William Alvin Lloyd

William Alvin Lloyd (July 4, 1822 – March 17, 1869) was an American con man and minstrel troupe impresario who, under the guise as steamboat and railroad guide publisher, claimed to be employed during the Civil War as a personal spy for President Abraham Lincoln. Lloyd along with his associates Thomas H. S. Boyd and F. J. Bonfanti were able to travel throughout the South during the war, to supposedly gather intelligence for the North. After his death, Lloyd's estate filed suit against the government for unpaid compensation. This suit resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court case Totten v. United States.

Pre-war life Born the son of a tailor in Kentucky on July 4, 1822, William A. Lloyd's family came to Louisville in 1830 where Lloyd came of age, and was apprenticed to his father until the age of twenty-one. Finally opening his own tailoring business, Lloyd married and fathered two children but abruptly left his home and family in 1846 to follow a traveling minstrel troupe, eventually assuming the duties of manager, marketer and prominent impresario. Between bouts of failure, poverty, blackmailing, swindling and serial bigamy, as he traveled throughout the Northeast and Midwest with his troupe, Lloyd was often on the run from the police, leading new minstrel bands and publishing a steamboat and railroad guide, an anti-abolitionist, southern right mouthpiece that excoriated Abraham Lincoln and his administration. When the Civil War began and his latest minstrel band folded because of his hard-handed management and his failure to pay his performers, along with his pro-Confederate stance, he decided he must go south. The passport would allow Lloyd to do research for his guide books on railroad and steam boat transportation; it allowed him to visit the South so that he could collect advertising revenues that were owed him by Southern businessmen. According to Lloyd, Lincoln agreed to issue him the passport as part of a deal that only the two of them would ever know about, on the condition that he would act as Lincoln's personal secret agent. Lloyd claimed that Lincoln promised him a salary of $200 a month for his services. Lincoln issued passports for Lloyd, Mr. Boyd, Mr. Bonfanti, Mrs. Boyd, and her maid in July 1861. He would procure the plans of the Confederacy forts and other battle structures. He would be paid a $200 monthly stipend, and be compensated for expenses. Lloyd and his business partners had a well established presence in the Confederacy prior to the war, which afforded them an easier time moving about the country. Despite their reputation, Lloyd's activities drew suspicion from government and military officials. Over the course of his four years in the Confederacy, Lloyd was incarcerated on at least four separate occasions. He was jailed in Savannah for seven months, followed immediately by two months in Macon, for being a Yankee spy. During that time one of his wives came from New York with their young son, to join him. After Lloyd's release he was a broken man but pressed on with his endeavors, for a while being the subject of harassment from the authorities. In 1863, he was shot down on the streets of Mobile, Alabama, for attempting to blackmail a citizen there. Despite the dubious evidence, Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton issued a reimbursement for his expenses totaling $2,380. However, Stanton refused to pay Lloyd his $200 a month stipend, which would have totaled $9,753.32 at the end of the war. The Supreme Court upheld the decision of the lower courts.