Anatomy of a Fraud
See Lloyd right where we left him, in Enoch Totten’s office on June 1, 1865. His life—the horrors and highs of that life; the great drama, the music, and the man—errant and outrageous—the telling of the story has ended. The young lawyer must have been riveted. Here Totten was in a city teeming with competition, a fresh face with a fresh shingle, and William Alvin Lloyd stumbled into his office with a claim that has all the necessary elements to make Enoch Totten a substantial legal name in the nation’s capital. Better, this man Lloyd, this broth of showman and criminal, is now a sympathetic weary cripple, swearing he has served and suffered for Abraham Lincoln and the Union cause. William Alvin Lloyd was too good to pass up.
Needed now was great speed. If this claim was to go anywhere, speed was of the essence. Claims of various sorts were starting to come in already, from all over the country; Totten knew this, and it wouldn’t be long before the War Department got bogged down with paperwork. So Totten would build, create, massage, and mold the anatomy of a fraud.
Here, in more detail, is Totten’s plan, his design, as he navigates pitfalls, embellishes, and wends his way through the thicket that is Lloyd’s time in the war: First there is the matter of a verbal contract with the president that Lloyd reported to Grant’s office, this alleged spying contract that Lincoln had given Lloyd back in 1861. No—and he is firm about this—a verbal contract would not suffice. There has to have been a written contract. A written contract? But Grant’s office was told it was verbal. That is a problem. That’s on Grant’s endorsement, right there in black and white. Verbal. Can a verbal contract be a written contract at one and the same time? How’s that possible? It used to be written, but now that it’s been lost it’s merely verbal. Why was it lost? It was, they decide, destroyed. How about by Nellie the nursemaid, at, say, Lynchburg in 1862, to stop it falling into enemy hands, to save the spy’s life? That will do. So, it started out as a written contract. Now it’s verbal, that’s all. Now what exactly did that contract say? Lloyd and Totten create the wording. This contract is the focal point of the claim. Indeed, it is the only focus of the claim for Lloyd’s back pay. Two hundred dollars a month for four years.
That’s $9,600. But there can be more. Totten suggests, what about expenses incurred during the war? The contract they are creating doesn’t mention expenses. It just says two hundred a month salary. Totten decides he will press for expenses. After examining Lloyd’s expense sheet, Totten adds another $2,380, bringing the claim against the US government to $11,980. An even bigger sum. Nothing like settling on a definitive claim, down to the nearest dollar.
And about witnesses who will perjure themselves for Lloyd? Well, the “witnesses” are not only available, they are in Washington at this very moment, ready and willing, primed to say and do whatever was needed. Virginia, Boyd, Nellie, and even young Clarence, if necessary. Perhaps a five-year-old boy wouldn’t make a good witness, but the others will do. They will need more, but these will make a good start.
They will all be deposed under oath on June 3, two days away, in front of notary John Callan. All four statements must be close, but not too close, otherwise the authorities might become suspicious. They have two days. They must rehearse—drill—rehearse. And so, on June 3, these four appear before notary John Callan, in Washington, DC.370
Because they will be deposed, not interrogated, their statements sworn under oath will—Totten and Lloyd hope—suffice, convince, and prove that William Alvin Lloyd was in fact Abraham Lincoln’s most secret of secret agents.
It begins. He begins. Another chapter begins. A very debilitated Lloyd takes a seat before the notary and raises his right hand. By now, because the spying contract had no longer been verbal but in writing, he reproduces the wording of that contract “according to the best of my recollection.”
The bearer, Mr W.A. Lloyd, is authorized to proceed South and learn the number of troops stationed in the different points and cities in the insurgent states, procure plans of the fortifications and forts, and gain all other information that might be beneficial to the Government of the United States, and report the facts to me, for which service Mr Lloyd shall be paid two hundred dollars per month. [Signed] A. Lincoln. July 13, 1861.
Lloyd then goes on to describe in detail the events of November 7, 1862, at Lynchburg, when he says the contract was destroyed. Then, “I have no other written evidence of said contract . . . except the pass . . . written and signed at that time by the President.” Of course, this last wording is sleight of hand. You see the pass, now you see the contract, because Alvin the prestidigitator tells you to. In reality, the pass, as genuine as it is, is just a pass to go south, one of many Lincoln gave out to people during the war. Possession of a pass is absolutely no proof that there was a contract. Reality is suspended. And notary Callen is merely a paid scribe.
Alvin then claims that he immediately set about his business, on July 13, 1861, went to Tennessee, and finally, after faithfully adhering to the terms of the contract, emerged from the insurgent states on May 24, 1865. He briefly mentions his periods of imprisonment: several weeks in Nashville and in Memphis, nine months in Savannah, three months in Macon, eight months in Richmond, and several weeks in Mobile and Lynchburg, each time as a Yankee spy, a grand total of more than two years behind bars, and that during the greater part of 1863 he was paralyzed as the result of his cruel confinements.371
Just to keep the historical record straight—for at times, reality, like a defaced daguerreotype, is blurred, unrecognizable—in fact, and it bears repeating, there were only two times Alvin was imprisoned in the South, for a total of nine months, not the “more than two years” that he claims. But Totten will, in time, summon “ringers,” men paid to give false witness, who will testify to Lloyd’s various incarcerations.
Alphabetical Boyd, also deposing on June 3, 1865, claimed that on July 13, 1861, he accompanied his employer, Lloyd, into the Southern states “on special business of the United States Government,” and that he “continued with him in said states as his assistant in obtaining information concerning the rebel forces for the benefit of the United States Government from that time until the 24th day of May 1865.”372
So, there they were, as claimed. Lloyd and Boyd, intrepid, fearless Lincoln men working ceaselessly as spies for four years. Alphabetical’s “best recollection” of the wording on the contract is identical to that of his employer, with the exception of one letter (the “s” at the end of the word “services”). But then it would be, if he had been with his boss for four long years. If he had been, that is.
Boyd swears that he accompanied Alvin to Memphis in July 1861. In the deposition he further states that it was here that he first saw the contract, and that he often secreted it in times of danger. He then says, foolishly and forgetting, that on October 7, 1862, Nellie Dooley destroyed it, “as he is informed, and verily believes.” So, by his own admission, T.H.S. Boyd was not present at the burning of the contract in Lynchburg. That he wasn’t there is bolstered by the fact that he gets the date wrong. According to Alvin and Virginia, the date of the burning of the contract was November 7.
Boyd says that in July 1862, at Savannah, Lloyd gave him a package of letters to be delivered to Mr. Lincoln, which Boyd did later that month. In July 1862, Lloyd was certainly in Savannah, had been for the last seven months, but imprisoned in the Chatham County Jail. What possible documentation could he have had that would have been of any use to Lincoln? Boyd claims he did not know the contents of this package. By 1872, when he came to depose again, his memory had improved, as we shall see.
Still with Boyd’s deposition of June 3, 1865, he says he performed a similar function in October of 1862, and that on the twentieth of that month he delivered a second package to the president. This time he did know the contents—“fortifications, troop strengths, and the number of troops in Lee’s army.” He does not say where Lloyd was when he handed him this second package.373
Virginia was up next. She claimed she joined her husband at Clarksville, Tennesse, on October 1, 1861, that she was with him at the time of his imprisonment in Savannah, and that she was permitted to visit him a portion of the time, as she was also at Macon, Geogira, and in Richmond. Unfortunately, the Lloyd Papers are missing a section of this deposition, so we don’t get to learn how she remembered the wording of the contract.374
Ellen R. “Nellie” Dooley is the next deponent. She sets the scene by stating that she has been Virginia’s attendant since December 10, 1859, and has remained so to this day (June 3, 1865). She had come south with Mrs. Lloyd, and remained with Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd throughout the duration of the war, with the exception of the nine months that Alvin was in jail at Savannah. It is not revealed where she was during those nine months. She claims that for a long time prior to November 5, 1862, the contract was in her possession. One might well gather from this that before Alvin was jailed in Savannah in December 1861, he gave Nellie the contract, which she secreted in her undergarments, which is how she came to know the contents by heart.375
But Totten, and he was in charge, was concerned that these sworn depositions might not convince the federal authorities of the veracity of the claim. He decided more was needed. More detail. For the next week or so, Alvin went through his “journal,” the one he had prepared so carefully during his four years in enemy territory, making a copy for presentation to the War Department. This “newly revised” journal gave his every movement from July 13, 1861, to May 24, 1865—where he had been, whom he had seen, monies collected, and, most critically, peppered with fictitious spying episodes. By the middle of June it was finished. The document was fourteen pages long and would as has been noted, eventually become known as Enclosure 13 of the Lloyd Papers.
More detail. More, Totten demanded. On June 13, 1865, T.H.S. Boyd made another deposition, this one to the effect that he had been present when Lincoln gave Lloyd the contract, that he heard Lincoln offer the job to Lloyd, heard the president mention two hundred dollars a month, and saw the great man sign a piece of paper that he gave to Lloyd. Boyd believed it to be the same piece of paper he first saw in Memphis in July 1861.376
And now, for further evidence, Totten obtained a medical affidavit from Dr. John Frederick May, a professor of anatomy and physiology, one of the most eminent surgeons of his time. Thus it was a brilliant coup on the part of Totten to bring him in to examine Alvin in Washington, on June 14, 1865. Dr. May’s verdict would go a long way—if only it was favorable to the claimant. There are various ways one can make sure of such a verdict from such a high-flying medical witness, especially when a large fee is involved.377
Dr. May was fresh from the newspapers as not only the man who had poked his index finger into the hole in Mr. Lincoln’s head and declared that there was no hope, but also as one of the identifiers of the dead body of John Wilkes Booth, the very assasin who had created that hole. Curiously, two years before—in 1863—this same Dr. May had operated on a tumor in Booth’s neck. That was the only time he had ever seen Lincoln’s assassin alive. Now, when confronted with the cadaver before him, May exclaimed, “There is no resemblance in that corpse to Booth, nor can I believe it to be that of Booth.” Colonel Lafayette Baker had succeeded Pinkerton as head of the Secret Service. It was Baker who personally escorted Dr. May to Booth’s remains that day. Some say it was Baker who persuaded May to change his opinion. May himself, in his bizarre 1887 paper, The Marked Scalpel, says that it was the two-year-old scar on the back of the cadaver’s neck that convinced him the dead man was Booth.378
Dr. May’s veracity, if not his competency and motives, speaks for itself: “Washington, June 14, 1865. This is to certify that I have examined Mr. W.A. Lloyd who, I am informed, has been afflicted with partial paralysis (hemiplegia) from long continued confinement in the Libby & other Southern prisons.” Alvin was never in Libby Prison, in Richmond. For Dr. May to name this infamous prison based on hearsay is notable and disturbing. Who would have told him this? Lloyd? Totten? Obviously someone did.
Mr. Lloyd’s left inferior limb still gives evidence of the above mentioned disease. It is smaller than the other limb, its action is still impeded in locomotion, & its sensibility is considerably affected.
The imperfect use of the member is at once seen in his gait, & its sensibility I have ascertained by pricking it at different points with a sharp pointed instrument. Altho’ I have not attended Mr. Lloyd professionally, & therefore am ignorant of the previous history of his case, I would yet state that paralysis can be induced by long continued hard usage, & sleeping on the ground, or in damp & unventilated apartments, which Mr. Lloyd informs me has been the cause of his disease. Jno. Fredk. May, MD.379
With its fresh padding, the Lloyd case moved forward. On June 16, 1865, Major William W. Winthrop was standing in for Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, who at that time was immersed in the trial of the Lincoln conspirators and deep in the business of paying the duplicitous Sanford Conover, aka Charles Dunham, Holt’s original star “witness” at the conspirators’ trial. Winthrop had just finished reviewing the Lloyd case as presented thus far, and now wrote a letter to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, “in the matter of W.A. Lloyd’s demand for compensation as Special Agent of the Government.” Winthrop then discusses the pass, and says, “This is in the handwriting of the late President, and bears his signature, with the date of July 13, 1865.”380
Winthrop cites numerous letters and documents provided by Lloyd, and then sums up: “It is the opinion of this Bureau that the evidence submitted by the claimant clearly shows that he was employed as alleged, and that the expenditures reported were not, under the circumstances, unreasonable or improbable.” Winthrop also says, “It is believed that the claims of Mr Lloyd should be allowed.”381
Remember that all Winthrop has read are the rehearsed statements of Lloyd and his accomplices and that he seems to believe them. “But it may be remarked that it is somewhat singular,” Winthrop writes, “that he should have engaged in such services, remained absent for four years in the meantime communicating with the Government, without having received any money for salary or expenses before starting, or during the period of his absence. It is therefore recommended that the account of the Contingent Fund in the hands of the Executive during this period be examined in order to ascertain, if possible, whether they contain evidence of any payments to Mr Lloyd. If they fail to show this, it is believed that the account should be allowed and paid.”
Totten’s clever orchestration, his inventions, his client, and his witnesses are, so far, winning.
Stanton received this letter the same day, and on June 22 he returned it to the Bureau of Military Justice for examination by Judge Holt himself. The busy and beleaguered Holt complied, and on June 26 returned Lloyd’s claim papers along with a letter to Stanton. “While they make out a strong prima facie case in support of the claim, there are circumstances surrounding the transaction and the testimony offered which suggest further investigation as necessary before a final determination is arrived at.”
He goes on to say, “In the absence of all record evidence of the existence of the contract alleged to have been made with the claimant by the late President, and in the absence, too, of any correspondence with him, and considering the magnitude of the sum demanded, it is believed that the claimant should be turned over to Congress or to the Court of Claims, where his claim, & the proofs adduced in its support can be subjected to tests which the executive branch of the Government has no power to apply.”382
“No power to apply.” Alvin would not, could not air his secrets in a public court. Judge Holt’s advice and skepticism sent Totten scurrying.
Two days later, following quickly up on the suggestion made by Major Winthrop that President Lincoln’s contingency funds, if they were of record, be examined, Totten wrote to the late president’s son, Robert T. Lincoln, then living in Chicago. Totten asked Robert Lincoln if he or the president’s widow Mary Todd Lincoln knew anything about William Alvin Lloyd. Robert Lincoln’s reply of July 11 forms Enclosure 41 of the Lloyd Papers: “My dear Sir, your letter of June 28th has been forwarded to me. The private papers of my father cannot be examined for several years. For any purpose. Mrs Lincoln does not know of any transaction of the kind to which you refer. If your client has been in the Secret Service of the Govt., there is, without doubt, evidence of it in the war Dept. I regret that it is impossible for me to supply any. Very truly yours.”
Undaunted and with a new design, a new, improved plan, beginning on June 30, 1865, Enoch Totten began to file additional affidavits in support of the Lloyd claim. Several men, the “ringers” paid to testify, some of whom existed in real life, and some who used false names, would make these additional depositions.
Marcellus Howser was the first to be deposed, on June 30, in Washington. At that time a deponent was required to supply someone who would vouch for him, for his character, his veracity, and his overall credibility as a trustworthy witness. The same day, Robert G. Beale, warden of the district jail, vouched for Marcellus. Beale had known him for a year or two, had even employed him when, on occasion, he had had to send prisoners to the Albany Penitentiary, in New York. “I selected him as one of my guard, and I found him diligent and reliable, and place the fullest reliance on his integrity & fidelity.”383
Mr. Howser, born on April 5, 1847, in Frederick County, Maryland, was just eighteen. In this deposition, he claims to have been present, along with Lloyd and Boyd and Lincoln, at the moment the contract was signed on July 13, 1861. It is not explained how a boy of just fourteen came to find himself in such illustrious company at the president’s house that day. But Mr. Howser remembered the interview clearly. After all, it’s not every day a teenager gets to be in on an interview with the president of the United States. According to Mr. Howser, Lloyd asked Mr. Lincoln if he could be of any service to him while he was in the South, and the president answered in the affirmative. Then came the contract, at two hundred a month, and finally—and this is something new—that if Lloyd should die in the execution of his duties, then the money was to go to Mrs. Lloyd. No one else during the mass of 1865 depositions ever mentions this last clause. Mr. Howser also says he has known T.H.S. Boyd for more than twelve years, and that Boyd had always been a “loyal and true citizen of the United States.”384
John P. Hamlin vouched for the next witness, Asbury Baker. Mr. Baker claims that he temporarily found himself in Washington, DC, on business, in July 1861, “on or about the 15th thereof.” At least, according to the deposition he made in Washington on June 30, 1865, the same day as Marcellus Howser. Baker claims to have been acquainted with Lloyd for the past four years, something rather difficult, surely, as W. Alvin Lloyd had spent those very four years deep in enemy territory. He claims that Alvin showed him the contract on July 13, 1861. He even quotes considerable portions of that contract. Asbury Baker said he had also known Alphabetical Boyd for more than fifteen years. He also claimed that for almost three years he, Baker, had been a resident of DC, which is difficult to reconcile with the fact that in 1863 he was living in Baltimore, at 7th Street, and working in that city as a clerk for Messrs Johnson & Sutton. Perhaps, though, what Mr. Baker had in mind when he said he had been three years a resident of Washington, was that late in 1864, he and three fellow clerks in Baltimore were caught selling goods to Confederate blockade-runners and thrown into the Old Capitol Prison, in Washington.385
On July 15, 1865, Alvin deposed again, a new element being introduced: His life was at risk. That if it should become known through the South that he had been employed as a secret agent of the government during the Rebellion that such notoriety would work great injury to him, and would not only injure his business, but, he believed, would endanger his life; that he thought he ought not to be compelled to go before Congress or any other tribunal to substantiate his claim; that such a course would change his evidence from the secret archives of the War Department to public records of the Court of Claims or Congress, as he was advised and believed. He therefore respectfully asked that he may be allowed the amount of his claim by the Honorable Secretary of War.386
Next was Charles T. Moore, of the City of Philadelphia, to depose in front of a Baltimore notary public on July 15, 1865, claiming that he had been with Lloyd in Memphis in July 1861. This particular testimony, Totten knew, was central to an understanding of Lloyd’s time in Memphis. The rather mysterious Mr. Moore—i.e., the very mysterious Mr. Moore—had never been heard of or from until the moment he deposed, and would never be heard of or from again.
Charles T. Moore swore he had “known W.A. Lloyd for fifteen years and more” and that he “went in company with Mr. Lloyd from Louisville, Ky., in July 1861, to Memphis, Tenn.” It is somewhat odd that, while the Memphis Appeal ran an article on Lloyd’s arrival, they never mentioned Mr. Moore. What is downright curious is that Alvin Lloyd never mentioned Mr. Moore at all, ever.387
Moore claimed he “saw, in Lloyd’s possession, a card, signed by the late President,” and then went on to recite the wording of the pass, accurately, to the letter. “Also saw and read a paper, signed by the late President,” and he then proceeded to quote the fictitious contract.388
The man called on to vouch for Charles T. Moore was one Harvey Williams, of Philadelphia City, Pennsylvania, who deposed at the same time, and in the same place, as Mr. Moore. Mr. Williams swore that he had been well acquainted with Mr. Charles T. Moore for the last twelve years, and that he knew him to be a “gentleman of full credit and belief.” Harvey Williams seems to have been the only man who ever lived who knew Charles T. Moore, but that may be because Harvey Williams never existed by that name either.389
So, who were Charles T. Moore and Harvey Williams, in real life? Of course, without knowing, one can only guess. However, there was a young man named Charles T. Harvey, who would soon make a rather dramatic appearance.
On July 18, 1865, Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd both deposed again in Washington, DC. The thrust of Virginia’s deposition was that on September 15, 1861, she was in New York City when she was “informed that her husband was imprisoned as a spy in Memphis.” Being a dutiful and faithful wife she immediately began making preparations to go to her husband, and toward the end of the month set out for Dixie, accompanied by more than twelve hundred dollars in gold. What she failed to mention was that she was also in company with her child and nursemaid. When she finally reached Memphis, and found Alvin in prison, she had precisely twelve hundred dollars left, which she promptly handed over to the inmate. That’s the end of the story. We don’t know what Lloyd did with this extraordinary sum of money, but presumably it was used to bail him out. Virginia did go on to say that from time to time during her long subsequent stay in the South, she was forced to dispose of her diamonds and jewelry for ten thousand dollars Confederate money, which was equivalent to about a thousand in gold.390
There are major problems with Virginia’s sworn testimony. The most glaring is that Lloyd was not in prison at Memphis, or indeed anywhere, at the time Virginia claims. He had done a night in the Memphis jail back in July 1861, for bigamy, and that case had made the New York papers. Both the Herald and the Tribune had covered that one in big headlines, so many in New York would have known of Alvin’s bigamous crimes.
In her June 3, 1865, deposition, Virginia has herself rendezvousing with her husband at Clarksville, Tennessee, on October 1, 1861. How could that be, if Alvin was in prison in Memphis? Virginia must have meant that by the time she got to Tennessee, Alvin had been let out of jail. That’s how he could have met her at Clarksville. But it would have been much better for all concerned if she had made this clear in her deposition. But how could it be clear?
At some stage just prior to July 18, 1865, something terrible was alleged to have happened to Lloyd’s original journal, the one from which he had drawn up what is of record, the later concocted summary known as Enclosure 13. The original met with an unfortunate accident. “Partially destroyed,” is how Lloyd put it in his deposition of July 18. Alas, all that was left were a few diary pages of his time in the prison at Macon in 1862, and a sprinkling of sundry other pages. First the destruction of the Abraham Lincoln spying contract back in Lynchburg in 1862, and now this.391
Stunning, then, that they continue, that Totten has allowed them to continue.
Alphabetical Boyd made a further deposition on July 19, 1865, in Washington, in front of notary public James H. Causten. It will be remembered, from Boyd’s June 3, 1865, deposition, that on or around July 15, 1862, he had received a package from Lloyd in Savannah, and had later that month handed it safely to President Lincoln. Now, come July 19, 1865, he has remembered something else about that meeting with Mr. Lincoln, something he had forgotten to mention on June 3, and something he had also failed to remember when he made his June 13 deposition, to wit, Mr. Lincoln had given him, Boyd, his own personal spying contract. Rather significant that “he was employed in the month of July 1862 by President Lincoln to go into the Southern States on special business; that the President wrote the terms of such employment in his presence in the words and figures following, to wit: ‘Mr T.H.S. Boyd is employed to go South and return with dispatches or other useful information. He will be allowed one hundred dollars per month. July 29, 1862. A Lincoln,’; that the original in the handwriting of the President of the United States, of which the foregoing is a true copy, is now in the possession of his attorney in the city of Baltimore, Md.”
This alleged contract was never produced, of course, nor was there ever an inquiry about such a document. Finally as sworn, it must be assumed that Boyd was regularly and faithfully paid by the Chief Executive, per the terms of the contract. Which is more than can be said for Lloyd, who never got paid at all. If, like Lloyd, Boyd had not been paid, then why didn’t he press his own claim through Totten, especially as he swore he had his own, signed contract sitting there safe in his lawyer’s office in Baltimore, just ready and waiting to be picked up?392
An old acquaintance of Lloyd’s now enters the picture. John Roper Branner, president of the East Tennessee & Virginia Railroad, happened to be in Washington on August 4, 1865. Several of his company’s bridges had been destroyed during the fighting, and the line was consequently in desperate trouble. The Federal government had to swing into action very soon, or Branner would be ruined. For the action he had in mind, he had in his pocket a couple of distinct points of leverage. His friend, Samuel Milligan, judge of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, was a great friend of Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, a Knoxvillian like Branner and Milligan. Perhaps most important, though, was that Andrew Johnson owed John Branner a favor due to something that had happened in Knoxville back in 1861, when General Thomas Hindman had been the star of an evening party (Knoxville was his home too, originally). Hindman was a little the worse for wear and his rabid secessionism was showing with increasing vehemence as the drinks wore on, when he learned that that Senator Andrew Johnson was going to be speechifying for the Union the next day at Rogersville. He immediately proposed sending troops to Rogersville to capture Johnson. John Branner, then in charge of the railroad, heard of this, sensed that such a punitive movement would not serve him or his railroad well, and rerouted the trains, thus saving the future president of the United States from certain arrest and probable lynching. John Branner got his bridges rebuilt.393
While he was about in the nation’s capital, Mr. Branner was induced to write a letter to William Alvin Lloyd, most likely at the urging of Totten, who felt this Branner statement would help Lloyd’s case. In fact, it is possible that Totten was handling Branner’s claim. The thrust of the letter, Branner’s grammar intact, as in the original, recalled “a conversation we [Lloyd and Branner] had on the cars from Knoxville, Tenn., to Bristol, Tenn. in July 1861, in regard to the rebellion, and you informed me that you was out South to collect debts due you by the Southern railroads, and that I was the only man who had paid you anything at that time.”394
There are a few problems with Mr. Branner’s letter. First, there is no room for such a train trip in July 1861. And Alvin never claimed to be in Knoxville in July 1861, and Bristol is never mentioned in Lloyd’s itinerary or in any of his accomplices’ statements.
Branner continued: “You also informed me you was a Union man, opposed to the war and the rebellion, and that the South would be compelled to submit to the laws and government of the United States. You also exhibited to me a pass from President Lincoln for you to pass the Federal lines, and gave me to understand that you was acting for him in collecting up all the information you could for the benefit of the United States Government.”395
Branner never claims to have actually seen the contract and this whole Branner episode must be regarded as falsehood, created and prompted by Enoch Totten.
On August 8, 1865, Samuel Milligan vouched for Branner, and President Andrew Johnson vouched for both Branner and Milligan. That’s the way things were done. It goes a long way in a claim if you have the president of the United States vouching for you: “I am directed by the President to state that any statements made by J.R. Branner and Sam Milligan are entitled to the fullest of credit. They are both men of the highest character. W.A. Browning, President’s Secretary.”396
According to W. Alvin Lloyd’s initial deposition of June 3, 1865, he spent eight months in prison in Richmond at some stage of his career, although he didn’t say when, and he didn’t name the institution in which he was so unfortunately lodged. In Virginia’s deposition of the same date, she claimed to have visited her husband in prison in Richmond. Again, nothing more specific than that. In his June 14, 1865, report, Dr. May let it slip that he had been informed that Alvin had been in the notorious Libby Prison, in Richmond. As Enclosure 13, presented on July 16, 1865, as part of his additional evidence, Alvin had drawn up the most extraordinarily extensive and detailed itinerary of his life in the Confederacy during the war. On reading and rereading Enclosure 13, it dawned on someone—probably Enoch Totten—that, although Lloyd was in Richmond on a dozen or so brief occasions during the course of the war, nowhere in that document did he mention being in prison there. What was worse was that nowhere could anything remotely like an eight-month incarceration be squeezed into an already busy schedule. They couldn’t now redo Enclosure 13—an earlier draft had already gone to the War Department—but they had to do something. The error was too glaring. They had to act quickly, blindingly quickly. Imagine a summer storm caught in a camera’s frame. Then next see the remains of a flashflood, a street with ankle-high water, obscuring a cobbled walk. The evidence, the papers that are the evidence lie ruined in the water. Now see new paper and new ink on a desk. Notes, scrawls, new evidence, a new man, a new “ringer.” He is Theodore Woodall.397
Woodall is forty years old, an illiterate, brutish Maryland policeman living in Baltimore. Totten himself deposed Woodall in Washington on August 11, 1865. In this deposition, Woodall swears he was in Richmond in 1861 and 1862 up to October of the latter year, when he returned north. And that’s true. That’s where he was. What he was doing all that time in the new Confederate capital is not mentioned, and neither is why he left Richmond in October 1862, or how he got north. But it is known, and it’s just as well for the Lloyd claim that Woodall didn’t mention it in his deposition.398
Woodall claims that during the year 1861, he was “informed by Mr. Samuel MacCubbin, chief of Winder’s rebel detectives, that Mr. Wm A. Lloyd had been arrested, and was imprisoned in Savannah, Ga., on a charge of being an agent of the United States Government.” Woodall also claims he knew, of his own knowledge, that “Mr. Lloyd was regarded by the Rebel authorities as an agent of the United States, and was constantly watched and followed by the Rebel detectives.”399
He goes on to say that, during a part of the year 1862 he (Woodall) was “a detective for the United States, in Col. L.C. Baker’s force,” and that he “returned to Richmond in the month of May 1863, and remained there until July 1864,” when he “came North and remained.” It is true that, after he got back North in 1862, he worked for Colonel Lafayette Baker (Allan Pinkerton’s replacement as head of the Federal Secret Service) sometime in the last three months of the year.
He claims that, during his stay in Richmond he knew Mr. William A. Lloyd.
Mr. Woodall swears, “There was a great outcry against him [Lloyd] in Richmond, and he was denounced by the people there as a Yankee spy, and was arrested, and thrown into prison (‘Libby’) [Woodall’s parentheses and quotes] by the Rebel authorities for being an agent of the United States Government.” Such an outcry would have made the Richmond press. It didn’t. Second, Alvin was never in prison in Richmond. No, Theodore Woodall was confusing Alvin with someone else. That someone else was Theodore Woodall.
Woodall had begun his professional life as a house painter, hated that, and so became a cop. Didn’t care for that either, and, in turn, because there was nothing else he could really do, just drifted into being a flatfoot on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. In 1859 he was badly beaten up by “plug uglies,” the infamous and thuggish gangsters. Woodall became a plug himself, and went around brutalizing people. He’d finally found job satisfaction, even though the pay was somewhat irregular. On April 19, 1861, a week into the Civil War, when the 6th Massachusetts Regiment came through Baltimore, a local secessionist mob fired on them, thus initiating the Baltimore Riot, the first blood drawn during the Civil War. One of the plugs who shouldered a musket was Ted Woodall.400
In July–August 1861, John H. Winder became inspector general of posts in and around Richmond, and, in order to do his job more effectively, he needed a goon squad. So, he imported from Baltimore a bunch of particularly vicious plugs, led by Samuel MacCubbin, who, soon enough, would become Winder’s chief of police. In October 1861, Theodore Woodall joined the squad. That’s what he was doing in Richmond—he was one of Winder’s detectives, notoriously cruel and violent. However, Woodall proved too enthusiastic in his post, and was indicted for extorting money from a Richmond grocer. Choosing to sacrifice the October wages of $124 he was entitled to as a Winder detective, Woodall fled Richmond via a flag-of-truce ship in October 1862. This “man of evil fame,” as the Richmond Daily Dispatch would later call him, was jailed for twenty days upon his arrival in the North, and then released on parole. He readily found employment in Washington as a detective on the force of a man as disturbingly corrupt and self-aggrandizing as himself—Colonel Lafayette Baker. In such a capacity, several visitors from the South who recognized him saw Woodall on the streets of Washington. Ten days later he was arrested again and thrown into the Old Capitol Prison until January 1862, when he was paroled to Baltimore.401
In Baltimore, Woodall was arrested for disloyalty to the Union, not once, but twice, on March 12, 1863, and again on May 27 of that year. However, he beat the rap by “volunteering” to become a Yankee spy, and a few days later, was back in Richmond, reporting to General Winder. Within a couple of weeks of his arrival back in Richmond, he was arrested by the mayor on the charge of being a suspicious character, and for sending information to the Yankees. Woodall wasn’t particularly good at being a Yankee spy. He was thrown in jail to await trial, and, in July, finally found guilty, but released on bail of seven hundred dollars, if he stayed out of trouble. Winder needed thugs like Woodall and took him back on his squad, even made arrangements for Woodall to be paid the money he was owed from the year before. The last evidence of Woodall in Dixie is that, on September 17, 1863, while in Wilmington, he received $235 for one month and seventeen days services as a Winder detective.402
Lafayette Baker writes of Woodall being one of the detectives who chased John Wilkes Booth after the Lincoln assassination, and that took place in April 1865. So, by the time Woodall testified in the Lloyd claim in August 1865, the Booth hunt would have been something to brag about indeed. However, in his deposition, taken a mere few months after the assassination, Woodall doesn’t even mention it. In fact, nowhere in his deposition does he even say he was with Baker in 1865.
If anything, as much as Totten tried to orchestrate Woodall’s testimony, it only clouded the issue, and after 1865, fortunately for Totten and his client, the subject of Lloyd being in prison in Richmond was never raised again.403
By order of the secretary of war, the new evidence presented by Totten was referred from the War Department to Judge Advocate General Holt on July 17, 1865, for his remarks. That was the same day Lloyd wrote to Stanton: “I hope and pray that you will order a final decision rendered in regard to my claim, either to pay me what I have worked and suffered for and which is justly mine, or let me know positively that it will not be paid as I am under heavy expenses here, and have been for over 8 weeks [this puts his arrival time in DC at between May 15 and May 22, probably closer to the latter], and if I am to lose my just dues [and here is the alarm], I must not longer waste time. You, Sir, know well that if my case goes before Congress or Court of Claims, it will become public, and although there have been four traitors hanged [he means the Lincoln assassination conspirators—Lewis Payne, Davey Herold, George Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt—on July 7] there are many more lurking about our country who would not hesitate to stab me in the dark if they knew my business for the past four years. Mr. Stanton, I look to you to have my case decided, and give me the ‘justice’ you said I should have.”
By August 16, Judge Holt was writing to Stanton that, “the belief is entertained that its payment would be justified.” Holt had done not merely a volte-face on the subject of Lloyd, but a double somersault. Something had changed his mind since June, and it wasn’t, as Holt claimed, the additional “evidence” supplied by Lloyd in the interim. This new evidence, when subjected to close examination, was just as starkly implausible as the original evidence, if not more so.
What made Holt do a 180-degree turn? Was it Holt’s fierce and faithful attachment to Abraham Lincoln that made him swallow a stew of bogus evidence meant to disorient and confuse? Was Holt moved by Lloyd—Lincoln’s self-proclaimed spy—a man who claimed he’d served and suffered for the lost leader? It would be astounding if Holt had not actually met Alvin Lloyd between June and August. Two men talking together, finding out that they were both from Louisville, had both arrived in that town at the same time back in 1830, and, to cap it all, that Holt’s second wife was first cousin to Alvin’s stepmother. Was that of importance?
Things were now going Lloyd’s way, but on August 26, 1865, a dark cloud appeared not on the horizon but right in Alvin Lloyd’s face, one that portended a hurricane that might well blow the entire claim train right off the track.
Judge Holt, even as “the fates of Jefferson Davis and his top subordinates remained in limbo,” in his dogged pursuit of Jefferson Davis’s involvement in the Lincoln assassination, sent chief US Government Archivist Francis Lieber to Richmond to retrieve whatever Confederate documents he could. He hoped that lurking therein might be the damning evidence needed to finally put the noose around the neck of the ex-Confederate president. Lieber never found that evidence but he did find documents on William Alvin Lloyd, a man he knew to be making a claim with the War Department at that very moment.404
On August 26, 1865, Lieber wrote a letter to Secretary of War Stanton: “Sir, I have the honor to transmit a Bill presented to the rebel Secretary of War by W. Alvin Lloyd, who, it is understood, is now urging a claim against the United States War Department for alleged Secret Service in the insurgent states performed under direction of the late President.”405
The bill Lieber had found was dated February 1, 1864: “Hon. Secretary of War. Ten copies of W. Alvin Lloyd’s War Map. $50. Richmond.” Then it says, “Received payment,” and was signed, “W. Alvin Lloyd.”406
There were several other notes, all from February 1, 1864, which Lieber did not find. One was from the Confederate adjutant general’s office: “W. Alvin Lloyd sold 100 copies of his ‘Southern RR Map’ to C.S. Engineers Bureau, for which he received $500. Dated Richd., Va., Feb. 1/64.” Another reads: “Confederate States of America. 25 copies of Lloyd’s RR map. $150.” Yet another, relating to “40 copies of W. Alvin Lloyd’s Southern Railroad maps,” at five dollars each—totaling two hundred dollars, for the Confederate States Nitre & Mining Service. Alvin also received $125 for twenty-five copies of the map for the Ordnance Department as well as $50 for ten copies, at five dollars a copy, from the Navy Department, proof that Lloyd was busy selling his wares in the Confederacy.407
But the one bill Lieber did find caused a stir within the US War Department. Alvin and Totten were forced to come up with a suitable answer. On September 27 Lloyd wrote personally to Stanton, explaining things, and the following day had the letter notarized by John Callan: “I have the honor to state to you that during my term of service as a Special Agent of the United states, in the so-called Southern Confederacy, I published a ‘Rail Road Guide,’ giving a plan and maps of the various rail roads in the states then in rebellion against the Government; that the said publication was made sometime in 1863; that I sold about five hundred of the maps, one copy of the maps is herewith submitted for examination, to the rebel government, which were taken by the various departments.”
This is clever reasoning, one that Totten and Lloyd hoped would convince Stanton. Lloyd continues:
I was under observation at the time of the said publication in the detective department of the rebel government, and resorted to this business in order to cover up my real designs, and to have some ostensible occupation as a means of support, to account for my presence in the rebel dominions. I had at that time but recently been released from a rebel prison on a charge of being a “Yankee spy,” that it was well and widely known through the South that I had been engaged in the publication of “Rail Road Guides” for many years, and I adopted this particular business as being better calculated, on that account, to disarm suspicion and to relieve myself from observation in the said detective department, in order that I might be able more fully to carry out the instructions given to me by President Lincoln; the money obtained from the sale of these “Guides” was used in defraying my expenses; that the rebel government refused for a long time to buy said maps, but on being pressed, on the ground that I had suffered a long and wrongful imprisonment, the various departments consented to, and each of them did, take a few of the maps, amounting in all to five hundred copies, but that they were afterwards cast aside as useless [and useless they indeed were; the one attached to this enclosure is—well—useless]. I am fully of the belief that the publication of these guides was actually necessary to prevent my being confined in a rebel dungeon on suspicion of being a “Yankee spy”; that the said publication did actually relieve me to a great extent from the observation and suspicion of the rebel detective police force, and enabled me to perform my duty as a secret agent in the employ of the Government; that I thus considered it to be my duty to mislead the officers of the so-called Confederacy in this manner, and that I am still of that opinion.408
Lieber was still determined to locate Confederate documents that might be damaging to Jefferson Davis, and Stanton advised that Lieber keep an eye out for anything pertaining to this man Lloyd. And Lieber did. And he found more. On October 5, he was able to write to Stanton that “after careful search, the following are the only papers in this office which I have been able to find relating to W. Alvin Lloyd.” The documents listed were:
All very damaging.
But time was pressing upon Stanton and all his subordinates in the War Department. Judge Holt and others were all in favor of paying Lloyd, but Stanton still had reservations. The Lieber letters only added to what was a natural lawyerly caution, but something had to be done very soon, to get rid of this Lloyd case and move on to other things. And so came a Totten/Lloyd victory. And with it an incredible glimpse into the world of harried, gullible US officials:
The Secretary of War directs the amount of expenditures reported by the Judge Advocate General ($2380) in gold, or its equivalent, to be paid. He does not feel justified in paying the salary or compensation for services claimed. The case is referred to the Adjutant General to pay the above specified sum out of the fund in his hands, leaving the claimant to pursue his claim elsewhere for the residue. [Signed] Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War, Oct. 9, 1865.
But was expediency the only reason Stanton felt obliged to overcome his natural caution in the Lloyd case? He could equally have just said no. Could there have been another reason? Something to do with Judge Holt?
In early May Judge Holt had made a pact with the devil. At that time it was rumored that Jefferson Davis had been involved in the Lincoln assassination. Judge Holt wanted this to be true, and, as we have seen, was taking steps to try to implicate the ex-Confederate president, who was now languishing in Fort Monroe. Judge Holt wanted to hang Jefferson Davis. All he needed was proof. Sanford Conover appeared to him as Mephistopheles appeared to Faust.
Conover claimed to have the proof, and he was prepared to sell it. Judge Holt was prepared to buy. However, by the middle of June 1865 evidence was coming in that Conover was a bilker, and that Holt was being taken. And he was. Throughout July the evidence mounted until any sane man would have admitted he’d been conned. But so irrational had Holt become in his hatred of Jefferson Davis that he circled the wagons, with his pet informant Conover right in the center of the circle.410
Assistant Judge Advocate General Edward D. Townsend, of the adjutant general’s office, actually paid the money in gold to Alvin on October 10, 1865, $2,380. Stanton had instructed the advocate general’s office to pay to Lloyd “in gold, or its equivalent.” What Stanton quite clearly meant is, if not gold, then the equivalent of gold, that is, $2,380 in some other form—silver, perhaps. E. D. Townsend was the man to whom the task fell of actually handing Lloyd the money, but he seems to have misread Stanton’s instructions, misunderstood them, didn’t see the comma in Stanton’s sentence, or something, and assumed that he was to pay Lloyd the equivalent of $2,380 in “today’s money,” October 1865 money. Taking into account inflation, and doing the math, he duly paid Lloyd $3,427.20—over a thousand more than he should have. Although he later admitted this to General Hardie, the mistake was never dwelled on—by anyone—and the official figure went down in the history books as $2,380 paid.411
Paid. A big win.
Of all the players in Lloyd’s light and shadow show, it is the director, the ringmaster Enoch Totten, who must demand the loudest applause. He must bow first. Then, they all must bow.