Post Lloyd Ergo Propter Lloyd
Even after his death, mere days after his death, William Alvin Lloyd is haunting the government authorities. To some, he is a puzzle, to others, he is “in hell.” And there is a new wrinkle. Needing absolute proof of the real Lloyd—imposter or brave, unsung hero-spy—Colonel George Gibson Jr. of the War Department has sent Pinkerton detective Harry W. Davies, superintendent of Pinkerton’s National Police Agency in New York, to gather information. The first response to Lloyd’s background check—as it has been three years since he walked away with the gold—is in a letter from Harry Davies to General Delos B. Sackett, a close associate of detective Allan Pinkerton and former inspector general under Pinkerton’s wartime employer, General George B. McClellan.
“Today one of the operatives was informed by a creditor of Lloyd’s ‘that Lloyd was in hell,’ ” Davies wrote, “and we find in the New York Herald and World of today a notice of the death of Wm Alvin Lloyd, and from what we can learn, I am convinced that he is the same man you are after. Lloyd, within the last two or three years, has been publishing a Railroad Guide, manager of a theatre, and also proprietor of a minstrel troupe. I will forward you any further particulars I may get regarding the antecedents of this man.”460
If Davies’ letter was truly written on March 20, then he couldn’t yet have seen the Herald’s death notice, as it wouldn’t appear until the following morning, Sunday. Either the paper he had been looking at was the Tribune, which did carry the notice on the twentieth, or his letter is simply misdated; it should read March 21. Odd for an agency whose eye allegedly never closed, dozed, or sank into deep slumber.
General Sackett was in Philadelphia on April 23, 1869, at the Headquarters of the Military Division of the Atlantic, in the Inspector General’s Office, when he sat down to write a letter to Colonel Gibson at the War Department in Washington, DC. “I promised you if I found anything further regarding Wm A. Lloyd to forward it. Since my last letter, I have ascertained from Mr. Allen [sic] Pinkerton that there was no person employed on Secret Service by the United States between July 61 & 63 named Wm A. Lloyd. After July ’63 Pinkerton cannot say who was employed.”461
From 1860 Pinkerton served Lincoln as his protector and head of his Secret Service until December of 1862. One would think that very service should have included the name of William Alvin Lloyd, Lincoln’s trusted agent in the Confederacy, as Lloyd alleged that Lincoln hired him on July 13, 1861.
While Lloyd was being vetted postmortem, Virginia was determined to press on, determined to extract more money from the bogus claim she’d abetted. She’d descended on a new official, General John Aaron Rawlins, Grant’s old right-hand man who had taken over as secretary of war on March 13, 1869, just four days before Alvin died.
In this letter to Rawlins, Virginia wrote from her brother Eugene’s house in Providence, Rhode Island, on April 27.
Some three months since, I was promised by Major Gibson, under instruction from General Schofield, that my husband, William Alvin Lloyd’s claim should be decided in a few days, but the few days have rolled into weeks and months, and there has been no decision yet. In the mean time, General, God has seen fit to take my husband “home.” He died on March 17th, and I stand in need of the money owing him. I write to you personally, General, feeling assured you will sympathise [sic] with me in my great trouble, and give me an early reply. If necessary, I will come on to Washington. Please have the case investigated, General, for it is a most just debt, and as it has been thoroughly examined and about one third of it paid, I cannot see why there is such a delay. It only requires your signature, General, and I trust you will not long with hold it. Anxiously awaiting your reply, I am in great bereavement.462
Still, to no avail. But on May 4, 1869, Secretary of War Rawlins, on the recommendation of the inspector general, approved the action to refer the claimant to the US Court of Claims. That day, May 4, General James A. Hardie wrote a summary of the Lloyd case, repeating the “service” Lloyd had performed for President Lincoln. In the same letter he mentioned that Virginia and Clarence were destitute.463
Just at the time Alvin’s brother, J. T., was in the news again for swindling small-town newspapers, General Rawlins died on September 6, 1869, and General William T. Sherman took over as interim secretary of war. Perhaps the thought of badgering Sherman, the man who effectively killed her beloved Confederacy, was intimidating to Virginia. There is no record of Virginia corresponding with Sherman because there was no correspondence.
Also, on that very day, September 6, 1869, Walter Chisholm’s small, exclusive, and pricey school in the Bronx reopened for the new term, with young Clarence Lloyd, son of the late W. Alvin Lloyd, as one of the pupils, as the 1870 New York census indicates.464
And though Clarence’s father was gone, the players in the Lloyd charade were still afoot. By the end of the year 1869, Alphabetical Boyd, back home with his widowed mother and his two brothers, had begun, with the help of some associates, a monthly publication called Boyd’s Office Directory, packed full of useful information for the reader, and not to be, but surely intended to be, confused with William H. Boyd’s famous long-standing city directory of Washington. Asbury Baker, one of the “witnesses” deposed in 1865, was clerking in a notions store in Baltimore, and Charles T. Harvey, the man who’d told Stanton in 1866 that Lloyd and his accomplices were actors in a great fraud, was still a bookkeeper living with his father in Baltimore.465
Virginia, clearly plagued and haunted by the damaging Charles T. Harvey letter that remained in the keep of Federal authorities, had to do something about it, about Harvey. Through Alphabetical Boyd she arranged to meet with Harvey in Baltimore, but they couldn’t reach a financial settlement that would make him retract the incriminating charge. The next meeting was at the St. James Hotel, in Washington, in August 1870, with the same players. Apparently Harvey demanded five hundred dollars to keep silent. Virginia refused and offered three hundred. Harvey refused. Now that Charles Harvey wouldn’t be bought off as easily as they had thought, the Totten gang had to make every effort to ruin the young man’s credibility. Alphabetical’s brother, Charlie Boyd, was brought in, as was a ringer—Abner Young Lakenan—to defame Harvey. On September 6, 1870, Virginia pushed the trio into the notary’s office in Washington.
Alphabetical swore under oath to have known Harvey for fifteen years, the first three of which he was in business with the man he was about to excoriate. But that was before Harvey became “a disreputable and drunken character . . . an habitual drunkard and a person of low character and evil fame, which he has been now for more than twelve years.”
Charlie Boyd swore that he had known Harvey for twelve years and repeated the habitual drunkard slur, adding, ever since he had known him he was “A man of bad repute in the neighborhood.” When “Harvey is excited with liquor, he is exceedingly reckless in his statements.”
Mr. Abner Lakenan said he had met Harvey only a handful of times since they first ran into each other in July, two months previously. Mr. Lakenan claimed to have been at the meeting at the St. James, and that Harvey said at that meeting that his letter was written out of malice because Lloyd had cheated him. Lakenan added, “He [Harvey] further stated at said meeting that for the consideration aforesaid he was willing to retract the said letter in the most careful manner, and to that end he would swear to anything except that he himself was a liar. He said he would not go to that extent.” Despite only a bare working knowledge of Harvey he was now able to describe the man as “very indecent and brutal,” and claimed that judging from “Harvey’s walk and conversation,” he was a “man who was utterly given over to vice, and destitute of moral character.”466
As if in answer to Virginia’s prayers, there was a new war secretary, Major General William Belknap, a lawyer who’d served with valor during Sherman’s Atlanta campaign. From Washington, DC, on March 18, 1871, Secretary Belknap wrote to Virginia, who was then residing at John Minnelli’s boardinghouse at 56 West 11th Street in New York City. “Madam, I have caused a careful examination to be made of the claim presented by you for compensation for service alleged to have been rendered by your deceased husband as a spy for the United States government during the rebellion, and have to inform you, as the result of that examination, that the claim cannot be allowed.”467
This was the end of the road with the War Department’s Board of Claims, and it should have ended there, but it was not the end for Virginia, not by a long way. Alvin had not left a will, as such, and therefore legally was referred to as an intestate, but he did have an estate to be disposed of, a past estate and a future estate. On May 13, 1871, Enoch Totten became the administrator of William Alvin Lloyd’s estate.
So six years after he first designed and orchestrated Lloyd’s case in 1865, Totten had returned to his masterwork. On May 22, 1871, Totten reopened the claim for the balance of the money due Alvin for his spying activities, and filed the case with the US Court of Claims. He thus became what is technically termed “the claimant.” In his sworn statement, he tells the story in brief of William Alvin Lloyd and how he came to spy for Lincoln. But this is a somewhat new version. After Totten addresses the particulars of Lloyd’s alleged services to the President, his additional inventions note that “On or about the 13th day of July, 1861, William A. Lloyd, entered into a contract with Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States acting in behalf of the United States, whereby he agreed to proceed to the states then in insurrection against the Government, to obtain, for the use of the United States, information concerning the number, condition, and situation of the troops of the insurgents, and of the plans and projects of the leaders of the rebellion, and to transmit the same from time to time as he might have opportunity, to the said Abraham Lincoln, for which service the United States agreed to pay said Lloyd, at the rate of two hundred [200] dollars per month, for so long a time as he might continue in said service, together with his reasonable expenses incurred in and about said service. A written memorandum of said contract was drawn and signed by said Abraham Lincoln, and delivered to said Lloyd, but it was subsequently destroyed by said Lloyd, to prevent the same from falling into the hands of the rebel authorities who had arrested said Lloyd on a charge of being a spy or secret agent of the United States.”468
There are four major areas in which Totten’s new version diverges from the original. The first has Lincoln acting in behalf of the United States. Of course, it’s certainly true that he was not acting in behalf of, say, the Confederate States of America but, as the US Court of Claims would subsequently demonstrate, Abraham Lincoln had been acting only for himself, not for the country. In the second area, the wording is very different in Totten’s claim than it is on the “contract.” Surely it would have been better for Totten to have stuck to the “original wording,” and not embellish it, as he did. In the third, nowhere until now is Lincoln said to have even hinted at expenses. And the fourth area—and most illuminating—is this part about the memorandum.
Totten’s justification, if anyone should call him on it, went something like this: Lloyd’s contract with Lincoln had originally been a written contract, yes, but because Lloyd had been forced to destroy that written contract during the war, by the time he got to Grant in 1865 he no longer had a written contract and was forced to use the word “verbal,” because that’s all he had now. No one called Totten on this issue—at the time, anyway.
Now, six years later, certain persons were finding Totten’s explanation rather specious, even downright unsatisfactory. Besides, other points were being raised about this verbal vs. written contract, for example, if there had been a written contract, where was Lincoln’s copy? A contract is between two persons, not just one. So, a new, revised solution was needed, and Totten duly came up with it.
Yes, the contract was verbal, Totten wrote, but Lloyd wanted some sort of proof from Lincoln, so the president dashed off a memo there and then, in his office, and handed it to Lloyd, asking him if that would “cover the ground.”
In effect, then, according to Totten, what Lloyd allegedly was toting around so dangerously throughout the Confederacy in 1861 and 1862 was not a contract, but a written memorandum. However, the effect would have been the same. If it had been found by Rebel detectives Alvin would have been hanged just as expeditiously as if it had been a real contract, or so Totten claimed.
Totten’s bill against the US government was $9,753.32, for forty-six months and twenty-three days work performed by W. Alvin Lloyd. This did not include the $2,380 paid by Stanton as Lloyd’s expenses, but using Totten’s mathematics it took Lloyd’s government service up to the date of June 6, 1865, the date of the first deposition. Totten was saying, therefore, that Lloyd’s compensation must include the last two months—i.e., since the end of the war—the two months since Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated. The logic behind this is incomprehensible. What would he have been spying on, and for whom?469
On June 1, 1871, the Assistant Attorney General George W. Parsons requested a full report of the Lloyd case from the War Department. The War Department’s Assistant Judge Advocate General William McKee Dunn then got on the case, but the machine rolled slowly. After a mass of correspondence between various departments, Dunn finally got back to Assistant Attorney General Parsons on November 9, 1871.470
At a well-appointed office at 627 Walnut Street, in the city of Philadelphia, a small group of men met on October 14, 1872. Their purpose was to secure a deposition at the request of the claimant [Totten]. This was attorney Totten’s first active step in the next stage of the Lloyd claim, the opening gambit in the chess game that was the US Court of Claims. W. Alvin Lloyd was dead, so there was no longer any fear of reprisals from Rebel avengers if the story came out in open court.
Those present at the deposition included Samuel C. Perkins, ex-officio commissioner of the Court of Claims; Charles A. Gray, representing the attorney general of the United States (the United States being the defendant); and James W. Latta, a Pennsylvanian, a Union army captain who’d served in the 119th Pennsylvania Regiment. Latta was also a prolific war diarist, now working for Totten as his stringer in Philadelphia, representing the claimant.
Finally came the star of the show, the deponent himself, Marcellus Howser, now almost recovered from the dangerous wound he had received in Washington City back on March 11, when Frank M. Jones shot him at Mr. Burns’s house on 8th near K, for “undue familiarity” with Mrs. Jones.471
My name is Marcellus Houser [it was actually Howser]
My age is twenty seven years
My residence the past year has been in Washington, District of Columbia, up to April 3, 1872, and since that date at No. 1139 South 16th Street, Philadelphia.
It was to be a question-and-answer session, with the answers coming from Howser. He was first sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and then the answers contained in the deposition were written down by the commissioner in the presence of the witness, and afterwards read over to the witness.
Question: “Did you know William Alvin Lloyd in his lifetime? If so, how long, when, and where?”
Answer: “I did know him. It was in 1858. I first met him in Cincinnati. I knew him in Washington. I knew him in Baltimore. I met him in 1861, in Washington. I knew him up till the time of his death. I parted with him in 1866.”
Question: “What was his business?”
Answer: “He was a map publisher. A publisher rather of a railroad guide. I was employed with him.”
During the cross-examination, Howser was asked what time in 1861 he saw Lloyd, to which he replied, “In June, I think, after the interview with the President. I left the city, and did not see Lloyd again until 1865.”
Howser’s would be the first of five question-and-answer depositions made toward the end of 1872 to support the new Lloyd claim. These interrogatories were designed to be used later in court, at the actual trial, if it ever came down to that. These preliminaries were not a trial. Consequently, cross-examining lawyers are not going in for the kill. There was no need for them to do that, not at this stage of the game, anyway. However, that didn’t prevent them from asking some very clever questions sometimes—and some very puzzling ones as well.472
On October 25, 1872, Enoch Totten sent out requests by mail for three individuals to depose in New York at 10:00 a.m., November 15, 1872, before John J. Latting, Commissioner for the Court of Claims, at his office at 20 Stassen Street. Frank H. Howe would be Totten’s man there, and Alexander J. Gray would represent the United States. Those summoned were Virginia V. Lloyd, Marcellus Howser, Ellen Dooley, “and such other witnesses as may be produced.”473
Why would Totten want Howser to depose in New York when he had just deposed in Philadelphia? That doesn’t seem to make much sense, but, in fact, it does. It was only after that deposition on October 14 that lawyer Totten had reluctantly come to the conclusion that Lloyd had acquired the Lincoln contract a little too easily. More was needed, more effort, more color, and much more detail about that meeting with Abraham Lincoln in the White House. That’s why Howser was required again. But Howser never showed up for that November 15 deposition. Neither did Nellie Dooley, the maid. Virginia herself came up at the appointed time, of course, in company with a new man, a new face, a new name. Another ringer.
My name is Francis Joseph Bonfanti.
My occupation is professor of languages and interpreter to the courts.
[An advertisement had been appearing regularly in the New York Herald since May 29, 1872: “French, Italian, Spanish. Private lessons. Thorough instruction. Combined theory and practice. Professor Bonfanti, 241 West Fourteenth Street, or at Translation Bureau, 66 Broadway. Anglais aux Etrangers.” ]
My age is forty one. [Actually he was forty-three.]
My residence the past year has been in the city of New York. 241 West 14th Street.474
Totten’s man Frank Howard Howe was Senator Timothy Otis Howe’s son, a literate and literary-minded young man, for whom lawyering was a pragmatic career choice, not a passion. Frank Howe was twenty-two when he was admitted to the bar in Washington, and now he needed a job. Fortunately he didn’t have far to stroll, right into the law office of his brother-in-law, Major Enoch Totten. The very first mission Totten gave him was to travel to New York in order to depose Virginia V. Lloyd and J. F. Bonfanti. Frank was inattentive, incompetent, and if the testimonies had been heard at a trial instead of a preliminary interrogatory, Totten’s claim on behalf of the Lloyd estate would have collapsed, deemed a fraud then and there.475
Bonfanti was never cross-examined. One can only suppose that the counsel for the defense was happy to sit back and watch Bonfanti and Mr. Howe hang themselves.
Frank Howe asked Bonfanti the date he originally met Alvin Lloyd, to which the linguist replied, “End of 1859, or beginning of 1860, while stopping at the Metropolitan Hotel, in Broadway.” Bonfanti says, of Lloyd: “He was publishing Railway Guides and directories—Lloyd’s Railway Guide, I think it was called.”476
Bonfanti hadn’t always been a professor. Not by a long way. F. J. had spent his whole life as a rich adventurer—traveler, mercenary soldier, and writer. He had fought as a major for the Turks in the Crimea and as a general for the Mexicans, and had been an observer of the California Gold Rush. At the outbreak of the Civil War he was a professor at an academy in New Orleans, and on March 22, 1862, enlisted as a private in Greenleaf’s Horse, in Louisiana—that is, in the Confederate Army. On June 6 that year he went AWOL from Camp Williamson, at Tupelo, Mississippi. That was one month and six days after General Butler entered New Orleans. On June 14, 1862, Bonfanti was declared deserted. He had found a more interesting occupation—peddling drugs to the Confederate Government—quinine, calomel, and potash. By 1872 he was back in New York, and on November 15 he deposed along with Virginia.477
On November 26, 1872, T.H.S. Boyd, Charles C. Boyd, and Theodore Woodall were all invited to be deposed in Washington on November 30, in the presence of Court of Claims commissioner John Cruickshank. Alexander J. Gray would represent the defendants (i.e., the United States) while Mr. Totten himself would appear as counsel for the claimant. The Boyd brothers accepted the invitation to appear. Mr. Woodall didn’t. So, altogether, five persons—Marcellus Howser, Virginia, Bonfanti, Charlie Boyd, and Alphabetical Boyd—all in favor of the claimant, were deposed in late 1872, and interrogated by their own counsel. All except Bonfanti were also interrogated by the counsel for the defense.478
These 1872 testimonies shed light on the case, on the five deponents themselves, on Totten and his surrogates, on the defense lawyers, and on the late William Alvin Lloyd. Mostly due to the damaging Harvey letter of 1866, Totten had various issues he wished to present, re-present, or hammer home.
First was the initial trip from New York to Washington, in order for Alvin to get a pass to cross the lines south. We know he left New York with the merchant’s daughter, his new paramour, and we know he arrived in Louisville on July 15, 1861, with the girl in tow. We know he left Louisville the following morning, alone, and that he arrived in Memphis on the night of the sixteenth.
It was hard to fix a date for his departure from New York. The only time Alvin himself ever gives a date is in his letter to Jefferson Davis, written from Memphis on July 18, 1861, in which he says he left New York on July 11. As will be seen from the 1872 depositions, it was probably July 10. In his letter to President Davis, Alvin doesn’t mention going to Washington, of course, but he did go to Washington, because he got the pass from Lincoln to cross the lines south, and that pass was dated July 13, 1861.
The only time the actual trip from New York to Washington is ever mentioned is in Bonfanti’s November 15, 1872, deposition, replying to a pertinent question asked by his own counsel, Frank Howe. “It was during our journey to Washington that Mr. Lloyd mentioned to me that he was personally and intimately acquainted with President Lincoln.”479 So now we have Bonfanti, a wholly new character, in Washington with Lloyd.
According to Bonfanti, Lloyd told him that he intended trying to go south, and that he hoped to get a pass from President Lincoln through the lines, and that his (Lloyd’s) main object was to collect money that was due him from several of the railroad companies. “He mentioned also that he intended speculating on his own account, I think in cotton or tobacco.” If Frank Howe had been really committed to this case, he would have sensed danger with this reply and stopped the Bonfanti deposition then and there. But he let it go. What followed is a trip into the realm of the ludicrous.
Bonfanti’s stated object in wishing to accompany Lloyd to Washington was that he also intended going south on business of his own in New Orleans, where he had been residing before, and where he had some property. Lloyd told him that he would try to get a pass for him at the same time he asked for his own.480
Even Virginia, in her November 15, 1872, deposition, doesn’t mention the trip from New York to Washington. All she says is that she was in Washington with her husband on July 13, 1861. She makes no reference to the preceding few days, except to imply that the Lloyds were staying in a lodging house in the capital at that time. However, if Virginia was in Washington on July 13, then she came down from New York with Alvin, as well as with the child and the maid. But that can’t be, of course, because the last person in the world to accompany Alvin and his new paramour—the merchant’s daughter—would have been Virginia. So, in 1872, Virginia is once again lying under oath. She did not go to Washington in July 1861. And neither did her child Clarence, or the maid Nellie. The three of them were ensconced in the cottage in Westchester County, New York.481
Alphabetical Boyd maintained in his 1865 depositions, and again in 1872, that he was with Lloyd in Washington in July 1861, even though all the Confederate military records prove that he was in Louisiana. So, according to his testimony, he too came down from New York with his employer. So, to sum up the party line as it was being presented in late 1872, there would have been a sextet making that train trip from New York to Washington on July 10, 1861—Lloyd, Virginia, Clarence, Nellie, Boyd, and Bonfanti. A far cry indeed from Lloyd and the paramour of record in the Memphis Appeal.482
The idea of William Alvin Lloyd being a good friend of Abraham Lincoln’s prior to the July 13, 1861, meeting was only dreamed up in November 1872. It had to be, for why was it not mentioned back during the 1865 claim? It would have been such a monumental feather in Lloyd’s cap that he would probably have made off with ten thousand dollars. But back then, no one had thought of it. Even as late as October 1872 Marcellus Howser fails to mention anything like that at all, and, given his very detailed account of what transpired at that July 1861 meeting, he would certainly have used this ace, if he knew about it. No, it is not until Virginia’s 1872 interrogation that this concept is first brought to light. She says, of the contract, that it “bore Mr Lincoln’s signature, which I had seen a great many times previous.” She knew it was Lincoln’s signature because he “was a personal friend of my late husband’s, and wrote to him a number of times.”483
Bonfanti, when asked if he knew anything about Lloyd’s previous acquaintance with Mr. Lincoln, replied, “It was during our journey to Washington that Mr. Lloyd mentioned to me that he was personally and intimately acquainted with President Lincoln.”
Question: “Did you ask Mr Lloyd to use his influence with Mr Lincoln to obtain you a pass?”
Answer: “I did.”
Question: “Did he promise to introduce you to the President?”
Answer: “He did.”
Bonfanti testifies that when Lloyd finally introduced him to the president, Mr. Lincoln “spoke to Lloyd as if they were on terms of intimate acquaintance. He addressed Mr. Lloyd by his last name, calling him familiarly ‘Lloyd.’ ”484
It was pushing it hard to get Charlie Boyd in on the act, but they did.
“My name is Charles C. Boyd, 29 years of age, messenger in the Treasury Department, Washington, DC.”
In his November 1872 interrogation, Charlie is asked about that day in July 1861, when Lloyd reputedly showed him the contract. He is asked how did he know it was Lincoln’s handwriting. He answered, “I know it from the fact that Mr. Lloyd had in his possession before that a note signed by Mr. Lincoln.”485
But it was up to Alphabetical Boyd to tell the most detailed stories. When asked in November 1872 about his early days with Lloyd—1859 and 1860—he has this to say about the summer and fall of 1860, that he “met Abraham Lincoln, who was afterwards President, in Chicago, sometime before the election. I was present at an interview between William A. Lloyd and Abraham Lincoln at the Sherman House in Chicago, some two or three weeks previous to the election. Understood from the conversation that Lloyd had a previous acquaintance with Mr. Lincoln, and that Lloyd was on terms of intimacy with him. Lloyd stated to me that if Lincoln was elected, he (Lloyd) would have a good place, or words to that effect.”
So, suddenly in November 1872, it transpires that Lloyd was an old friend of the president’s. The deponents are all maintaining that Lloyd had three interviews with Lincoln—July 11, July 12, and July 13. Boyd says he went to the first one, on July 11, 1861. Leaving his wife, child, and nurse in the boardinghouse, Alvin, accompanied by Alphabetical Boyd, went off to see the chief executive at what was then usually called the President’s House. On November 30, 1872, Boyd claimed, “I was present in Washington City with Mr. W.A. Lloyd on or about the 10th of July 1861.” Of course, Boyd was serving in the Confederate army at that time. More than that, even, Boyd swears, in the same statement in the same deposition, “Visited the President in company with W.A. Lloyd, and was present at an interview with Abraham Lincoln, then President of the United States.” In his cross-examination by the US counsel, Boyd says that this initial interview took place “about the 10th or 11th of July 1861.” The US counsel asks him, “Were you present at this interview?” to which Boyd replies, “I was, Sir.”
In his cross-examination, in response to the US counsel’s question, “What was done or said at the first interview?” Boyd replies, “After the usual salutations which take place between persons who have not met for some time, and compliments by Mr. Lloyd on his election, Mr. Lloyd told Mr. Lincoln he had a favor to ask of him.”
Boyd says in his direct examination, all in one breath, it seemed:
Mr. Lloyd wanted a pass, or permission, for himself and myself, to pass to and from, through the lines so as to allow Mr. Lloyd to collect and settle outstanding claims he had against Railroad companies, etc. Mr Lincoln told him that he would do so, but would like to employ him as a secret agent for the Government, to furnish him with information direct, as the Government at that time was without any reliable or responsible agents in the rebellious states, and he was greatly in need of some trustworthy and competent person who had complete and thorough knowledge of the geography and topography of the states in rebellion, and he knew that Lloyd, by having been a publisher of a Railroad and Steamboat Guide, and also of “Disasters on the Western and Southern Waters,” with maps giving all steamboat landings on the tributaries of the Mississippi, and also of a “Directory of Steamboat Engineers,” etc., plying the Southern waters, would be of great service to him and the country, and wished him to do the service.
[Here is a new detail.] Lloyd did not accept at that time, as it was a hazardous and difficult service, but said he would call in a day or two.
Boyd then says, “He went back the next day. I was not present at the interview.” That would make the next day the twelfth. In his cross-examination, Boyd says, “I was present at two interviews, and heard him say he had several others.” When Boyd says he was at two interviews, he is referring to those of the eleventh and the thirteenth.486
Bonfanti says he was not at the first interview with Lincoln—the one on the eleventh—but according to his (Bonfanti’s) November 15, 1872, deposition, Lloyd told him about it two or three days after it happened, told him that “the President wanted him while South, to procure all reliable information he could regarding the Rebel forces, movement of troops, commissariat, etc., and to send to him, the President, all such information whenever he had a chance of so doing. That for this, the President promised to give him a monthly sum of two hundred dollars. That he was to see the President again the next day, I believe in reference to the same subject.”
Based on this fiction, why did Alvin take so long to tell Bonfanti? But in fact he must have told him on the very day of that first interview—the eleventh. This has to be the case, because Bonfanti says that Lloyd “was to see the president again the next day, I believe in reference to the same subject.”
So, by his own admission, Bonfanti is going along to that second meeting—the one on the twelfth. Either way, Bonfanti was very much against the spying idea. He has become Lloyd’s advisor: “I told him that I thought it would be foolish in him to accept any offer of the kind, simply because the compensation offered was far below the value of his services, if good. To this, Mr. Lloyd answered that the getting of a pass from the President would greatly help him in his own private affairs, that the President would grant no pass without receiving something in return for it [this is new material], and that Mr. Lloyd considered the two hundred dollars per month offered not as adequate compensation for the services he was to render, but as a help to him, Lloyd, in the payment of any expenses he might be put to in the forwarding of dispatches and the gathering of information.”
So, when Alphabetical Boyd says that Lloyd “went back the next day. I was not present at the interview,” that next day was Friday the twelfth. Bonfanti, when asked if he went with Alvin to that particular meeting with Lincoln, replied, “I did.”
Back to Bonfanti: “You saw the President on that occasion?” Meaning the second meeting, the one on July 12. Bonfanti said he did. Furthermore, he said he heard the conversation Lloyd had with Lincoln.
This series of concoctions are all the work of Totten, whose witness, Bonfanti, is lost in a thicket: forgetting, remembering, and forgetting.
Then, finally, an open probe, to force Bonfanti to elaborate, “State the substance of it [the conversation with Lincoln].”
Hence the substance of the meeting of the twelfth, as recounted by Bonfanti:
Mr. Lloyd began the conversation by reminding the President that he had called according to appointment. The President appeared to be anxious to secure the services of Mr. Lloyd. Mr. Lloyd having introduced me, and mentioned that I was going South, asked the President if he would give me a pass also, and I promised that if he did give me a pass, I would give Lloyd any information that I might pick up without making it my special business to do so. Whilst the President and Lloyd were talking the matter over, an official of some kind came in to say to the President that he was wanted, or something of that kind, and the interview was broken off, and the President said to call the next day at twelve.
Question: “Did the President express himself as confident of Lloyd’s ability to perform this service?”
Answer: “He did.”487
Virginia, deposed on the same day as Bonfanti—November 15, 1872—was asked during direct examination, “Where was Mr. Lloyd in the summer—in the first part of July 1861?”
Answer: “In Washington.”
More specific still was the question put to her during the cross-examination in the same deposition: “Where were you on the 13th of July 1861?” which elicited the response, “Washington City,” as though she, Lloyd, Clarence, Nellie, Boyd, and Bonfanti were together on that momentous day.
Back to Virginia’s direct examination, the question was then asked: “Are you aware of Mr. Lloyd’s visiting Mr. Lincoln the President at any time in July 1861?”
Answer: “He left the house to go to see the President,” meaning, of course, the Washington boardinghouse.488
As they have framed it, at high noon on Saturday, July 13, 1861, in the Executive Office of the President’s House in Washington, DC, W. Alvin Lloyd, Alphabetical Boyd, Bonfanti, and the fourteen-year-old boy named Marcellus Howser, met with Mr. Lincoln . . .489
The president had already met Boyd, of course—according to Boyd, anyway—once in Chicago in 1860, and again on July 11, only two days before this meeting now about to commence. Bonfanti he had met the previous day, the twelfth. As for Mr. Howser, what a teenager was doing in this company at this very juncture must have been a real mystery to Mr. Lincoln, as it seems to have been, indeed, to Mr. Howser himself.490
Bonfanti was asked about that fateful meeting of the thirteenth. His reply, in sum, is that he called at twelve o’clock, in company with Lloyd and Boyd, and that all met with Mr. Lincoln. He does not mention young Howser. Boyd said Lloyd told the president that he had thought over the proposal made the day before, and had decided to accept it, provided that the president would agree to the two hundred dollars per month being paid to Virginia should he be killed, or die, or be kept prisoner, by the Rebels while in this service. “The President, without saying yes or no, wrote a paper and passed it to Lloyd, saying, Will that do? . . . Lloyd read it aloud.”
Question: “You heard it?”
Answer: “I did.”
Question: “Did you read it yourself?”
Answer: “I cannot swear that I did.”
When asked to state the substance of the paper that he’d heard read, Bonfanti gave the outline of the now familiar contract but with the important addition, “the compensation for such service to be fixed at two hundred dollars per month to be paid to Mrs. Lloyd, in case of accident to her husband.” There is stress being laid on Virginia here, enormous stress. Marcellus Howser had volunteered this information back in 1865, but on October 14, 1872, when he deposed again, he failed to mention it—another reason Totten had wanted Howser back again on November 15, 1872. But Howser didn’t show, so they needed a ringer to rework this information about Virginia as beneficiary—hence Bonfanti.
Question: “This is in substance what you heard read by Mr Lloyd?”
Bonfanti’s whole testimony is reluctant. He is stumbling. And why shouldn’t he, yanked into this fraud in haste? His answer was: “This is in substance what I heard read, but I cannot say that it was put in that the money was to be paid to Mrs. Lloyd. I recollect the contents of the paper rather from what was said at the time than from actual recollection of what I heard read at the time.”
He then goes on to say that Lloyd agreed, that the President signed the paper that Lloyd had read, and gave it to him. Lloyd then asked for three passes, one for himself, one for Boyd, and one for Bonfanti. “The President wrote them on three bits of stiff paper and gave them all three to Mr. Lloyd.” Apparently, Lincoln signed them all. All three.
One of the later questions asked was, “What was the date of this last interview?” to which Bonfanti replied, “The 12th or 13th July.”491
Boyd said: “On the 13th of July 1861 I was in company with Lloyd and Joseph de Bonfanti and had an interview with the President in which the President told Lloyd he would give him a pass and $200 a month and pay his expenses. To which Mr. Lloyd agreed.”492
Now it is Marcellus Howser’s turn, deposed twice over the years, first on June 30, 1865, and again on October 14, 1872. In 1865 he made it quite clear that the one and only meeting he attended was the famous one, on the thirteenth:
Mr. Lloyd said to the President that he was going South into the rebellious states; that he had business with the railroad companies, and was extensively acquainted with the railroad men in those states, and asked the President if he could be of any service to him. The President answered that he could, and that he desired that he (Mr. Lloyd) should go to the insurgent states and make observations touching the strength of the enemy and report all things to him that might be of the slightest benefit to the United States Government; and that for such services, Mr. Lloyd should be paid at the rate of $200 per month; that in the event of Mr. Lloyd’s death during such services there, he said the money should be paid to Mrs. Lloyd; that he saw the President hand to Mr. Lloyd at the time a paper which Mr. Lloyd afterwards said contained the terms of his contract.
In the same deposition, Howser claimed T.H.S. Boyd was also at this meeting. Bonfanti is not mentioned.493
In 1872 Mr. Howser was asked, during direct examination, if he was present at any conversation between Lloyd and President Lincoln, and if so, when was it, where, and what was that conversation?
Answer: “In July 1861, it was, I think.”
Mr. Howser had obviously attended so many presidential occasions that he couldn’t recall the exact date of this one. A similar insouciance afflicted most of the Lloyd gang from time to time.
“I was present at the President’s House in company with Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Boyd at a conversation which occurred with reference to—” He leaves this sentence unfinished, while he regroups. “What I heard was this. Mr. Lloyd stated to Mr. Lincoln that he was going South, and that as he was well acquainted with the Southern Country, as his business was principally South, publishing a Railroad map and guide of the Southern Country, that, under the circumstances, he thought he could be of some benefit to the Federal cause.”
This makes Mr. Howser the only one who recollects this spying business as being Lloyd’s idea. Everyone else remembers it as Lincoln’s.
Howser continues, “The sum substance of his argument, or proposal, was that, for a certain sum, he would undertake to furnish the Government, from time to time, with such news as would benefit them; that for the same he would receive two hundred dollars in gold per month, for his services. This is the sum and substance of the conversation that I heard.”
Marcellus Howser was then asked what, if any, agreement was made for the payment of this sum of money.
Answer: “I understood at the time that Mr Lincoln, for this sum, two hundred dollars per month, in gold, employed Mr. Lloyd.”
Question: “How did you understand this? Did Mr. Lincoln say this?”
Answer: “Mr. Lloyd stated to Mr Lincoln that he was going South, and that his business being principally with the South, publishing a Southern Railroad Map and Guide, under the circumstances he could afford the Government some service, and the question asked by Mr. Lincoln what remuneration he wished for such services as he proposed to render. Mr. Lloyd named the sum before mentioned, two hundred dollars.”
Then Mr. Howser drops a bombshell, “Further I wasn’t present [meaning that from that point on in the meeting he wasn’t present]. I left the house [the White House] at the time. Afterwards I seen [Howser’s grammar] a pass from Mr. Lincoln. The pass was shown to me by Mr. Lloyd, passing Mr. Lloyd to and fro through the Federal lines South for an unlimited time, with Mr. Lincoln’s signature.”
Obviously Mr. Howser had an appointment far more pressing, and is thus not a firsthand witness from that point on.494
Then the deal was done. As Boyd says, “Mr. Lincoln then wrote a contract on a piece of paper and read it aloud to Lloyd and asked him if that would cover the ground.”
Bonfanti remembers it slightly differently: “The President, without saying yes or no, wrote a paper, and passed it to Lloyd, saying, ‘Will that do?’ Lloyd read it aloud.”
In essence, and allowing for discrepancies in memory, the wording of the contract was repeated.
All that remained now was the question of the passes.
Bonfanti says, “Mr. Lloyd then asked for three passes, one for himself, one for Mr. Boyd, and one for me. The president wrote them on three bits of stiff paper and gave them all three to Mr. Lloyd. That is all I recollect of this interview.”
Question: “By whom were the passes signed?”
Answer: “By the President alone.”495
Boyd’s recollection of that moment offers a slight variation: “He [the president] delivered the contract and pass for Mr. Lloyd to Mr. Lloyd, and each of the individual passes to Mr. Bonfanti and myself.”496
They recited the wording of the pass: “Allow the bearer, Mr. William. A. Lloyd to pass our lines south and return on special business.” It was signed “A. Lincoln,” and dated July 13, 1861.497
It must be noted that, while Alvin’s pass came up as a subject of discussion during the 1865 depositions, Alphabetical Boyd’s did not. It wasn’t until 1872 that his pass is referred to.
Question: “You say you received a pass from Mr. Lincoln. Have you that pass?”
Answer: “No, Sir, it was stolen from my trunk at Canada West, at the Tecumseh House.”498
Another topic that had to be addressed fully in 1872 was the genuineness of Lincoln’s handwriting on the pass. It was the wording in Harvey’s 1866 letter that prompted this: “forgery of deceased officers’ names.” What did Harvey have in mind when he made this accusation? He might have meant the contract, but equally he might well have been referring to the forged letters found in Alvin’s trunk in Philadelphia, letters from high Confederate officers, including Jefferson Davis. As there was no courtroom exhibit of the contract with the president’s actual writing on it, this in itself wouldn’t have worried Totten. What worried him, by extension, was the pass. In other words, would authorities question Lincoln’s handwriting, its authenticity?
No one had ever doubted the authenticity of this pass, and no one ever would again. But Totten had to tackle the issue head on, just in case someone did ask.499
Marcellus Howser was the first deponent to be asked this, on October 14, 1872. He was able to recognize Mr. Lincoln’s handwriting on the contract because he had “a book with all the government officials in. I was at one time under Genl Rucker in the Quartermaster’s Department, and I have seen the signature very frequently. By those means I became familiar with it.”
Virginia, under cross-examination in 1872, was asked, “How did you know it to be a contract executed by Mr Lincoln?” to which she replied, “It bore Mr Lincoln’s signature, which I had seen a great many times previous.”
Although she said she never actually saw Lincoln in the process of putting pen to paper, she was quite sure she had seen his writing in the past. She knew the writing on the contract was the president’s because he “was a personal friend of my late husband’s, and wrote to him a number of times.” These alleged letters from Lincoln to Lloyd have never been seen, nor did anyone at the time ask to see or verify them. A search through the Lincoln Papers has yielded nothing.500
Charlie Boyd, in 1872, was asked by Totten, “Did you see the signature to the contract in Lloyd’s possession, and, if so, was the signature genuine, and, if genuine, how do you know it?” To which Charlie replied, “I took it for genuine because he was so glad to have this contract, and, if it had not been genuine, he would not have made such preparation to go. I know Mr. Lincoln’s signature, and believe this to have been genuine.”
Question: “Did you ever see Mr Lincoln write his signature?”
Question: “Were you employed in the Department in 1861, 62, or 63?”
Answer: “No, Sir. Since the War, I have been employed in the Treasury Department.”
Question: “Have you seen original documents in the department, signed by Mr Lincoln during your service?”
Answer: “I have seen a letter that Mr. Lincoln wrote and other papers. I believe—the signature to the contract with Lloyd to have been Mr Lincoln’s genuine signature.”
He was then cross-examined by Alexander J. Gray, for the United States.
Question: “You state that Mr. Lloyd showed you a paper, to the contents of which you have testified here, which you believed to be signed by Mr. Lincoln. How did you know it was Mr. Lincoln’s handwriting?”
Answer: “I know it from the fact that Mr. Lloyd had in his possession before that a note signed by Mr. Lincoln. Since that, I have seen papers signed by Mr. Lincoln. I have every reason to believe it was genuine. I know too that he was going up to see the President every few days.”501
As if these muddled, contradictory depositions weren’t disturbing enough, in November 1872 something disturbing and potentially damaging happened to Enoch Totten.
One of the most important linchpins in the claim had always been that Alvin had been arrested in Memphis in July 1861 for being a Yankee spy. This was the party line in 1865. It was as solid as testimony can be.
Now in November 1872, someone must have slipped an old newspaper clipping in front of lawyer Totten, probably from the July 25, 1865, edition of the New York Herald, titled, “Lloyd the Bigamist.” Suddenly, things were not looking so good. Totten would have checked with Memphis, and with Louisville. Things were looking worse. “Lloyd the bigamist.” It had been all over the papers back in 1861. It was to be hoped that the opposition didn’t have this Herald clipping.
They didn’t use the expression “damage control” back then. Lloyd was dead, as was Captain Klinck, the Memphis jailer, so neither could testify one way or the other. But Totten had to work fast. He could say that Alvin’s written itinerary, Enclosure 13, might well have been off by a few weeks, in spite of newspapers placing him there, as might his money accounts that placed him fairly and squarely in Memphis on July 17 and 18, 1861. That mysterious 1865 witness, Charles T. Moore, who claimed to have been with Alvin in Memphis in July of 1861, was now nowhere to be found.
But there was still one player who would be vulnerable, and that was T.H.S. Boyd. Even though Alphabetical, in all his 1865 depositions, had never mentioned the Memphis jail, Totten could imagine the counsel for the United States asking Boyd the reason for Mr. Lloyd’s arrest in the said city of Memphis in July 1861. Totten could not allow this to happen. He had to rewrite history, and if anyone brought up the 1865 depositions, he’d simply have to bluff his way out.
As for Lloyd leaving Washington on July 13, 1861, and arriving in Memphis on the seventeenth, Totten decided, the date must be changed.
On July 13, 1861, immediately after getting his pass to cross the lines, Lloyd left Washington on the train for Cincinnati. And of course, he was not alone. He had his “new paramour” with him, as the Louisville paper of July 16, 1861, tells us the day after Lloyd arrived back in his hometown. We also know that on the morning of July 16 he left Louisville without the girl, and arrived late that night in Memphis. That is from the Memphis Appeal of July 17. And then came the well-covered bigamy business and a night in jail, and then Alvin headed south. That’s all substantiated.
In his June 3, 1865, deposition, Alvin said “on the said 13th day of July 1861 I entered upon the discharge of my duties as said special agent and proceeded to Tennessee.”502
In her 1865 deposition, Virginia made no mention of herself being in Washington. However, by 1872 she was claiming to have been in Washington in July 1861, when Lloyd got the contract. When asked at what “time Mr. Lloyd crossed the Rebel lines to go South,” she replied, “Very soon after the contract was given. It may have been toward the latter part of July 1861.”
The departure date of July 13 is now a thing of the past.
Question: “Did you follow soon after?”
Answer: “Yes, Sir.”
Question: “Where did you next meet him?”
Answer: “At some little town in Tennessee, but I do not now recollect the name.” She had certainly had no problem remembering the name of Clarksville, Tennessee, in her 1865 deposition.
She then says that Alvin “went to Memphis, and to Nashville. I do not recollect which he went to first.”503
Bonfanti, when asked how long he remained in Washington after the July 13, 1861, Lincoln interview, replied: “Until the morning of the 21st of July.”
Question: “Where did you go on the 21st?”
Answer: “I was trying to go South. I left for Nashville that day.”
Question: “Was Lloyd with you when you left?”
Answer: “Yes, he was.”504
Suddenly, as well as Boyd, we have Bonfanti accompanying Lloyd to Tennessee. Totten instructed them to say they left Washington on July 21, not the thirteenth (the day Alvin got the signed Lincoln pass). And Totten told them to say they went to Nashville, rather than Memphis. Stay clear of Memphis, Totten would have demanded. That’s the bigamy arrest. That’s trouble.
Back in 1865, when everyone was testifying and documents of all sorts and sizes were flying around, and enormous detail of places and persons was being bandied about, the name Bonfanti never, ever came up. How could the dashing and flamboyant Bonfanti have left such little impression upon so many persons?
But on November 15, 1872, Bonfanti swore that he left Washington on July 21, 1861, in company with W. Alvin Lloyd, bound for Nashville.
Then, two weeks later, on November 30, 1872, T.H.S. Boyd was deposed. The first thing he said when Totten got him on the stand was, “Lloyd left Washington for the South on or about the 18th day of July 1861.”
The date bears no resemblance to the truth, or to that given by the deponents in 1865, or to that given by Bonfanti only two weeks before. But this is nothing compared to what follows. The counsel for the defense (i.e., the United States) asks Mr. Boyd if he left Washington with Mr. Lloyd at that time. The US counsel has just read over Alphabetical Boyd’s 1865 deposition, in which Boyd and Lloyd left for Memphis together, and therefore must have been somewhat startled when the affiant responded, “No, Sir.”
Gone are the days when Alphabetical Boyd left Washington with Lloyd on July 13, 1861, bound for Memphis. So, if Alphabetical didn’t go to Memphis with Lloyd, what did he do? Obviously, Mr. Boyd was having a problem keeping up with the new lies he was meant to tell. And of course, in July 1861 he was, according to Confederate records, still a private in Louisiana.
When asked, during his December 7, 1872, cross-examination, when he left Washington, Boyd replied: “I left four or five days after the first battle of Bull Run.” Bull Run having taken place on the twenty-first, this then places Boyd’s departure from Washington on or about July 25. However, a little later in the very same cross-examination, he is asked, by the same US counsel, where he was in the month of July 1861, after the thirteenth, to which Boyd replied: “I remained five or six days in Washington.” That then puts his departure from Washington at July 18 or 19.
Boyd then talks about what happened to Alvin Lloyd when he left Washington. Boyd has already said, at the start of his direct examination the week before, that “Lloyd left Washington for the South on or about the 18th day of July 1861.” Now, in his cross-examination, he replies to the same question with, “Some four or five days after the President had employed him. About the 17th or 18th of July.”
In his cross-examination the following week, Boyd has this to say: “I saw him receive transportation in Washington on his papers from Mr. Lincoln to Cincinnati. I received a letter from him dated Cincinnati, also letters from him dated Nashville, Grand Junction and Memphis.” He claimed to have received the first of these letters while he was still in Washington.
So if Alphabetical Boyd said he didn’t accompany Alvin to Tennessee, where did he go when he left Washington? To the US counsel, under cross-examination, he replies to this question: “I went by Harpers Ferry, and the Valley of Virginia, Lynchburg and Petersburg, to Norfolk.” A little later in the same cross-examination, he is asked that same question again, and this is his answer this time: “I went to Frederick and Harpers Ferry, then to Norfolk by way of Petersburg. I arrived in Petersburg in the latter part of July, and in Norfolk the latter part of July or first of August.” Given the route he took from Washington to Norfolk, it can only be said that he moved with astonishing speed.
It was in Norfolk that Boyd claimed to have received the last three of the letters that Alvin had been busily sending him en route through Tennessee.
On November 30, 1872, Totten asked Boyd when he joined Mr. Lloyd after his (Lloyd’s) departure from Washington. “In Norfolk, Va., about October or Nov. 1861.” A week later he was asked the same question under cross-examination by the US counsel, and replied, “In October, I think it was, of that year, 1861—in Norfolk, Va.” A question asked very soon afterwards was how long he remained in Norfolk before Lloyd came, to which he replied, “From sixty to ninety days.” As he arrived in Norfolk on or around August 1, 1861, this statement confirms that Alvin showed up in Norfolk sometime in the month of October 1861.
Totten eases Boyd into this with the question: “How long did you stay with Lloyd when you joined him in Norfolk, and where did he go, and where did you go when you left him?” Boyd replied: “I remained in Norfolk with Lloyd about two weeks and was engaged in visiting the different fortifications and batteries on both sides of the Elizabeth and Nansemond Rivers, and the camps and fortifications adjacent to Norfolk and Portsmouth. Drew a map of the harbor and batteries on each side, and the number of troops then under the command of General Huger. The map was taken charge of by Mr. Lloyd and sent to Mr. Lincoln. The map went to Mr. Lincoln by a man who was an engineer on a transport between Norfolk and Craney Island. He went in a boat to Fortress Monroe. Lloyd left Norfolk for Savannah about the latter part of November 1861.”
Now Alvin arrived in Norfolk sometime in October. If he stayed only two weeks with Boyd there, then it could not have been the latter part of November that he left for Savannah.505
But there can be no doubt that Alvin was in Norfolk around this time. In his own itinerary, in Enclosure 13, he says, “Arrived at Norfolk Sept. 17. Remained 2 days. Visited Crany [sic] Island, fortifications, camps, etc etc. Met T.H.S. Boyd at Norfolk. Left Sept. 19.” And that was written in 1865. However, September 17 is only forty-eight days after Boyd’s arrival there, not sixty or ninety. And two days is not two weeks.506
To Totten, Boyd in 1872 said, “I received a letter from Lloyd from Savannah, stating that he was in jail. I showed it to a friend of mine who told me I had better destroy it if I did not want to be in jail myself. So I destroyed it.” No letter, of course.
During direct examination by Totten, Boyd continues: “I saw Lloyd next time in Savannah in January or February 1862. He was in jail at Savannah. I saw him in jail. I found out what he was in jail for from the Colonel commanding the post. I can’t remember his name. He told me Lloyd had been arrested as a Yankee spy, and showed me an affidavit signed by Miss Jordan, an actress who stated that she had overheard conversations between Lloyd and other parties in which Lloyd was sending information to the United States Government, in regard to the plans of fortifications surrounding Savannah. Lloyd was confined solitarily in Savannah for about six weeks, on account of an intercepted dispatch.”
Under cross-examination, Boyd was asked how he gained access to Lloyd in jail in Savannah. “I had a permit from the Colonel commanding the post.”507
Although Boyd couldn’t remember the colonel’s name, Colonel Rockwell certainly remembered Boyd’s. There can be no doubt at all that Colonel Rockwell had heard of Boyd, heard from Annie Taylor Lloyd that a man named Boyd had brought secret messages for Alvin in his boot from Salmon Chase. Lloyd probably mentioned the name of Boyd to Annie at some point. As for the courier fiction, Annie’s determination to condemn Lloyd to endless imprisonment is likely the real story. And it is equally certain that Rockwell had no idea of Boyd’s first name. And there can be no question that Rockwell, being alerted to this courier Boyd, would, if he had ever met Boyd even once, have thrown him in jail with Alvin. No, far from giving Boyd a permit to visit Lloyd, Rockwell would have swarmed all over Alphabetical Boyd, arrested him on the spot. And even if Boyd wanted anyone to believe this story, his visit to Lloyd in Savannah had to take place before February 20, 1862, because on that date he, Boyd, went AWOL from his camp and headed for Richmond to wangle an officer’s commission from Governor Letcher.508
In his November 15, 1872, deposition, Bonfanti swears that when he left Lloyd in Nashville, and they went their separate ways, he next met Lloyd in Memphis several months later. The time after that was in New Orleans “about two weeks before General Butler came in. I don’t recall when exactly that was.” What he means is that he couldn’t recall the date. In fact Union General Benjamin Butler came into New Orleans on May 1, 1862. Two weeks before that date would be April 16, give or take a day or two. “I mentioned to Mr. Lloyd that I thought that the Yankees would soon be in town, that I intended going North as soon as possible. Mr. Lloyd said that he was very glad I should do so, as he intended giving me some important papers to take through with me, but that he would first have to go to Chattanooga to get some information of a spy that was in his pay at that place, and that he would return in the course of a very few days. Lloyd left for Chattanooga, and some five days afterwards the city was taken possession of by General Butler.”509
Bonfanti is extraordinarily time specific. He has been coached to be. A serious embarrassment to Bonfanti’s story in that from December 14, 1861, until July 15, 1862, Lloyd was languishing in jail in Savannah. That is a historical fact. He was ailing, in confinement, so a quick escape and dash to New Orleans to meet Bonfanti would be impossible. And then Lloyd would have had to dash back up to Chattanooga, then dash back to Savannah, and break back into the Chatham County Jail without anyone seeing.
There is a whiff of comic opera here.
Bonfanti is not the only one in 1872 who has Alvin Lloyd being in two places at once ten years before. Alphabetical Boyd tells us that Alvin “visited the defenses of Richmond. This was in June 1862. He got information as to strength and location of batteries and number of troops around Richmond.”
Question: “What did he do with this information?”
Answer: “He made a report in writing, which he gave to me for Mr. Lincoln, which I delivered in the latter part of July or first of August, to Mr Lincoln in person.”510
The story of Alvin’s arrest and search in Lynchburg on November 7, 1862—including the searching of his wife—is told in his detailed itinerary presented on July 16, 1865 (Enclosure 13). That particular account sounds reasonable, given that there are documents to back it up. What is not mentioned in Enclosure 13 is the contract and especially the destruction of that contract. That’s because there was no contract to destroy.
On June 1, 1865, when Alvin came to Totten’s office for the first time looking for a lawyer to handle his case, he was stating that his spying contract with Lincoln had been verbal. That’s what he had told Grant’s office. Totten changed all that and made it written. But because it was said to have been a written contract, that contract had to have been destroyed somewhere, sometime, during the war. November 7, 1862, in Lynchburg, seemed as good a time as any, and they settled on that.
That part of the story, the actual destruction of the contract, is told at only two specific points in time. The first was June 3, 1865, in the original depositions made by Alvin, Virginia, T.H.S. Boyd, and Nellie the maid. Alvin claims that the contract “was destroyed by my family attendant, while the said detectives were searching the persons of myself and wife and the other papers and baggage.”
The attendant herself, Nellie the maid, deposed that “the said paper of instructions” was at that time in her possession, and sewed up in her clothing; that she was afraid of being searched by the said detectives, and that the said paper would be found, and she “destroyed the said paper of instructions while the detectives were searching the persons of Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd, by tearing it into small pieces, and scattering the pieces about.”511
Alphabetical Boyd deposed that the contract was destroyed by Ellen R. Dooley, “as he is informed and verily believes.”512
Unfortunately, as previously noted, although Virginia talked about this episode, the relevant sheet in the Lloyd Papers has been lost.
That, then, was the sum of testimony provided on June 3, 1865, on the subject of the destruction of the contract at Lynchburg. By 1872, Totten, for some reason, felt that it wasn’t enough, that more detail was needed. By now, of course, Alvin was long dead, and therefore could contribute nothing new, which is why Totten wanted Nellie the maid to depose again. But Nellie never came, which just left Virginia among the original adult participants. Obviously they needed to bring in a ringer. The last person in the world a sane lawyer would have allowed in would have been Alphabetical Boyd, simply because, by his own written and sworn admission of 1865, he had not even been in Lynchburg in 1862. Yet Alphabetical Boyd was the ringer Totten brought in. In addition, Totten brought in half a ringer, Charlie Boyd, Alphabetical’s younger brother. Charlie Boyd was there to provide hearsay.
First, the actual date of the Lynchburg episode. In 1865 Alvin claimed it was November 7, 1862. Virginia, although not absolutely specific, seems to agree with that date. Alphabetical Boyd says October 7, rather than November, but then, by his own admission, he wasn’t there. Nellie thinks it was November 5.
By November 1872, because more than seven years had gone by since she last deposed, Virginia could do no better than “In 1862. Sometime in November.” Like his brother Alphabetical, Charlie Boyd had only heard about the episode, and, wisely, didn’t attempt to date it. On the other hand, in his 1872 interrogation, Alphabetical Boyd still maintains it was October, but this time he was there, in Lynchburg, taking a big hand in the destruction of the contract.
As for what happened that day in Lynchburg, whenever exactly that day was, everyone agreed that the Rebel detectives burst in on the Lloyd party with the intention of searching baggage and persons, in the hopes of finding evidence that would incriminate Alvin as a Yankee spy.
Alvin and Virginia both said, in their 1865 depositions, that they were physically searched. They mention no one else undergoing this indignity. Indeed, Nellie the maid, in her own 1865 deposition claimed that she was “afraid of being searched.” The question thus presents itself—if Alvin and Virginia were searched, then why wasn’t Nellie?513
By 1872 Virginia was swearing under interrogation that Alvin was searched. She made no mention of herself being searched. In fact, on the contrary, as shall soon be seen. And Alphabetical Boyd was saying that “all persons” were searched, including himself.514
Who was in possession of the damning contract when the detectives broke in? In 1865 Alvin seemed to believe it was Nellie the maid: “it was destroyed by my family attendant, while the said detectives were searching the persons of myself and wife.” Nellie was, evidently, in another room, otherwise the detectives would have immediately stopped her.515
In 1865, Nellie said, “the said paper of instructions was at that time” in her possession, and sewed up in her clothing. Owing to the lost page in the Lloyd Papers, Virginia must remain forever and frustratingly silent on this issue, at least as she was recalling it on June 3, 1865.516
But did Nellie really have the contract sewed up in her clothing? Under 1872 interrogation, Virginia was asked, “Did Mr. Lloyd have the contract . . . on his person there?” She replied, “No. I had it on mine.” Was it Virginia or Nellie? Fictions within fictions. Unfortunately, with no 1872 help forthcoming from Alvin or Nellie on this point, and with Charlie Boyd not touching this issue because all he had to rely on was hearsay, we are left with Alphabetical Boyd, who, by now has decided that he was there after all. However, he too remained silent on this.517
What happened next was that the contract had to be destroyed, to prevent it falling into the detectives’ hands. Alvin said, “ it was destroyed by my family attendant.” Also in 1865, Alphabetical Boyd claimed that the contract was “destroyed by Ellen R. Dooley (who was the female attendant in the family of the said Lloyd).” But then Boyd wasn’t there, as is abundantly borne out by his own words, “as he is informed and verily believes.”518
Nellie herself, in her own 1865 deposition, said that she “destroyed the said paper of instructions while the detectives were searching the persons of Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd, by tearing it into small pieces, and scattering the pieces about.” One can only hope that they were very small pieces, and that the detectives, upon finding them, which they surely would have done, were too unwitting to put two and two together and conclude that the maid’s action might be proof of Alvin’s guilt.
It will be remembered that, come 1872, Virginia had the contract on her person—in other words, it was no longer sewed up in Nellie’s clothing. When asked what she did with the contract, Virginia replies, “I gave it to my nurse, with instructions to destroy it, which she did.” Presumably this maneuver was carried out just as the detectives were breaking down the door, rather than, say, as the detectives were searching her.
In her 1872 cross-examination by the counsel for the defense (i.e., the United States), Virginia was asked if she saw the contract destroyed. She replied, “I did not.”
Question: “Do you know of your own knowledge that it was destroyed?”
Answer: “I believe it was. I know it.”
Then, Virginia was again examined by her own counsel.
Question: “Did your nurse tell you she had destroyed the contract?”
Answer: “She not only told me so. But I was present at the destroying of it, but do not remember of seeing it actually destroyed.”
Question: “Do you know in what manner it was destroyed? Whether by tearing or burning?”
Answer: “It was burnt.”
Question: “Did you see it burnt?”
Answer: “I don’t remember of seeing it destroyed. I was in the same room—but in the confusion I cannot say that I actually saw it burnt.”519
Still in 1872, Charlie Boyd, who wasn’t in Lynchburg in 1862, says: “Mrs. Lloyd said the contract was destroyed by Nelly the nurse. Nelly told me she destroyed it. Mrs. Lloyd told me that because it was destroyed, they got only part of the claim paid. I heard Mr. Lloyd say the same.”520
Bonfanti wasn’t in Lynchburg either, but Totten manages to insert him, albeit obliquely. In his November 15, 1872, deposition, Bonfanti relates a curious tale about meeting Alvin Lloyd in Richmond in either September or October of 1863, one of the two. According to Bonfanti, he had just returned from England by running the blockade, a mission he had been on for Mr. Lincoln, who had asked him to take that route to see how that blockade was run, and to figure out what steps could be taken to stop it. “Mr. Lloyd stated that he had made some maps of the Southern Confederacy. He wanted to send them to Washington. Would I take them? I agreed to do so.”
Bonfanti made no mention of Alvin being in jail at this time. “He also said he wished me to get him another pass from the President because he had been taken prisoner, and had lost or destroyed all his papers.” He was referring here to the Lynchburg episode and the burning of the contract. “Also if I could get another agreement from the President like the one that had been given him when we came South, because he had been obliged to have that destroyed, and he wished to get another, and have it given to his wife.”
Question: “Did he furnish you with these papers? These maps?”
Answer: “He did. There was one map on tissue paper.”
Question: “With what directions?”
Answer: “That if I should get to Washington, I should give them to the President with the package of papers that accompanied it. I was to have started the next day.”
Question: “Did you leave Richmond?”
Answer: “Yes.”
Question: “After this, when did you next see Mr Lloyd?”
Answer: “I have never seen Mr Lloyd since.”521
This meeting with Lloyd couldn’t have been in September or October of 1863, as Bonfanti claims. W. Alvin Lloyd arrived in Mobile on August 8, 1863, and was still there on October 1 when he got shot to pieces. He spent the rest of the month on the verge of death and recuperating there, and didn’t leave Mobile until December 22.
We have to dismiss Bonfanti’s dates, then, as bogus, and along with them his story. You can’t jettison one without the other. But a lying Bonfanti is nothing new. In fact, it is to be expected. But that’s not the point here. The point is why did Totten have him say this about the replacement pass? It couldn’t just have been to have yet another deponent add weight to the destruction of the contract, even as hearsay, at least not when such a statement appears so ludicrous . . . on the surface. Lloyd came through the lines in 1865 with a July 13, 1861, pass, he presented this pass as evidence in 1865, and this pass is still in existence, in a vault at the National Archives. More to the point, it was very much in existence in 1872, and still dated July 13, 1861, for anyone to see. Why would Totten have Bonfanti say Lloyd had lost it? This makes no sense, at least on the surface.
Totten must have had a reason. But there was the actual physical pass. Why say that Lloyd had lost it? He found it again? Then why have Bonfanti tell this tale in the first place? It’s very damaging to the Lloyd claim.
The most detailed description of the destruction of the contract comes from T.H.S. Boyd, who was not there. But by the time of his 1872 deposition, he said he was there. “Lloyd told me to go to his room and destroy the contract and papers which might implicate or compromise him. I delivered the message to Mrs. Lloyd, and the nurse and we together destroyed everything that was likely to be dangerous, including the contract. I assisted the servant, and saw the contract torn up and burned.”522
In 1865, Nellie never mentions a fire. She merely says she tore the contract up and scattered the pieces. Unlike Boyd, she does not mention any other documents, which presumably did not include the pass that, as we know, survives to this day. And she never mentioned Boyd being there.
During his 1872 cross-examination, Alphabetical was again asked about the contract. “It was torn up and burnt—with a number of other papers.” And then, in answer to the question, “Did you see it torn up and burnt? And who tore it up and burnt it?” he replied, “I saw it torn up and burnt by Helen Dooley, or rather, she tore it up, and I picked up some of the scattered fragments and threw them in the fire.” Totten has now resolved the scattered fragments problem.523
The final issue that Totten wished to drive home was how Lloyd had suffered for his country. This is what Boyd had to say in 1872 about his former employer: “His health was much reduced while he was in Savannah. He suffered considerably from paralysis. One leg was considerably shrunken.” And then, in response to Totten’s question, “What was the condition of Lloyd’s health when he went South, and what was its condition when he came back in June 1865?” Boyd replied: “When Lloyd went South in July 1861, he was in enjoyment of good health and had every appearance of a man who would live a long life. When he came back in June 1865 he used a crutch and cane, and was constantly under the care of a physician, and so until his death. His lungs were affected, and he also had paralysis of the back and leg, which was considerably shrunken and shortened. This paralysis occurred in Mobile—first in Savannah, and afterwards in Mobile.” The shooting is never mentioned, of course.524
On December 10, 1873, John Goforth, assistant attorney general of the United States, drew up his brief for the defense. His comments are sometimes amusing, usually acerbic, and it is quite clear he regards the whole claim as preposterous—“a very likely story,” he writes.525
But John Goforth was a lone voice in the wilderness. On February 9, 1874, the Court of Claims reached a decision. To a man, they believed the claim, and found in favor of it. However, they were evenly split on whether a president has the right to enter into such an agreement with a spy, and so “the court, upon due consideration of the premises, find in favor of the defendants, and do order, judge, and decree that the said claimant’s [Totten’s] petition be discharged.”526
Not accepting this defeat, Enoch Totten then appealed to the US Supreme Court. He drew up his case, and US Solicitor General Benjamin Bristow, representing the United States, drew up his own brief. The solicitor general based his defense on a number of arguments. The first was that the US Court of Claims case had been filed by Totten on May 22, 1871, but that the six-year statute of limitations on such a case had run out eight days before that date, missed it by a week. If only for that reason, the solicitor general argued, the present Supreme Court case should be barred. The solicitor general admitted that the US Court of Claims had somehow overlooked this small but important point.
The defense brief then expounded upon the monthly payments of two hundred dollars as they related to the said statute of limitations. According to the terms of the purported contract, Lloyd was to have received two hundred dollars per month. Each two hundred dollars was therefore a separate accounts item, and was subject to the same term of six years. So, as an example, if the first ever Lloyd payment, the one covering July 13 to August 13, 1861, was not claimed within six years, then it didn’t make the statute of limitations. This is false reasoning, because Lloyd did, indeed, make such a claim within six years—he made it on June 3, 1865. In short, the solicitor general did not make a good case for his first point.
But he did raise the all-important point: “Lloyd was a loyal man, engaged in the public service of the United States within the Confederate lines. There was no reason to prevent his being paid by President Lincoln at any time during the war that his accounts were presented. Whilst transmitting ‘information,’ he had power as well to transmit an order for whatever was due him. The presence of such a man within rebel territory imposed no disabilty because of vicinage upon him.” In other words, why didn’t Alvin communicate with the president, asking for his contracted monthly fee?
The second argument raised by the solicitor general was “whether transactions of the sort under consideration give to the employees therein a right of suit against the United States.” He submitted that the president had arranged to make the Lloyd payments from a “secret service fund” which had been voted to the president by Congress, and therefore, failure of that fund to provide for Lloyd meant that Totten should now have to apply to Congress for payment.
In the October session of 1875, the US Supreme Court issued their verdict. Associate Justice Stephen J. Field delivered the unanimous opinion. The eight other justices were: Chief Justice Morrison Waite, associate Justices Nathan Clifford, Noah H. Swayne, Samuel F. Miller, David Davis, William Strong, Ward Hunt, and Joseph P. Bradley. This court was composed of mainly Lincoln and Grant appointees.
In an almost mirror image of the Court of Claims proceedings, each and every Supreme Court justice believed the Lloyd story, yet at the same time found against the claimants, but for a different reason, one that would have far-reaching consequences. “We have no difficulty as to the authority of the President in the matter,” the finding stated. “He [Lincoln] was undoubtedly authorized during the war, as commander in chief of the armies of the United States, to employ secret agents [Lloyd] to enter the rebel lines and obtain information regarding the strength, resources and movements of the enemy; and contracts to compensate such agents are so far binding upon the government as to render lawful for the President to direct payment of the amount stipulated out of the contingent fund under his control.”
This critically important finding stood—and stands—prohibiting a public hearing “where a disclosure of the secret service might compromise or embarrass our government in its public duties, or endanger the person or injure the character of the agent.” Further, the court found that “the whole service in any case, and the manner of its discharge, with the details of dealings with individuals and officers, might be exposed, to the serious detriment of the public. A secret service, with liability to publicity in this way, would be impossible. . . . The final statement, may be stated as a general principle, that public policy forbids the maintenance of any suit in a court of justice, the trial of which would inevitably lead to the disclosure of matters which the law regards as confidential, and respecting which it will not allow the confidence to be violated. On this principle, suits cannot be maintained.”527
The Supreme Court justices having established the precedent ruling, but excluding a finding on the recovery of monies, then referred the case to Congress, with a strong suggestion that Totten be paid.
In other words, the Lloyd claim passed out of the legal into the moral, with the pressure now on the legislature.528
And so William Alvin Lloyd’s claim, the chicanery, shadows, and outright lies, was never challenged. As for Lloyd’s widow, Virginia, she had clearly moved on. Or so it seemed.
“Wednesday evening, Nov. 17, at the residence of the bride. D. Williamson Lee and Mrs. Virginia Van Rensselaer Lloyd.” The New York newspapers of November 20, 1875, carried paid notices of the marriage. Mr. Lee moved in with Virginia, at 265 Lexington Avenue.529
As 1876 rolled around, T.H.S. Boyd was publishing a railroad guide from 915 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, and Alvin’s brother, J. T. Lloyd, and his wife, Ella, were producing maps from the same city.530
Incredibly, Enoch Totten was unable or unwilling to let the Lloyd claim go. Just two months later on April 27, 1876, Representative William B. Spencer of Louisiana introduced the Lloyd case to the House of Representatives. Totten was now pressing for $9,153.32, plus interest accrued since June 5, 1865. On May 15, a bill for the relief (payment) of the claimant (Totten) was introduced in the Senate, where it was referred to the committee of claims. The committee examined the case, believed it to a man, adjusted the amount a little, and Senator George Grover Wright, of Iowa, reported favorably on the claim, writing, “On an examination of the contract, however, as set out in evidence, we do not find that there was any provision therein for the repayment to Mr. Lloyd of his expenses.”
And then, astonishingly, the finding: “We therefore consider that he should be allowed compensation from July 13, 1861 to April 27, 1865, at $200 per month, amounting to $9093.33, from which is to be deducted the amount allowed and paid him by the War Department as expenses, to wit $2380, leaving, as now due his estate, the sum of $6713.33. We do not think that interest on this amount should be allowed claimant. Your committee therefore report herewith a bill authorizing and requiring the Secretary of the Treasury to pay to Enoch Totten, as administrator of the estate of William A. Lloyd, deceased, the sum of $6713.33, in full, for the personal services of said William A. Lloyd, rendered in pursuance of a contract made with Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, and recommended that said bill do pass.” It then went back to the House, where it was not acted upon.531
The memory of Lloyd-as-spy, the claim of Lloyd-as-spy, is gone. Vanished. But again, Totten was not giving up on his dogged pursuit of the money. With the disclosure of a spying contract and any suit by, or on behalf of, an agent so engaged prohibited by the Supreme Court precedent, Totten changed the nature of Lloyd’s work for president Lincoln to “legal services.” Lloyd, Totten claimed, had been in the South on Lincoln’s personal legal business, but never elaborated as to the nature of that business.
On October 31, 1877, Senator Angus Cameron of Wisconsin introduced a brand new bill in the Senate, asking the Secretary of the Treasury to pay $6,713.33. On December 7 the Senate passed the bill without amendment, and it was sent to the House on December 12, 1877. It died there, never acted upon again.532
But in spite of Enoch Totten’s last legal deception, his last grasp at the remainder of the Lloyd claim, the decision the claim inspired was now indisputably a fixed law, a precedent bearing his name. Known variously as the Totten Doctrine, the Totten Bar, or the Totten Decision, the law was upheld again in 1895. It seemed that William Alvin Lloyd’s claim against the US government for services rendered in the Confederacy while a Union spy was not the first of its kind presented to the War Department. On January 6, 1862, one Charles de Arnaud did just that, claimed to have been spying for Generals John C. Fremont and Ulysses S. Grant out west in the early days of the war, even had letters from those generals to prove it. President Lincoln endorsed the claim. Simon Cameron, then secretary of war, balked at the proposed payment of $3,600 and de Arnaud cut his losses, settled for $2,000, and disappeared. He resurfaced in 1891, in the US Court of Claims, but the court cited the Lloyd precedent. On April 24, 1895, Colonel H. C. Ainsworth, United States, summarizing the De Arnaud case in a letter to the secretary of war, used expressions that are shockingly redolent of Lloyd’s claim: “It is apparent from an examination of the mass of papers . . . that de Arnaud has succeeded in convincing many persons, including high executive officers of the government and members of important Congressional committees, persons of the highest integrity and the best of judgment, that he actually was . . .” etc. He goes on: “As one studies this case for the first time, with all the facts before him, it will seem more and more astonishing that anyone could have been misled or imposed upon for a moment by such a transparent and baseless fabrication as this portion of de Arnaud’s altogether incredible story now appears to be.” The case was dismissed, citing Totten vs. the US.
It is worth a brief review of the Totten Doctrine, because as will be seen, eighty-seven years later, it was conflated with the very controversial State Secrets Privilege, a rule that bars evidence, or portions of evidence, that impinge on national security from being litigated in a court of law. “While the Courts may examine such evidence closely, in practice they generally defer to the Executive Branch, at which time if the evidence warrants the state secrets privilege, the plaintiff cannot continue the suit without privileged information and drops the case.” In fact, the State Secrets Privilege has been described as “Totten’s Poisoned Progeny,” by Sean C. Flynn, Associate General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at Abiomed, and has become to some in the legal community “a major hindrance to litigation that seeks to challenge abuses of executive power in the context of the War on Terror,” wrote Professor of Law, D. A. Jeremy Telman.”533
But in spite of the conflation of the State Secrets Privilege and the Totten Doctrine, there are differences. “In Totten, wrote attorney Frederick G. Jauss, IV, in his abstract of an article by attorney Daniel L. Pines, “the Supreme Court took issue, not with the ability of the President to enter into secret contracts, but with claims brought on the basis of secret contracts. Judicial review of secret contracts for secret services would needlessly endanger national security.”
However, wrote Telman, the Totten Doctrine is sometimes invoked when the “government seeks dismissal of tort claims through the State Secrets Privilege.”534 And, eventually the Totten Doctrine “was expanded to all contracts with the government when at the time of its creation, the contract was secret or covert,” wrote lawyers Douglas Kash and Matthew Indrisano.535
In fact, the second time the Totten Doctrine stood as the reason for dismissing a case was when in 1973, a clerk-typist named John Doe, working in a Communist embassy in the United States, made approaches to the CIA. He wanted to defect. His wife, too. The CIA persuaded the couple to remain in place, but as spies, and Mr. Doe worked his way up to electronics technician, providing good service to his covert handlers, secure in the knowledge that the US government, as part of the deal, would relocate him and his wife when the time came, and look after them for life. However, in January 1982, Mr. Doe informed the CIA that he was a homosexual, and that was the end of his career, and his financial security. The 1947 National Security Act gave the director of the CIA the power to fire an employee if it was considered that that employee was a threat to the state. In 1985, the Does sued the CIA, and, eventually, the case made its way to the Supreme Court in 2005, as Tenet vs. Doe (George Tenet being the recently departed director of the CIA at that time). “The respondents’ suit was barred by the Totten rule, the finding read, with Justice William Rehnquist “delivering the opinion for the unanimous court.”536
Long after the death of William Alvin Lloyd, his claim—the tissue of lies, sculpted by Enoch Totten and delivered by him to the highest court in the land—remains. As for the doctrine that bears Totten’s name, and its often-conflated progeny, the State Secrets Privilege, both continue to bar the rights of operatives and assets employed by the CIA and other government clandestine organizations to have their day in court. To this day.