandeered by Yankee troops?

Now imagine him moving through the streets past the old familiar sights: the paddle steamers, the showboats painted up like gaudy women, the riverboat pilots with their slick beaver-fur hats and sun-blistered faces; the cardsharps with snub-nosed derringers concealed among the ruffles of their shirts; the farmers in stained denim coveralls hawking their prize pigs and coxcomb roosters. And the slaves, always the slaves, grunting, sweating, hefting barrels of whiskey. Familiar, so familiar to a man who’d grown up there, tired of life there, and left there.

For one night, to please her, then leave her, Lloyd and his lady checked into the Galt House, an elegant three-story sprawl of a building, and the best hotel in town, where some years before the touring literary legend Charles Dickens was inspired to gush that he’d been “lodged as though we had been in Paris.” 147 Perfect for honeymooners or lovers.

But with the dawn, on Tuesday, July 16, Lloyd quickly abandoned the lady. As he left for the depot, was he hearing the calliope strains of “My Old Kentucky Home” drifting over the Ohio? Did the old tunes, the memories, choke him, haunt him still? And if they’d wed—with no historical record to support another marriage at this time—he left her behind amid the rubble of his past.

He boarded the Louisville Express to Memphis. Behind him, there was war news: “Federal Forces Routed,” the Daily Democrat trumpeted on July 16, 1861. Confederate General Benjamin McCullough’s twelve thousand men had engaged the Union troops in blue at Springfield, Missouri, killed nine hundred of them, and forced the unconditional surrender of the rest.

Lloyd is traveling now. Beneath frequent and copious showers, the eighteen-hour-and-twenty-minute trip was a trial but faster than taking the riverboat down from Louisville, the 643 miles of the Ohio, then the Mississippi. Sixty hours of rising Big Muddy, whatever river one traveled. But Lloyd’s livelihood depended on his arrival farther south, so he made haste.

What Lloyd didn’t know, as the train pulled into Memphis late that night, was that the woman he’d abandoned in Louisville had gone to the police, to prominent city detective Dick Moore, and told him of her plight. She’d been deserted. She was ruined. She was alone. Moore asked the girl where Lloyd had gone. Memphis, she said. Lloyd was known to Moore. He had a file on Lloyd.

“Dick Moore has been watching his maneuvers for some time past,” the Daily Courier of July 17 noted. Indeed, Moore had. He wired ahead to Memphis.

“Arrived at Memphis, July 17th (midnight),” Alvin wrote. It was actually the sixteenth, as will be seen.148 Thus begins Lloyd’s journal entries, part of a summary of his activities in the Confederacy. He did in fact keep a record of his travels, and we can journey with him and read real-time news reports of his adventures, crimes, and misadventures. However, any and all mentions of spying for Lincoln were only added after June of 1865 when, together with his lawyer Enoch Totten, a new summary peppered with spying episodes was created expressly to buttress Lloyd’s claim that he had been Lincoln’s secret agent and deserved compensation for that service. This summary forms one of the groups of documents pertaining to Lloyd in the National Archives and known as Enclosure 13. As well, there are of record some loose diary pages, some of which met with timely loss, others altered and selected by Lloyd and his lawyer to further “prove” his claim.

Here was Lloyd in Memphis. It had been seven months since he had last pulled the Memphis shift, but as in Louisville, things had changed here in that short time. The Confederate flag flew from rooftops, unfurled and defiant. He was in another country now. Unfamiliar, but very welcome.

Lloyd’s arrival in Memphis did not go unnoticed. For once, there was a real Dixie welcome: “Among the arrivals at the Gayoso House . . . was our friend, Mr. Alvin Lloyd, publisher of the Southern Railroad Guide,” the Memphis Daily Appeal reported. “Mr. Lloyd comes directly from New York, from which city he was compelled to leave in consequence of his strong Southern sympathies. We extend to him a cordial welcome to the more congenial society of the South.”149 It is probable that Lloyd told a member of the press—some of whom commonly met the trains and went to the hotels to interview and record the new arrivals in town—the story of how he was “compelled to leave” New York City.

The following morning, waking up in a room at the Gayoso, a guest would feel flush at discovering the gas-lit chandeliers, marble floors, and indoor plumbing. It was raining steadily, the wind was howling, and distinguished guests such as J. E. Davis, the Confederate president’s brother, and General Nugent, of New Orleans, at that very moment were checking into Lloyd’s hotel.150

Lloyd’s only pressing business that day was with Ralph C. Brinkley, one of the directors of the Memphis & Charleston Railroad and president of the Memphis & Little Rock Railroad, a little road leading thirty-eight miles out from Hopefield, Tennessee, to Madison, Arkansas. It was a visit well worthwhile—$125 dollars in gold. The rest of that Wednesday was spent planning his next stops.151

Finally it was a chance meeting with Joe Davis that inspired Lloyd to spend the morning of the very cloudy and sultry Thursday penning a letter to Joe Davis’s brother: “Hon. Jefferson Davis. I hope you will pardon me, an entire stranger, for addressing you, but my love for my country’s safe deliverance must be my excuse.” In this letter he tells Davis that he had been in Grafton, Virginia, with General McClellan of the Union Army, a couple of weeks earlier and that McClellan had divulged to Lloyd his plans for taking the East Tennessee & Virginia Railroad. “I give you this information gratis,” Lloyd wrote. “I think if you have not that section of Virginia fortified, it would be well to attend to it at once, and give him a warm reception.” He ends the letter with: “Will be in Richmond a week or so. I would wish to have our army victorious. Your friend, W. Alvin Lloyd.”152

That afternoon, Lloyd went out to the Memphis & Little Rock Railroad to pick up another one hundred dollars in gold. Then it was on to a meeting with a host of assembled Memphis bigwigs, including Sam Tate and W. J. Ross, president and general superintendent respectively of the Memphis & Charleston. They were all rabid secessionists like Lloyd. And it would be the last carefree night Lloyd would spend in Memphis.

The next morning, Lloyd boarded the six-thirty mail train, bound for another successful money-gathering spree. Things were looking up. A few hours later he arrived at his destination, Grand Junction. Fifty-two miles away, it was the first big station you got to when going east on the Memphis & Charleston Railroad. Then things went horribly wrong. How many times in his life had Lloyd stepped out of a train, only to have police waiting, on the lookout for him?

“You are our prisoner, and must return to Memphis with us.” So said the police, at least according to the 1865 testimony of Charles T. Moore, one of the false witnesses called by Totten to depose for Lloyd.153

And Alvin Lloyd did return to Memphis on a train that arrived back at one o’clock that very afternoon. Police Captain Hayne Irby Klinck was waiting. And a storm of press was reporting on Lloyd’s criminal doings and the real reason for his arrest: The Louisville Courier of July 21 and July 22, 1861, carried this:

Bigamy. . . . Officers Moore and Sweeney, of this city, received a special dispatch from Memphis, from Captain Klink of the police, announcing the arrest of W.A. Lloyd, who is charged with bigamy. Said Lloyd is formerly of this city and is somewhat notorious in the marrying line. His last villainy was practiced upon the daughter of a merchant in New York. He is also, we learn, under indictment in Columbus, Ohio, for a similar offense. He was arrested at Grand Junction, and taken to Memphis, where he will be held to await a requisition.”

After only four days in the city, here he was—behind bars.

“I paid Capt. Clink and the lawyer (Yerger) one hundred dollars ($100) each and was discharged. Left July 20th.” Lloyd would later, much later write in his revised summary that he’d been arrested as a Yankee spy. And he charged the Federal government for his expenses. “Three hundred dollars for amount paid to rebel detectives to discharge me from prison at Memphis, Tenn., in gold. $30 expenses while in prison in Memphis, Tenn., pd in gold.”154 This marvel of a lie, charging the Federal government for money he spent to get rid of the bigamy rap was in its own way, perfect.

Lloyd was told to get out of town and never come back. And so he did, taking the five o’clock slow train to a little town just across the Mississippi line. Officers Moore and Sweeney duly arrived in Memphis to take Lloyd back to Louisville, but the notorious bigamist had fled.

The following morning, in Holly Springs, Lloyd had an interview with E. G. Barney, superintendent of the Mississippi Central Railroad. It was a most distressing meeting. Mr. Barney didn’t tell Lloyd this, but he had only recently been alerted to the fact that his visitor was the brother of the notorious J. T. Lloyd who a few years before, in the blackmail rag the Cincinnati Sun, had printed vicious lies about not only the railroad but about Mr. Barney himself. So Barney refused to pay. No more Yankee debts being honored. What was worse, Barney started a rumor in Holly Springs that Lloyd was a Yankee spy and an abolitionist. Lloyd, outraged at the time—and what a cruel joke that was—would later use this accusation to buttress his claim against the government when swearing he’d spied for Lincoln.

But here, in truth, being simply accused of spying for Lincoln, when of course he never spied for Lincoln, was not the real peril; there was more afoot, something Lloyd couldn’t sweet-talk, deny, beat, shoot, pay or bribe his way out of. Soon there would be no escaping it.