If this were played upon a stage I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.
—Twelfth Night: act three, scene four, by William Shakespeare
William Alvin Lloyd. Here was a man, a comet, streaking through decades with impudence and impunity. A simmering broth of lust, indefatigable energy, greed, and larceny, he was magical, priapic, musical, inventive, a survivor and a scoundrel. From a jangled, jarring Kentucky boyhood where he learned a tailor’s trade, he then ran from that trade, covering his dye-stained hands with white gloves, and, on occasion, his face with the burnt cork of the minstrels, his minstrels. For a time Lloyd owned the tambos, the bones, the banjos, and the men that played them. He was a publisher, a blackmailer, seeking scandal, a moth to a fire. And in the war, his time in the war was at first a salvation that brought him a little wealth then stripped him bare, disarmed and desiccated him. Then accused, nearly hanged as a Union spy by the men who ruled Dixieland, the land he’d loved.
At the end of the war, no longer a comet but a mere spit of light, he crawled away from the rubble of that land to emerge—twisted, numb—to reconfigure, to proclaim that he was Abraham Lincoln’s personal secret agent throughout the Civil War. Was William Alvin Lloyd truly Lincoln’s own, or a cunning imposter? And his lawyer, Enoch Totten, who for years doggedly pursued Lloyd’s claim until it became the basis of an important Supreme Court precedent—one that to this day affects the legal rights of clandestine operatives and assets—was he the architect of a great fraud?
Authors Jane Singer and John Stewart have both written books about the Civil War and are devoted students of spy craft, priding themselves on prying secrets from the jaws of a murky trade that rarely succumbs to hard research. Tracking the oft mentioned but never researched William Alvin Lloyd through private collections, genealogical sites, old newspaper article databases, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and numerous historical societies was revelatory. Finally after scouring unpublished primary source documents, witness testimonies, and court transcripts, the true story of his claim and of a life writ large emerged. But in spite of our inescapable conclusions we were, and still are, riveted by the tireless moxie of the man. And though he might howl to learn that two twenty-first-century authors have shone a hard light on his long-hidden secrets, he could not help but applaud his top billing. William Alvin Lloyd is onstage again. But this time he is truly the star of his own show.