If Virginia Lloyd and Enoch Totten could have peered through a scrim into the future, they would see Lloyd’s postmortem influence on the claim, on the falsehood they’d abetted. As for Totten, whose creation bears his name for all time and who had discarded the truth with great zeal, would he be proud? With the ignominious burial of the case at the end of 1877, aside from the initial expenses granted by Secretary of War Stanton way back in 1865, had it all been for nothing—all that effort, the lies, the greed?
But although Virginia may have been unhappy with the outcome of the claim, after such a long and desperate haul through the courts, she was finally free of it. And she’d not been caught, exposed, shamed. Ever the survivor, she and her new husband, David Williamson Lee, along with eighteen-year-old Clarence Alvin Lloyd, packed their bags, rented out the house in New York, and moved to South Orange, New Jersey. But if stability, happiness, a better life for Virginia and her son seemed possible, it was not.
Her husband, David Lee, was dying of liver and kidney ailments. On January 18, 1886, rather than continue to suffer, D. W. Lee shot himself in the head. Virginia came home to find him. Lee’s family made sure Virginia got nothing from his estate. Two years later, in Brooklyn, on September 27, 1888, Virginia married the wealthy James Monroe Jacques.537
In Newark, on June 8, 1881, Clarence Alvin Lloyd married the widow Mamie Remington Walthour of Thomasville, Georgia. Due to the privations he had suffered as a child, Clarence was frail and sickly and would remain so. At the stroke of midnight, on September 21, 1889, Clarence died of a lingering illness in Thomasville. He left two daughters. Their descendants are alive today, but none of them knew, until recently, that their great-great-grandfather was William Alvin Lloyd, Lincoln’s secret spy.
Virginia’s brother, Eugene Higgins—who wrote the letter to Jefferson Davis suggesting Lloyd for the job of Provost Marshal of Mobile—was admitted to the Mount Hope Retreat Insane Asylum, run by the Catholic Sisters of Charity, and in the summer of 1880, in Norfolk, he overdosed on laudanum.538
Virginia Van Rensselaer Higgins Lloyd Lee Jacques died of apoplexy after a lingering illness in Baltimore at five o’clock in the afternoon on August 11, 1911, at her apartment in the Marlboro. The funeral took place at 3:00 p.m., the following Monday, at Druid Ridge Cemetery.539
In 1879 a book came out called The History of Montgomery County. Later that year, it went into a second edition, and has since become the classic history of the county. In it can be found this truth: “Among the officers in the Confederate service, none were more distinguished for capacity, efficiency and valor, than . . . Col. T.H.S. Boyd.” The author of this work was Thomas Hewlings Stockton Boyd.
Charles Boyd, Alphabetical’s brother, resided in Baltimore with his wife, Cecelia, but that wouldn’t last, and by the end of the following year he and Alphabetical went back to living with their widowed mother in Clarksburg.540
Alphabetical Boyd spent the last dozen years of his life at the Maryland Line Confederate Soldiers’ Home, near Pikesville. His death came sometime in 1907, although, in typical Boyd fashion, nobody seems to know precisely when. His tombstone says December 12, the Maryland death records have December 11, and the newspapers reported that it was December 9.541
Ellen Robinson “Nellie” Dooley fell out with her employers after the Lloyd caper, and pursued a career in nursing for a while in Rhode Island. In 1880 she married a Massachusetts jeweler named Alfred Acly, and they moved back to Providence, where she died on April 13, 1916.542
After deposing for Virginia, F. J. Bonfanti left for Cuba in March 1873, and subsequently for England. In early 1876 he was in Manchester visiting his brother, Harry, who was, at that moment, putting together Bonfanti’s Circus. F. J. Bonfanti never lived to see opening night.543
Marcellus Howser continued to reside in Washington. In 1873 he got married, and had two daughters, but by 1881 had joined the US Marine Corps, serving four years as a private. An inordinate quantity of his service career was spent in a hospital bed, being treated for gonorrhea and syphilis, which he had picked up while posted in the Far East with the Asiatic Squadron. After a spell as a grocer and clerk, he lost his wife in 1890, and immediately pressed for a Marine pension, but was turned down, and again in 1898. Even as late as 1906, when he was living in Ridgely, Maryland, he was still pushing his Congressman for that pension. He finally got it in 1908. He was sixty.544
In the little community of Royal Oak, in Talbot County, Maryland, on December 2, 1880, Charles T. Harvey, who’d written the damaging letter exposing the Lloyd fraud, died at the age of forty-two. He was buried three days later.545
Theodore Woodall, the detective, became a railroad ticket agent and later a saloonkeeper in Baltimore, and died on April 1, 1881.546
On August 11, 1889, at Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, Asbury Baker, one of several false witnesses in the Lloyd claim, died at the age of fifty.547
John P. Hamlin, who had vouched for Asbury Baker as a veracious witness in 1865, remained in the restaurant business in Washington, and, in 1881, for a brief while, found himself exposed in the glare of the national spotlight as the foreman of the jury that hanged Guiteau, President Garfield’s assassin. Hamlin died on June 8, 1914.548
While William Alvin Lloyd had dreamed up the idea to defraud the US government, the man who turned the dream into a reality was lawyer Enoch Totten. With a Supreme Court case that became a precedent ruling bearing his name, Mr. Totten became a prominent, wealthy, highly respected and busy attorney in Washington. He died, much mourned and eulogized by his colleagues, on November 11, 1898. He was sixty-two.549
Totten’s brother-in-law, Frank Howe, who had done such an inferior job with his first legal mission as Totten’s representative at the Court of Claims, got out of the law business, married, moved to New York, and became a writer. He died at forty-nine.550
John Robin McDaniel, Alvin’s steadfast friend in Lynchburg, was so devastated by the Civil War that he could never recover. From once being one of the leading citizens of Lynchburg, he moved to Washington at the beginning of 1878 and opened up a boardinghouse. On May 14 of that year, he passed away.551
E. D. Frost, the Canton, Mississippi, railroad superintendent who had vouched for his friend Alvin Lloyd, died on April 3, 1892.552
Confederate President Jefferson Davis was captured just outside Irwinville, Georgia, “on the gray dawn of May 10th, 1865, . . . one month after Lee’s surrender.” Hard as he tried, Joseph Holt was never able to prove that Davis played a part in or abetted the Lincoln assassination. Jefferson Davis was never brought to trial and served two years in prison at Fortress Monroe, “regarded by a majority of Northerners as the living embodiment of treason.” He died on December 6, 1889.553
Colonel Jack Brown, Alvin’s friendly jailer at Macon, left for Richmond with his regiment, the 59th Georgia Infantry, at about the same time Alvin was released. Jack was wounded at Gettysburg, a ball in each thigh, and captured. He was exchanged from Point Lookout in 1864, and was wounded again later that year—in the right popliteal. After the war he moved between Georgia and Washington, DC, and died on April 2, 1891.554
Alvin’s friend, railroad executive John Roper Branner, died in 1869 of apoplexy at the age of forty-seven.555
Hayne Irby Klinck, the police chief in Memphis who arrested Alvin Lloyd for bigamy in July 1861, lost everything he had when the Federals occupied his city. Broke and desperate, he tried hard for a job as captain in the Confederate Secret Service, only to fall at the battle of Franklin in 1864.556
Colonel William S. Rockwell, in large part responsible for Alvin’s harsh durance in Savannah, died on January 23, 1870, and was taken back to Milledgeville, while Waring Russell, Alvin’s keeper at the Savannah jail, remained in that post for quite a while, finally becoming city treasurer. He died in 1914.557
Dr. John Frederick May, the famous surgeon who’d cursorily examined Alvin at the behest of Enoch Totten, died in Washington in 1891.558
By early August 1867, Happy Cal Wagner, the former Lloyd’s Minstrel, was back in Cleveland, playing with La Rue’s Carnival Minstrels. Later that year he came down with yellow fever in New Orleans. Dan Bryant, the minstrel king who horsewhipped W. Alvin Lloyd up and down Broadway, and had been a friend of John Wilkes Booth, died in New York City, in 1875. Gustave Bidaux, whom Lloyd fired in 1867 for the grossest and most unspeakable behavior, died in 1886, and Dave Wambold, the minstrel who had threatened to kick Alvin’s head in before the war, died in 1889. Cool White hadn’t quite reached seventy when he drew his last breath in Chicago on April 23, 1891.559
Johnny Booker, Alvin’s stepbrother, continued in the minstrel game for a while, and was then arrested for bigamy in Indianapolis in 1874. He only managed to avoid incarceration by disappearing to the East Indies for a few years. He later became a cobbler in Dayton, Ohio, which is where he died, on October 25, 1898.560
Elizabeth Ann “Lizzie” Lloyd, Alvin’s very first wife, never remarried, and died in Louisville in 1907, worn away by rheumatism at the age of eighty-four. She is buried in Louisville’s Eastern Cemetery. Alvin and Elizabeth Lloyd’s daughter, Belle, married J. D. Johnson. He predeceased Belle, who died in 1881. She is buried alongside her mother in the Eastern Cemetery.561 Alvin’s son, Charles William Lloyd, died in Louisville at the age of thirty-four, of stomach cancer. He is buried in Cave Hill Cemetery. He never married.562
Thomas G. Lloyd outlived his son Alvin, dying of diabetes in the Louisville City Hospital on November 9, 1870. He was seventy-three years old.563
Finally there is Alvin’s brother, J. T. Lloyd. By the 1880s, J. T. was fifty, portly, and with a full gray beard and the dark complexion of his Welsh forebears. But his ferocious energy remained undiminished as he embarked on a fresh bilking rampage all over the country, followed by an almost equally determined press campaign to stop him. For the “Great Map Man,” as he described himself, the crooked path had, give or take a few serious bumps in the road, been a good one, paved with gold. He was now training his sons in the bilking business, as the press reported, but, somehow, even though the offspring would constantly be in the news, they were never able to acquire the boldness, the panache, of their father, or of their uncle Alvin. As 1890 rolled around, J. T. started a new map company in Baltimore, and it was there, on February 2, 1891, that he died of heart failure.564
Another montage? It cannot be. There is no one left in the frame, in the theater, on the stage. The show is over. Only shadows remain.