I Was the President’s Spy
Washington City
Through an old stereoscope viewer, caught in a photographer’s explosion of black powder and flashes of light, see a man. Though featureless, note that he is on his last leg—one is shriveled—barely allowing him to stand so he must lean on makeshift crutches, crude wooden rods that steady him. He fades, blurring as he inches painfully along. He will stumble, right himself, and at times like this, slip from view.
But there are facts—not unwarranted colorizations—accompanying William Alvin Lloyd. Know he has endured harsh imprisonment and bears the scars of a near-fatal shooting. Know he has hobbled out of the ravaged Confederacy—torn sinew and aching bones—to the depot at Danville, Virginia. There he boarded a shuddering night train that took him to Richmond, then by rail and steamer to City Point, Virginia, and finally into the nation’s capital.
But as sorry a sight as he is, unlike the masses of maimed and scarred Union veterans flooding the city, William Alvin Lloyd is no ordinary soldier. He is a man on a mission. He has secreted a packet of documents on his person. And he is armed.
If all goes according to plan, Lloyd will make his way to the War Department and seek an audience with Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, who is headquartered there. But he will not kill the enemy chieftain whose mighty armies defeated Lee’s forces. Rather he has come to wound the Yankee government and make it bleed. Money. A great deal of it. The documents he clutches, he hopes, will prove that he has been President Abraham Lincoln’s secret agent in the Confederacy. His timing is perfect. There could be no firm handshake from the president Lloyd said employed him. The dead don’t shake hands.
While there is no record of Lloyd’s meeting with Grant at his War Department office, it is fact that his documents were received and examined by someone on the busy general’s staff. So we must envision Lloyd entering a nearly empty building and leaving the papers with a clerk, perhaps an indifferent drudge who tosses them on a pile and rushes off to the parade, the Grand Review of Union Armies, an “immense and imposing display” of men and weaponry.1 Much of the city is festooned with flowers. Victory banners proclaim, “All Honor to the Brave and Gallant Defenders of Our Country! The Union Forever!”2
It is May 24, 1865, three weeks after the assassination of President Lincoln. The moist, heavy air of the preceding days—sorrowful days of endless mourning for the President—has lightened, dried, and cooled. Black cloths that draped the Capitol like giant widow’s weeds have been removed. Flags, once at half-mast, now flutter in ruffles of summer wind. President Andrew Johnson has ordered this day and the next to be one long celebration, a welcome respite for the denizens of the city who crowd rooftops, peer excitedly from windows, and pack the streets. Hearty huzzahs echo through alleyways, over the fetid canals, and up Pennsylvania Avenue. Banners, foodstuffs, horse dung, and spent cartridges litter the cobblestones as do the drunks, whores, and beggars who’ve flooded the city since the first of the regiments came by train and horseback to march as one for the last time before returning to civilian life.
“I saw the day the return of the heroes,” Walt Whitman wrote after watching the parade from somewhere in the crowd. “I saw the interminable corps, I saw the processions of armies, worn, swart, handsome, strong. . . . No holiday soldiers—youthful, yet veterans . . . ” 3
Gaze at a sea of bonnets, straw hats, and top hats, and below them, know that if William Alvin Lloyd does cheer with the masses that have gathered to watch a quarter of a million Union victors, he will do it for show. And does he see in the reviewing stand, just opposite the White House—seated in the canopied wooden bleachers along with President Andrew Johnson and his cabinet—Lieutenant General Grant, smoke from his ever-present cigar clouding his face as his victorious troops parade before him?
Schools have been let out and masses of children stream by waving flags and singing. Amid blizzards of confetti from rooftops, Grant remembered, “the national flag flying from almost every house and store . . . the doorsteps and sidewalks crowded with colored people and poor whites who did not succeed in securing better quarters,” and the loud strains of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” amid the cannon salutes. The great pageant will last over six hours.4
And as for Lloyd, with the first stage of his mission completed and though he has been bested by a Yankee circus, a two-day circus at that, it must be time for him to join his accomplices at a designated meeting place, for he has not come alone to the city where war was declared and war was ended alone. There is Virginia, his very young wife—one of several. She has endured him and remained with him through much of the war. And there is Thomas H. S. Boyd, his clerk, his princely underling, a hair-trigger ruffian with an ever-ready bowie knife concealed in his coat. And little Clarence Lloyd—small and frail at five, and Ellen Robinson “Nellie” Dooley, a sturdy English country girl, the nanny who cares for him.
Together they’d assembled the particulars of Lloyd’s claim. The documents he left in Grant’s office said that back on July 13, 1861, he made a verbal agreement with President Lincoln to be his personal spy in the Confederacy: Two hundred dollars a month for his services, as yet unpaid. A vast sum, but for a man who would say he risked his life at every turn, he would claim, justified. There were other papers that proved he’d done time in Confederate prisons. And there was a pass from the President, a slim, worn, much folded piece of cardboard—nearly ruined—not unlike the man who’d secreted it for four years:
Please allow the bearer, William A. Lloyd to pass our lines south and return on special business. A. Lincoln, July 13, 1861.5
“Special business,” the pass said. Lloyd’s “special business” was prosaic. He was collecting desperately needed revenue for his Southern Steamboat and Railroad Guide throughout the Confederacy. But for Lloyd, at this time, in Washington City, his true sentiments, his anti-Lincoln writings, if known, might well bring a mob down upon him. Anyone who spoke ill of the martyred president faced arrest, imprisonment, or street justice. Amid wild jubilation over the end of the war, Lincoln’s assassination was a grim counterpoint. And the trial of John Wilkes Booth’s accomplices before a military tribunal, covered word for word in the papers. Surely Lewis Payne, David Herold, and George Atzerodt would hang. Less certain was the fate of Dr. Samuel Mudd, the country physician who’d set Booth’s broken leg. As for Booth’s childhood friends Michael O’Laughlen and Samuel Arnold, both in on the plot to kidnap the president, and Edman Spangler, the curtain raiser at Ford’s Theatre allegedly following Booth’s orders, prison sentences were called for. And the fate of Mary Surratt, the God-fearing widow who kept “the nest that hatched the egg,” providing succor and a safe house to the conspirators, was as yet undecided. But by July 7, she would hang.6
It was of comfort to some that Booth met his end in a burning barn on April 26 and that his accomplices were incarcerated, but “Beware the people weeping,” Herman Melville wrote in the aftermath of the crime, “when they bare the iron hand.”7 And there surely were the iron hands of Lincoln’s avengers—the grief-stricken war secretary, Edwin M. Stanton, and his frosty, unforgiving judge advocate general, Joseph Holt—both of whom were busy calling for the heads of all Confederate higher-ups. Jefferson Davis, the former occupant of the Confederate White House in Richmond, was imprisoned, awaiting a trial for treason. It was not enough. “The stain of innocent blood must be removed from the land,” Stanton vowed, beset by fits of uncontrollable sobbing.8
Likely no sobs emanated from the sparse rooms in a tumbledown boardinghouse where Lloyd’s impoverished band would have stayed, waiting for news about his claim. Three days passed. Endless days. Finally, on May 27, there was movement. Grant had forwarded Lloyd’s documents to Secretary Stanton. Whether Grant had perused them himself is not clear. But someone on his staff surely had.
“The papers of Mr. W. Alvin Loyd [sic],” Grant wrote, “have been examined and respectfully forwarded to the War Secretary, and satisfactorily proved that he has been in southern prisons over two years. Also that he has a pass from President Lincoln on special business. Mr. Lloyd desires payment for services in accordance with a verbal agreement with Mr. Lincoln.”9
The fatigued and disconsolate war secretary passed the materials on to an organ within the War Department—the Bureau of Military Justice—to Major Addison A. Hosmer, a Harvard law graduate who’d served with distinction during the war. Now he was the judge advocate in the absence of Joseph Holt who was busy day and night as the chief prosecutor at the trial of Booth’s coconspirators. Holt was “officially the nation’s chief arbiter and executor of military law” and rarely in his office. Hosmer explained his interception, saying, “The Secretary was greatly indisposed.” In fact, Stanton’s indispositions abounded in the long, difficult weeks after the president’s murder. Still bereft over the great loss of a man he loved, Stanton was inconsolable, profoundly depressed, and thought at times to be delusional.10
Major Hosmer surveyed the muddle of papers before him. He was troubled by the informal presentation of Lloyd’s clandestine work for President Lincoln and the outrageous sum he was demanding for those services. On May 30, Hosmer wrote to Stanton:
War Department, Bureau of Military Justice, Washington, DC,
To the Secretary of War. The primary and main object of Mr Lloyd is to obtain the payment to him of a large sum of money claimed as compensation for alleged secret service in the South under agreement said to have been made by the late President in July 1861. The amount demanded is $9600, being at the rate of $200 per month for about four years, which, if justly due, should be paid; but the presentation of the account is so informal and unsupported by affidavits or reference to any proof, either in possession of the claimant or the Government, that it will be impracticable for this Bureau in the present situation of the inclosed [sic] papers, to reach any satisfactory conclusion without performing simultaneously the somewhat incompatible duties of an attorney for the claimant and the judge passing upon the merits. For these reasons it is recommended that the papers be returned to Mr Lloyd in order that he may, by consulting suitable advisers and availing himself of the assistance of an attorney, prepare and submit his demand properly in form and substance. (signed) A.A. Hosmer, Major & Judge Adv. in the absence of the Judge Adv. General.11
Somehow Lloyd learned of Hosmer’s response, took the advice, and perhaps after scanning newspaper ads, saw this: “Enoch Totten attorney and counselor at law, Washington, DC (PO box 492) will procure back pay, pensions and patents, settle officers’ accounts, and collect all claims against the government.”12
No time to spare. Too much money at stake, riches to be made, time, time was of the essence. Just two days later, inside Totten’s office at 5th and E Streets, picture a scene: Totten, Ohio born, ten years Lloyd’s junior, fumbles to grasp a pen with his one good hand. His other hand was useless. For good reason: A lieutenant in the Fifth Wisconsin Infantry, Totten led a charge against Rebel earthworks at the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. One minute there was a hand wielding a saber. Next minute no saber, and not much of a hand. Not much of a left foot either. For his valor, they honored him and promoted him. Colonel Totten, he was now: new in town and hungry for clients.
There seemed to be as many attorneys in Washington as there were war claimants. Admittedly, some of the claims were somewhat trivial—a Yankee soldier had ripped the siding off a farmer’s barn and used it for firewood. Another man’s well was polluted by rotting mules. Who would pay? Then there were the six young field slaves, worth about two thousand dollars each, who had escaped from the overseer. How was the offended party going to survive without compensation? And the burning of a plantation by General Sherman’s marauding bummers; railroad tracks torn up or commandeered by the enemy; or the use of private homes as field headquarters, soldiers trampling precious carpets with their boots or guzzling stocks of rare brandy, defiant southern women being insulted, or worse.
Lloyd wouldn’t give a damn about other people’s claims. He told Totten the particulars of his: Back on July 13, 1861, he’d sat with Lincoln in the White House and verbally agreed to a most secret espionage contract guaranteeing him two hundred dollars a month for this perilous service. Lloyd was to gather enemy intelligence by infiltrating Rebel fortifications, reporting troop movements, and sending back dispatches to the president via a network of trusted couriers as often as he could. That was the story—how he suffered in Confederate prisons and nearly died in the service of Abraham Lincoln.
Totten smelled money. This was no ordinary claim. Grant’s office had already been taken in by it, and no one in the War Department had come flat out and said they disbelieved it. It just might work. But Totten knew quite a lot had to change if it was to go anywhere. For a start, the contract with Lincoln could no longer be verbal. That was no good at all. Verbal? That was amorphous, words, whispers in some darkened hallway. Foolish. It had to be a written contract. Lost, Totten decided, of course, during the war. That was the first thing. Totten was the architect now and together with Lloyd created the wording of the nonexistent contract, supposedly written and signed by Abraham Lincoln. It would never be seen, but it must have a shape. It must sound credible, it must impress, it must buttress Lloyd’s claim.
The bearer, Mr. Wm. A. Lloyd, is authorized to proceed south and learn the number of troops stationed in the different points and cities in the insurgent states, procure plans of the fortifications and forts, and gain all other information that might be beneficial to the Government of the United States, and report the facts to me, for which service Mr. Lloyd shall be paid two hundred dollars per month. Abraham Lincoln, July 13, 1861
Time, no time. Totten said they would immediately have to go before a notary and swear to the existence of this contract under oath. Totten would procure the notary and coach the witnesses. They first had to memorize the wording and be prepared to repeat it as fact. Verbatim. Each one of them. Lloyd assured Totten that his wife, clerk, and nanny would stick with his story. Fine, but, wait, who was this man Lloyd, this wreck, this stranger, this—imposter, or huckster, or—who was he? What was his life story, his war story? Totten must hear it to the smallest jot of a detail, all of it; everything about Lloyd—everything—so there would be no surprises. Begin, then. Begin.
Through the stereoscope, somewhere in the distance through filaments of light, see the wavering form of a small boy. Droplets of water puddle on smudged glass. See a wide river. It is too far away as yet to know it is the Ohio. But it will come into view. It will. He will.