My Old Kentucky Home
His memories of those early years—if memory served at all and had not been tempered or tampered with as was his wont—would be redolent of peril and uncertainty, of his family’s harrowing migration from Virginia into hostile Indian lands with uneasy stops along the Ohio frontier and into the wilds of Kentucky. But with no clear path to follow through the woodlands, trails, and mountains of his family’s westward journey, this much is known: William Alvin Lloyd known familiarly and forever as “Alvin,” was born on July 4, 1822, somewhere in Kentucky. His father, Thomas G. Lloyd, Alvin’s mother whose name is lost to history, his beloved younger brother James Talford, and Thomas G.’s brother William comprised the peripatetic little family.
Like so many emigrants swarming out of Winchester, Virginia, the Lloyds would have traveled by wagon through what is now West Virginia into the state of Ohio and down the Ohio River on a keelboat into Kentucky. Or, if they had reason to go by way of Indiana, at Jeffersonville just across the river from Louisville they could have bought passage on one of the ferries loaded with hogs, iron, and horses—wheezy tubs that pitched and groaned toward Louisville. Travelers of adequate means wouldn’t be seen dead in the fetid lower decks of a ferry, but they would certainly be seen alive taking a much more comfortable passage on a side-wheel paddle steamer that rumbled through the newly built Portland Canal, skirting the treacherous Ohio Falls.
Others coming from much farther south slogged along a well-trod and difficult wagon and stage route: the Wilderness Road. Originally a buffalo trail forged by Daniel Boone, the road traversed the rugged, rutted Cumberland Gap that was slashed through the mountains into Kentucky.
Whatever their route, and though their footprints are faint, it seems that Alvin’s father was unable to make a living in tiny burgs along the way that needed peddlers, not skilled cloth-cutters. So on they went like thousands before them to Louisville, where it was hoped that well-crafted woolens and leathers—not bearskins or deer hides—would clothe a more civilized lot.
For all new arrivals, the first sights and smells—multitudes of river birds, wide-winged herons, cormorants, and gulls swooping and seesawing overhead; the hum and thrum of the steamers’ engines as they nosed in numbers into their berths; the musky tang of dried tobacco; billows of whiskey fumes; calliope strains drifting over the churning water—dazzled and dizzied. The raucous muddle of old Indian fighters, merchants, gamblers, slave dealers, slave catchers, wary free and enslaved blacks, fools, and dreamers was not just another stopping place for the Lloyds. This was Louisville in 1830. This was journey’s end. This would be home.
For the next fourteen years, Alvin’s life there formed him, taught him a trade, spawned his errant ways, and stoked his wanderlust. And through the years of his growing the boy and the city came to resemble each other: brash, inventive, musical, explosive, and corrupt. Later he remembered what he chose to remember of those years and forgot or confabulated the rest.
Glimpse the child-Lloyd, perhaps, an eight-year-old roaming unchecked along the dirt roads, alleyways, and cobbled streets of his new home. Know that the place was besieged by typhoid, cholera, and yellow fever epidemics borne out of the miasmic and stagnant ponds and the stew of animal carcasses and human waste in the water. But boys like Alvin on their rambles would not have worried over such things, transfixed, as was the pioneer chronicler and historian Caleb Atwater, by “the roaring of the guns belonging to the numerous steamboats in the harbor, the cracking of the coachman’s whip . . . the sound of the stage driver’s horn saluting the ear.”13
A daring and curious boy would follow the mule skinners and peddlers and dodge the stages careening down Market Street, the “center of commerce through the heart of Louisville.”14
And if running along that river, heading east toward the Bourbon Stock Yards and into Butchertown, the stench of the slaughter pens, tanneries, soap makers, and distilleries would hold a grim fascination. There were the newly arrived German immigrants’ breweries and saloons—rough and brawling places teeming with thirsty customers clamoring for the local “whiskies, apple brandies and hard ciders.” And there were the prostitutes—accounting for “the great and unusual increase of tippling houses and houses of ill fame,” servicing the gamblers from the riverboats and the men from upper Main Street out on a pleasure crawl.15
It was a forbidden place for a boy hungering for things forbidden. Then. Always. Farther up Main were the proud palatial new homes, far from his family’s reach. They were “[t]wo and three lofty stories in height, standing upon solid stone foundations, exceeded any thing [sic] of its kind in the United States,” Atwater rhapsodized and exaggerated.16
See a tailor’s drudge like Alvin after a long day in his father’s shop, walking along Market Street, north of 5th, past the Louisville City Theatre, the only one in town. Perhaps he stops, drawn to the music pouring through an open door, the gabble of voices, the smells of cheap cigars and the stink of full spittoons. If he slips through a side entrance, stepping on peanut shells, slipping on gobs of chewed tobacco—because there is no one to tell him, go home, child, go to sleep—he creeps down into the theater pit. For seventy-five cents a ticket, and for two back-to-back shows lasting at least three hours, an audience of seven hundred packs the place. A Day After the Wedding, a “favorite farce,” is just ending. Actors Parson, Raymond, and Howard are bowing to mild applause. Soon, a mournful fiddle summons the cast back onstage. The “home-bred piece . . . a melo-drama” called the Kentucky Rifle, a “prairie narrative,” a bathetic tale of survival in the wilderness, began. A “comic Negro song,” the playbill promised, would lighten things up when Thomas Dartmouth Rice would perform in blackface as the slave Sambo.17
After characters Father Silversight, Thomas Buckthorn, and Farmer Felltree fight Indians and all manner of ailments, with an-off key trumpet blast, Sambo the slave shuffles onstage in a dilapidated coat, a pair of patched, tattered shoes, and a “dense black wig of matted moss,” topped by a tattered straw hat.18
The audience hoots and throws peanuts until Sambo sticks his fingers in his ears, shushing them, grinning and rolling his eyes. “Listen all you gals and boys, I’se jist from Tuckyhoe. I’m goin’ to sing a little song, my name’s Jim Crow.” Rubbery limbed, his knees knocking together to the rhythm of the tambourines and bones, Rice sings, “Weel about and turn about and do jis so . . .” And as he turns, he flaps his arms, “eb’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.” Then came a crook-backed tap dance, topped by an exaggerated bow, his hat hanging, and his wig askew. And the finish: “Weel about and turn about and jump Jim Crow.”19 The audience applauds wildly.
Jim Crow was a star. Thomas D. Rice was a star. Many had seen the actor striding about the town and now couldn’t believe the transformation. Unlike the caricature that made a mediocre performer famous, Rice was in fact a handsome young man, “about twenty-five years of age,” his grandson Edward Le Roy Rice wrote, “of a commanding height—six feet full, the heels of his boots not included in the reckoning—and dressed in scrupulous keeping with the fashion of the time.” Sweeping through the doors of the Galt House Hotel in a tight-waisted black frock coat, gleaming leather boots, and form-fitting trousers, Rice created his caricature of a happy slave, attributing “[h]is casual hearing of a song trolled by a negro stage-driver, lolling lazily on the box of his vehicle,” as the origin of “a school of music destined to excel in popularity all others.”20
As the fractious issue of slavery began to dominate national discourse, the world of burnt cork and banjos portrayed a patronizing, comedic, stereotypical version of a brainless, slothful slave like Sambo/Jim Crow, or the wily Zip Coon, the creation of minstrel and songwriter George Washington Dixon. Zip Coon, the “Larned skoler,” able to sing a “possum up a tree,” and jump over “dubble trubble,” schemed his way though a love triangle in Dixon’s “Coal Black Rose,” one of the first songs published in Louisville in 1830. By 1837, Louisville book and music stores were advertising “New Negro Song books,” with ditties like “Coal Black Rose” and “Jump Jim Crow” to feed the growing appetites of the burgeoning industry.21
Because African Americans were not able to perform on stage before the Civil War, white entertainers “blacked up,” much to the delight of audiences in the North and South. They loved these stereotypes, and no doubt these entertainments reinforced the idea that there could never be racial equality. And they promulgated the notion that all blacks—free and enslaved—would be better off under the lash of the master or tucked under the benevolent wing of the white man. Though at first the Jim Crow character made Rice the darling of audiences throughout the country, the name, the moniker, the stereotype he became would haunt for generations; the laws bearing that name would punish emancipated blacks after the Civil War and well into the twentieth century.
Years pass, and Alvin is fourteen. He has a sister and second brother now, Nancy, born in 1832, and baby Marcus, in 1834. In time—and it was not time yet, for then the boy and the city were still young, without a moment of shame as the ways of shame were unfamiliar to him and with music whirling in his head, sounding from rinky-dink saloons, concert halls and showboats—with a lifelong pattern of uncommon daring and no fear of consequence, he would find a way to be more than a tailor’s apprentice. It was a hard slog that would last as did most apprenticeships until he was twenty-one, when he could proclaim himself a full-blown tradesman.
Where might he or any hardworking boy find distraction and peace? There was always the Ohio River: turgid or glassy, bold blue, gray, or black late at night. The engine booms, hisses, and gabble of voices from the side-wheel wooden-hulled, flat-bottomed steam packets; the fine wood, etched glass, and tall smokestacks like heron’s necks were things of great beauty to Alvin. Later he would come to know every intimate detail of their design and chart to the second their comings and goings, a fixation that would remain with him personally and professionally for the rest of his life.
One day he might flee downriver on a craft like the Daniel Boone, “a fine, low pressure steam boat” bound for New Orleans loaded with rich brown sugar, fine china, and sundries, advertised as wanting “freight or passengers with fine accommodations” in an ad boasting it was able to make the one-thousand-mile journey to New Orleans in just under twenty days.22
And of the embarking passengers: frontiersmen, gamblers, settlers, and ladies—some painted, some dour, some girlish, many bejeweled. As he grew older, he eschewed the whores, but the women—the ones he took for proper ladies—were like gilded, come-alive statues perhaps to touch, or own, for a time at least. That some stayed and others glided away on the next boat didn’t matter. There would always be more coming by water, decorating the seedy wharves like bunches of bluebells.
Of course there were the ever-present hoards of enslaved humanity dragged through the city streets in coffles. They were exhibited, shackled in wooden pens along the Ohio, to be “sold down the river” to New Orleans slave auctions and from there to large plantations farther south. But because the Kentucky slave trade was the largest in the United States before the Civil War, the sights and sounds of this suffering were familiar to all, visitors, buyers, and town denizens alike. And so were the slave catchers, poring over the runaway slave ads, lurking along the waterfront, skirting the edges of the tobacco farms, seizing both free and enslaved blacks for a quick sale or a bounty.
Through all the time of his growing and beyond, Alvin would see this degradation, this misery, this snatching of souls, and not find any of it out of the ordinary. For it was his ordinary. His world. The riverboats. The songs, dances, the tears and lamentations of people sold like cattle: the caged people and the beautiful women from the riverboats. Always the women.
Before that, a time of which he would remember nothing, he would learn of a peripatetic lineage, a vague beginning. “My parents were from Winchester, Virginia,” was all he would say much later when he was in a Confederate prison during the war.23
Though records are scant, there is a letter written from Mount Washington, Bullitt County, Kentucky, on October 18, 1838, by one Joseph Lloyd, to his nephew James McCracken Lloyd, in response to the latter’s request for genealogical data. “My father, John Lloyd, was born in the City of London in the year 1704 Old Christmas Day.”24
That’s the old Christmas Day, before they changed the calendar. The writer goes on to say old John’s father was from Wales, hence the double L in the name, Lloyd. When he was fourteen, John was apprenticed to a boot- and shoemaker. On February 6, 1727, John Lloyd, of the parish of St. Botolph’s, Aldgate, stole several items from his former master, Samuel Peters. On February 22 he was tried at the Old Bailey. “The Prosecutor depos’d [sic],” the records state, “That the Prisoner had lodged at his House, and upon making Enquiry for the Loss of his Things, he heard the Prisoner was stopt [sic] with the Ring, which he pretended he found in the Entry, but it not being believ’d that he could find the working Tools too, a gold ring (worth 9 shillings) along with several shoemakers tools (knives, pinchers, awls, etc) . . . the Jury found him guilty.”25
John Lloyd was sentenced to transportation (deportation) to America. Forty-five days later, he arrived in Baltimore on the Rappahannock, a fully rigged ship, captained by Charles Whale. In 1742, after his indenture to an unknown master was completed, he married Prudence Emery in Orange County, Virginia. John Lloyd’s grandson was William Lloyd, who, as it turned out, would also be William Alvin Lloyd’s grandfather. This William Lloyd, via two wives, would keep producing and keep producing until he was seventy years old, thirteen children in all. The second of these children was Thomas G. Lloyd, Alvin’s father, born in 1792.
Thomas G., the tailor—termed a renovator, a scourer (scraping and finishing the leathers to fine, workable condition), and dyer—was one of eight tailors in Louisville. Picture him in everyday wear, for he would have to impress, as would his son Alvin growing up in the father’s business. T. G. would have worn a long linen shirt. He would have slept in the same shirt. His “pants had a front flap that attached to the waistband. The cravat (tie) was like a scarf wrapped around the collar and tied in front . . . and stockings held up with garters.” Over this ensemble, he’d wear a waistcoat. He would be clean-shaven, with longish hair, topped by a “wide brimmed or tall hat made of fur, silk or straw” when he went outside.26
T. G.’s brother William was a grocer—a white shirt and apron would have done for him—one of twenty-eight like merchants in a town that had “three print offices, six taverns, two carriage makers, six saddlers, six bake houses . . . twenty-two doctors and twelve lawyers.”27
Brother William didn’t stay in Louisville long, likely driven away by the competition, but Thomas would remain there for the rest of his life, a life filled with abysmal, whiskey-sodden lows, the highs of a well-turned tailoring business, a shaky vow never to drink again, and eventual redemption as a temperance street lecturer well after it would have saved his family’s humiliation. Old Joseph Lloyd’s Bullitt letter of 1838 says simply, “Thomas lives in Louisville.”28
Another new arrival in town was Joseph Holt, a young lawyer who hung up his shingle on the north side of Jefferson, between 5th and 6th Streets. In 1865, Alvin Lloyd would monumentally dupe Holt. So lawyer and future predator inhabited the same place and may or may not have known each other, though much later, Holt would marry the first cousin of Thomas G. Lloyd’s second wife. Much marrying and mixing among successful businessmen’s families would naturally occur in Louisville, a place that hadn’t borne the veneer of civility for very long at all.
In the late 1700s it was a tiny, protected encampment, a huddle of buildings by the Ohio of no more than a thousand people. “Without a store, or a tailor within a hundred miles, no blacksmith or saddlers,” assorted home-sewn bearskin and “hunting shirts of linsey linen and dresses of the same” garbed the men and women of the town. Along the banks and in the outlying forests old Indian fighters—constantly warring with braves of the Shawnee and the Delaware tribes—guarded and manned the forts. They were game hunters—the buckskin-clad frontiersmen—and their families. Survivalists they were, rough foragers all. What they couldn’t hunt or make was brought by “the keelboats and barges . . .” carrying “lead, flour, pork, and other articles.”29
These keelboats returned laden with sugar, coffee, and dry goods, “suited for the markets of Genevieve and St. Louis on the upper Mississippi,” or branched off and ascended the Ohio to the south side of the foot of the falls at Louisville, where the rapids precipitously dropped twenty-four feet for two miles along sandbars and limestone ledges.30 People traveling the Ohio River naturally paused at the falls, or foundered on the sandbars, hence it became the natural stopping place for the founding of a town on the south side of the tumbling waters.
But by 1811, when the first steamships were sighted on the river—hulking behemoths, engines blasting, studded with lanterns like so many fireflies, nosing into the wharves—change came, fast. Until February 13, 1828, Louisville had been a town. Now it was officially a chartered city fattened by settlers from the boats and the sales of slaves.
Though in August 1829 the first Louisville public schools opened—segregated according to gender and forbidden to anyone of color—there is no record of Alvin Lloyd’s formal education. But as evidenced by a kind of literary sensibility and publishing acumen later in life, the boy was by no means illiterate or unread. For excitement, and if the boy could find a quiet hearth, or venture into the public library on Jefferson Street atop the first courthouse, he might inhale the works of Byron or the adventures of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, rather than the ponderous tomes of natural science and botany. And for the boy, there were literally sounds of music from the showboats, concert halls, and street corners. A music library managed by piano maker William C. Peters and Sons published songs like “Jump Jim Crow” and soothed souls longing for a dose of Mozart with their Stephen Foster minstrel tunes.
Yes, there was music abounding, but what of Alvin’s beliefs, and whom to believe in? There he was, living in a city that was waging a war on itself and was becoming a microcosm of the great rift that was to tear the United States apart years later. Fire-eaters, bloody shirt wavers, crooked politicians, many identifying with the workingman’s Democratic party and just as many excoriating the Whigs (eventual Republicans) for their seemingly elitist stances and their vow to create a national bank. They argued, speechified, and tried to run the unwieldy, fractious city.
And as Alvin Lloyd would eventually have an editorial voice himself, the war between newspaper editors—Jacksonian Democrat Shadrach Penn Jr., the established and opinionated editor of the Louisville Public Advertiser, vs. the Whig-turned-Republican George D. Prentice of the Louisville Journal—was vicious and impossible to ignore. Prentice was brought to Louisville in 1830 to write native Kentucky son and Whig party founder Henry Clay’s biography. The Journal was founded to support Clay’s run for the presidency. But when Penn’s editorial dominance was threatened and his readership began to drift away, his vitriol increased. By 1841, and on his last editorial legs, Penn was fiercely attacking Prentice, saying he had “come out a full abolitionist of slavery.” Penn said, “It is worse than folly—it is treachery to the South.”31
That Lloyd-the-man became a full-blown southern rights advocate and anti-abolitionist, echoing the Southern Democratic party’s stance and never varying his beliefs, is fact. Eventually, and in print, Alvin damned Lincoln for his abolitionist ways and his vow to end slavery. And though Alvin’s brother J. T. boasted that he had known the statesman Clay, Alvin would have damned him too. Clay, the “Great Compromiser” and Whig party founder, was applauded and excoriated for his refusal to let slavery expand and overtake the free states. And so throughout the time of Lloyd’s coming of age in Louisville, the rights of the southern states and their adherence to the institution of slavery would be argued again and again, eventually exploding into the Civil War.
There were natural cataclysms as well: Fires and floods, but none as horrific as the Great Flood of Louisville that began on February 10, 1832, and lasted until the twenty-first of that month. “This was an unparalleled flood in the Ohio . . . having risen to the extraordinary height of 51 feet above low-water mark. . . . Nearly all the frame buildings near the river were either floated off or turned over and destroyed.”32
After the great deluge and when things had normalized, the city resumed its rapid growth. With expansion came a corresponding need for religious institutions. There was the old Baptist Church, and there were the Reformed Baptist, and the New Baptist, as well as the Methodist Episcopal and the Methodist Protestant, and, due to the number of free blacks in Louisville, enough to hire themselves out and worship, there were the African Church and the Baptist Church. On May 27, 1832, the first Unitarian Church would be dedicated in Louisville, on the corner of 5th and Walnut. That same year Alvin’s father and Uncle William appear in the Louisville City Directory as tailor and grocer.33
There are no sightings of the Lloyd family for the next five years, but in 1837, it seems Alvin’s mother passed away of unknown causes. If alcohol had been his father’s frequent pleasure, with the death of his wife he became an uncontrollable drunk, neglecting the three youngest children, abandoning them in the city streets. And what could fourteen-year-old Alvin do to rescue the lot of them from alcoholic rages, starvation, or worse? It is not known how he managed, but according to early census records that recorded only the name of the heads of household and the ages of the resident children, it appears he did remain with his father as a caretaker. That Alvin surely survived by his wits is evident but it is not known if he manned the tailor shop on his own or tried to find his abandoned siblings, James, Nancy, and Marcus, at that time no better off than the stray dogs and cats hunting for scraps along the wharves.
A kindly, charitable sort, a woman known only as Mrs. Gray, found the Lloyd children begging in the streets. Nancy Lloyd (no age given), James Lloyd (aged seven), and Marcus Lloyd (aged four) were all admitted to the Protestant Episcopal Orphan Asylum as intakes Nos. 33, 34, and 35, respectively, all children of Thomas Lloyd. Marcus died there. James T. was pulled from the orphanage, bound out to James E. W. Blanks, a Louisville carpenter. Nancy survived.34
Their true salvation was prosaic.
It seems that a Mrs. John Roberts, a widow whose wealthy husband had died when cholera swept through Bardstown, came with her three sons to Louisville and opened up a hotel, the Marion House on Jefferson, between 3rd and 4th. The 1838–39 Louisville Directory lists Thomas G. Lloyd & Co, tailors, Jefferson, between 3rd and 4th. This is the address of the Marion House. So it looks as though the widow Roberts boarded the inebriate tailor even though his surviving daughter was still in the asylum. Alvin, and one would hope he was included in this rescue, would have the company of one of the widow’s sons, Sam Roberts, a budding actor, later a famous minstrel known as Johnny Booker.
On July 11, 1838, In Louisville, Thomas G. Lloyd married the widow Roberts. Saved and finally sober, after his new wife vouched for him, his surviving children were returned.
From an errand-boy apprenticeship in his father’s shop, learning to stitch, pattern, dye, and fit the clothes made of fine wools and linens, Alvin grew older, serving gents, tradesmen, and their apprentices. Perhaps he strode about the city as a well-dressed businessman, with a silk top hat, a long greatcoat trimmed with beaver fur in winter, straw hat and light nankeen trousers in summer; appearing as much a dandy as he could stitch and fashion on his own time, until at last he turned twenty-one. His apprenticeship over, he was truly a tailor.
Three years later. Alvin went hunting. For a mate and found one. A respectable one. A pregnant one, it seemed. Elizabeth Ann (Lizzie) Dailey was just his age, from a policeman’s family, the oldest of four sisters. Alvin and Lizzie eloped to the town of Henderson, to the west of Louisville just up the river. They married on June 27, 1844. Might they have stayed in Henderson, a town grown fat on tobacco profits where rich farmers and their slaves abounded? No, back they came to Louisville. Alvin was now a proper tailor with his own shop on 4th Street between Jefferson and Green. Their daughter Belle was born in 1845. Soon Alvin’s wife was pregnant again. Charles W. Lloyd was born in 1847.
Like many in the city who patronized the blacked-up entertainers’ shows, who welcomed the minstrel troupes who steamed up and down the Ohio, stopping frequently in Louisville, surely Alvin Lloyd would see them stepping from the steamers onto the dock, toting their trunks full of burnt cork, banjos, bones, and tambourines, surrounded by townsmen and women, eager for a night of music and ribaldry, a night away from the ordinary. Soon Alvin’s life as a husband and father would change with the currents, with the changing, coursing currents of the river.
It was August 26, 1846, at the Apollo Rooms and there was a minstrel show in progress. In the dim light of the low-slung, smoky venue was a group of men in blackface giving a concert, “eliciting the greatest applause from all classes,” the Louisville Daily Democrat of August 21, 1846, crowed. No Jim Crow shabby rags here. Dressed as spanking fine gents they were: starched white shirts, black twirl-ties, jeweled cuff links, and shiny patent leather low boots. The fact that Rainer’s Sable Melodists were in concert that night is worth mentioning and they are most likely the group Alvin saw.
That year, the Melodists had done a lot of touring: Nashville, Cincinnati, and Boston. Louisville was a one-night appearance, “fresh from the fashionable watering places throughout the country” raved the Louisville Journal. Finding the troupe “superior to anything we ever heard from the sable gentry,” the Journal reserved the most worshipful praise for the banjo player, going “so far in his solos . . . that it was incredible . . . that the instrument was a banjo.”35
That night, the music, the strange, sweet-sour perfume of malt and tobacco … intoxicating. Soon, Alvin was gone, taking the first tentative step away from the tedium and toxins of the Louisville tailoring and scouring business.
He never left any writings behind to indicate what it was that propelled him out into that brand-new milieu, the world of minstrels. Was it a single event, the Sable Melodists or another similar troupe coming to town? Had he had enough of his life as it was shaping up? Could he foresee the long, dreary life ahead of him, a future like his father’s, a fate like his father’s? And so it seemed when the banjos, tambos, and bones summoned Alvin Lloyd, who as a boy had sprouted to manhood along the river, he was at last on the river. Leaving home. Leaving everything.