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Chapter Two

“The Great Work of Improving and Beautifying Our Beloved City”

First Steps in Business and Political Leadership, 1862–1865

BY 1862, TWENTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD Shepherd—married, a Union war veteran, and a partner in the plumbing firm of John W. Thompson—had entered the first phase of his political life in Washington. He quickly demonstrated leadership skills and began to build the case for political themes he would eventually see through to completion, although with consequences he had not imagined, for both himself and the city.

Civil War Washington was not much to look at. Almost every street in use was dirt and would remain so for several more years. Washington’s streets, such as they were, took an endless beating during the war from the stream of horses, wagons, carts, and soldiers, becoming a quagmire in winter and a dustbowl in summer. The capital’s public buildings were set amid open spaces or surrounded by unappealing wooden structures. The Washington Monument, not completed until 1884, was an ugly stump. The war overwhelmed Washington in every way. Aside from the constant threat of Confederate attack, the war brought tens of thousands of Union soldiers, healthy and wounded, into the city. The Capitol and the Patent Office became temporary barracks, with soldiers bunking in the Capitol rotunda and between Patent Office glass cases filled with inventions. The Capitol basement briefly became a bakery. Hospitals, a vital element in Union hopes of healing and returning soldiers to the front, sprang up everywhere, including in private homes and wooden structures erected for the purpose. Sixty-eight forts were built around the city’s perimeter to defend against Confederate attack, although only one, Fort Stevens, was needed to resist a July 1864 assault. The Civil War was a horse war, and thousands of horses had to be corralled, fed, and paraded in the city. Trees were a major casualty: the need for firewood for cooking was insatiable, forests were replaced by military camps, and the forts needed clear sight lines for their weapons.

After the departure of the southern Democratic members of Congress at the outbreak of war, some Republican members welcomed the opportunity to make the District of Columbia a testing ground for social and political engineering that would result in significant gains for Washington’s black residents. Known as Radical Republicans, these legislators proposed racial policies for the District that were still illegal or politically anathema in their home states. Senator Charles Sumner (R-Mass.) was the most per sis tent congressional advocate for emancipating blacks in the nation’s capital and for providing black children with educational opportunities equal to and integrated with those of the District’s white children. The senator, brutally caned on the Senate floor in 1856 by Democratic congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina for antislavery remarks, continued to introduce progressive legislation for black rights in Washington until his death in 1874.

The most dramatic early demonstration of Radical Republican political clout was passage of the District of Columbia Emancipation Act on April 16, 1862, eight months before President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The new law, which provided compensation to slave owners for freeing their slaves, was joyously welcomed by Washington’s black residents but had been anticipated by many white Washingtonians with a mixture of apprehension and dread. Local politicians began to speak up in protest shortly after Senator Lot Morrill (R-Maine), chairman of the Senate District Committee, introduced the emancipation bill in February; no effort was made to seek the consent of local voters. Regardless of whether congressional Republicans were influenced by abolitionist pressure at home, were made aware of the new political conditions created by the war, or were influenced by the demands of their own consciences, they took a step that not only initiated a wider legislative war against slavery but also marked a decisive change in the practical relationship between the national government and the capital city in which it sat.¹ Opposition within the local population to freeing the District’s slaves created friction that Shepherd would exploit for his own political gain.

Slavery had traditionally defined race relations in the nation’s capital. Washington’s black codes—applied to free as well as enslaved blacks—imposed fines for being on the street after 10:00 p.m. or engaging in card games, as well as six-month jail sentences for anyone arrested at a “nightly and disorderly” meeting.² Two incidents in the recent past had heightened racial fears among Washington’s white residents. The first was an 1835 attempt by a slave on the life of Anna Maria Thornton, widow of the former architect of the Capitol, William Thornton. This incident triggered the Snow Riot, when a white mob assaulted a free black restaurateur, Beverly Snow, and led to a three-day-long attack on Washington’s black residents.³ The second incident, in 1848, was a bold escape attempt by seventy-six slaves on board the schooner Pearl, led by the ship’s abolitionist captain. Freedom for the escapees was short-lived, however, and they were brought back to jail for subsequent sale in the Deep South.⁴ In response, whites stiffened the black codes, aiming for constant surveillance of the black population.

During the war the District attracted escaped slaves from plantations in neighboring Mary land and Virginia as well as farther south; consequently, the number of so-called contraband blacks in the District of Columbia mounted steadily. The black population, which made up less than 20 percent of the total District population in 1860, grew dramatically by 1870, with blacks, now freedmen, constituting 33 percent of the total population of 131,700.⁵ Most contrabands were illiterate, having served mainly as plantation field hands. However, the District’s freedmen had established a self-conscious community that seized educational and commercial opportunities whenever they presented themselves. This resulted in a number of the city’s black residents becoming prosperous businessmen and property owners as the capital’s demands for goods and services skyrocketed during the war.⁶ After the war, blacks also were represented in government clerkships and had access to higher education at Howard University, which opened in 1867. Particularly after receiving the vote in 1867, they sought to translate these gains into increased liberty. The emancipation of the District’s slave population in 1862 proved a blessing to the Republican Party; in gratitude for their freedom, former slaves handed the Republicans a virtually solid voting block for more than ten years.

Other than his obsession with streamlining governance of the District of Columbia and making Congress own up to its responsibility to help pay the bills for the capital, the most vexing issue for Shepherd was the status and role of Washington’s black population. Like many of his white business and political associates, he opposed social equality for blacks in spite of his support for President Lincoln and for emancipation, once it became law in January 1863.⁷ During the spring of 1862 Shepherd voiced opinions about race questions on several occasions during Common Council debates, strongly opposing the black suffrage movement that was gaining ground among Radical Republicans in Congress. In early March he made his first official commentary on race. This occurred following resolutions by the Metropolitan Police Board that requested repeal of the Washington and Georgetown black codes restricting the movements of blacks after 10:00 p.m. Shepherd introduced an unsuccessful amendment for review of the ordinances, noting that he did not desire to stir up agitation on the subject or to offend any member of the board. Shepherd said that his resolution was not meant to anticipate repeal by the board but rather to show respect for the police.⁸ The intent of the amendment is not clear, although Shepherd’s proposal to review police ordinances might imply that he was raising a question of whether or not the police board had the authority to call for revision of the black codes, all of which were in any event repealed that spring.⁹ At the end of March he joined a 14–4 Common Council majority in passing a joint resolution with the Board of Aldermen opposing the congressional emancipation bill.¹⁰

In April, during a council debate on an education bill, Shepherd observed that he hoped that the discussion of the “negro question” was at an end, adding that he considered the subject a “hobby [horse]” that politicians ought not to ride in seeking office; he wished to see agitation on the subject ended.¹¹ Shepherd made one of his most categorical statements on the black vote in 1864, in response to reports that he supported a congressional bill to provide the franchise for adult male residents of the District, regardless of race. The press reported that Shepherd

was opposed to the principle of allowing negroes to vote, in toto. A certain class of people were now trying to force the negroes to sit in the [horse] cars, with white people, but he . . . was not quite up to that standard. This negro-equality question was now being forced upon the people by the red-mouthed abolitionists in the United States. He . . . could not favor it, and yet he considered that his unionism was of a high standard. He was in favor of the President’s proclamation to free the slaves, but he was not in favor of putting them on an equality with white men.¹²

During his first term on the Common Council, Shepherd pushed hard but unsuccessfully to include a loyalty oath as a voting requirement. Failing this, he later proposed changing the Washington City charter to include such an oath. Shepherd linked his support for a loyalty oath with opposition to a congressional bill regarding residency requirements for Washington voters. During a congressional debate about the proposal to require only a six-month residency for Washington City voters, without regard to property owner ship, he objected, again unsuccessfully, on the grounds that it would be unjust to property holders to permit recent residents to influence elections.¹³ Furthermore, he argued that such a short residency requirement would also be unjust to property holders since “it would be abused by a class, such as teamsters, etc.,” who would take advantage of it for whiskey and money.¹⁴

Despite the failure of these initiatives, they strengthened Shepherd’s public image as a member of the Unconditional Union faction on the council and as a spokesman for property owners. He was a self-made businessman who had seen the disappearance of his father’s estate and subsequent family difficulties, and as a result he had developed firm views on the centrality of property as a qualification for political participation, a position on which he never wavered. Realizing that he was creating a political image that resonated with voters, Shepherd continued to stake out hard-line positions on loyalty to the Union, winning a third term on the Washington Common Council in 1863.

During this period Shepherd drew criticism from some Washington politicians who complained that they were being branded insufficiently loyal to the United States. They accused Shepherd and his supporters of having labeled them “copperheads,” a derogatory term for Southern-leaning Northerners. By taking a leading position on the Unconditional Union ticket and dramatizing the loyalty issue, Shepherd created an awkward situation for local, conservative, often Georgetown-based figures whose political sympathies were frequently with the South.

Shepherd’s debating style was always confident and occasionally aggressive. From the beginning he demonstrated a willingness to use his imposing physical presence to support a legislative position; one challenge during his term on the Elections Committee brought the response that he would allow no one to “asperse” him. Speaking in a loud tone and with a belligerent attitude, Shepherd told the other speaker to take his seat, and both men appeared ready to fight. Nothing ensued, however, and Shepherd closed by defending the members of his committee from the charge of unfairness.¹⁵ During one debate he contended that he did not care about “appearances, ridiculous or not. . . . The only question was whether it was right,” adding that he would do his duty and let others think what they might.¹⁶

During his three terms on the Common Council, Shepherd maintained a steady criticism of Congress’s refusal to provide local government with taxing authority while at the same time providing concessions and franchises to outside corporate investors in the capital. Responding to an article in a local paper critical of the District for neglect of Pennsylvania Avenue, he commented bitterly that “when a railroad franchise, or gas company, or anything of that sort was asked [of Congress], it was rushed straight through; but when the city asked for power to tax property for necessary improvements, to make this city a pride for its people, instead of a disgrace, we were snubbed or kicked out until the adjournment of Congress.”¹⁷ Among Shepherd’s targets was the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. He saw the railroad, which had a rail station near the Capitol and tracks across the mall that disfigured the vista of the Capitol, as a corporate bully that had political influence with Congress and would be an obstacle to his plans to rationalize the development of the city.

Balancing family life with his business and political affairs, Shepherd married Mary Grice Young in January 1862, and he and his bride moved into their first home, a comfortable brick row house at 358 Tenth Street W.¹⁸ Shepherd’s Washington residences would reflect his growing financial success, culminating in the mansion at 1705 K Street some ten years later. Although his mother remained in her nearby Ninth Street residence until after the end of the war, she helped the newlyweds settle into their new home. The couple’s first child, Mary Young Shepherd, was born in early December 1862 at their new home, where Shepherd’s mother no doubt was able to help out with the growing family.

Because Shepherd was a businessman whose major activities were equipping homes with heating, lighting, and plumbing systems, as well as developing real estate and constructing homes, he understood the importance of optimism and stability to encourage investment in local real estate. The constant attacks on Washington for its shortcomings were a threat to such local investment and encouraged attempts to “remove” the capital to some other part of the country. Local newspapers, informed observers such as the recorder of deeds, and the principal real estate brokers and developers of the time were vocal in attributing stuttering investment—public as well as private—in Washington to the threat of retrocession to Mary land and “removal” of the capital to the West. Retrocession had already occurred once, when Congress returned the Alexandria City and County portion of the original ten-mile square across the Potomac River to Virginia in 1846. Agitation and uncertainty had a negative influence on attitudes and property values, something Shepherd well understood.¹⁹ Consequently, as early as the Civil War, Shepherd had begun to take steps to identify and respond to the threat of capital removal, which he believed would crush the life out of Washington and his growing investments in land and buildings.

Article I, section 8, of the Constitution gave Congress exclusive jurisdiction over an area of up to ten miles square anticipated for cession by the states. Early debates over local governance of the nation’s capital wereunited on one key point: executive authority should be vested in an appointee of the president of the United States, not an individual elected by the residents. As an appointee, the mayor, it was thought, “could not fail to administer local affairs in harmony with the national administration.”²⁰ Nonetheless, by 1802 this concept had shifted to a congressional decision to delegate administration of local affairs to the local government, thereby granting limited freedom to residents to manage what concerned them more than it did the general government. However, Congress reserved the right to recall any or all of these privileges if at any time they were neglected or abused.²¹ The 1820 charter of Washington City made the City Corporation responsible for urban improvement, including streets, but from the outset the national government showed little interest in beautifying its creation. For many years the only aesthetic embellishment was Thomas Jefferson’s planting of four rows of poplar trees on Pennsylvania Avenue, in imitation of the famous Unter den Linden in Berlin.²²

Shepherd was not alone in grasping the magnitude of the challenge facing Washington if it was to overcome its status as a stepchild of the national government, but he developed a special ability to convert anger and frustration into concrete results through coalition building. Shepherd realized that Washington’s residents were simply unable to underwrite the physical development expected of the capital of a fast-growing nation without congressional support and funding. He would therefore have to convince Congress that its financial support for the improvement of the nation’s capital was in its own best interest.

Shepherd made use of his election speech as president of the Sixtieth Common Council in 1862 to identify themes to which he would return time and again: (1) supporting Unconditional Union (UU), the bedrock of his views; (2) downplaying what he called “unnecessary agitation” and division; (3) maintaining and developing Washington’s urban infrastructure; and, most important, (4) obtaining a commitment from Congress to participate fully in the city’s development. He exhorted his listeners, “Let us in all things uphold our government and by our acts and discussions secure the aid of our national legislature in the great work of improving and beautifying our beloved city.”²³

Building Blocks for Consolidation

The first step in Shepherd’s long campaign to create a new Washington was revision of the city charter to give the City Council authority to generate tax revenues adequate to pay for urban improvements. An 1862 joint council resolution calling for Congress to revise the Washington City charter led with the statement that the current charter limited the powers of the corporation to such an extent that carrying out substantial improvements was impossible. Shepherd explained his resolution in debate, saying that the corporation needed the power to provide for improvements, including sewerage, river dredging, a new city asylum for the poor, and, above all, paving of the streets. In order to determine where matters stood legally, the City Council approved Shepherd’s proposal for a digest and codification of corporation laws, which had become “incorrect and faulty” as a result of numerous amendments.²⁴ As part of his campaign to create greater awareness of Washington history, Shepherd also called for purchasing an original map of the District of Columbia and requested that General Montgomery Meigs donate photos of the Washington Aqueduct, which Meigs had designed and built in the 1850s to bring an adequate water supply to Washington from farther up the Potomac River.²⁵

In 1863, his final year on the Common Council, Shepherd’s principal legislative initiative remained the reform of the Washington City charter. For reasons that are unclear, Shepherd was absent from most of the council meetings in the summer and early fall of that year. He may have become disenchanted with the influence of the Common Council; he could also have been focusing more on building what was becoming a very successful plumbing and gas-fitting business. He had reason to devote more time and energy to his business dealings.

During the first half of 1864 Shepherd undertook a “private war” with Joseph F. Brown, who ran the Washington Gas Light Company and represented Shepherd’s Ward 3 constituency on the Board of Aldermen. The controversy was a combination of personalities, business, and politics. Shepherd took aim at the company’s pricing policies and supported a proposed bill in the Common Council to create a charter for a new gas company.²⁶ Throughout the spring Shepherd and Brown swapped heated exchanges in the press. Shepherd challenged the quality of the gas company’s work, and Brown countered with allegations about J. W. Thompson’s gas lines. It was clear that each man’s personal integrity was on the line. In a letter to the Evening Star, Shepherd accused Brown of slandering the Thompson firm in order to bring in more business for Brown’s newly launched plumbing establishment, adding that his own antagonism toward the gas company was due to his opposition to all monopolies that “oppress” the people.²⁷ Although the spat was officially resolved at a meeting arranged by friends, it resurfaced in a bitter dispute over which man should be the official candidate to represent Ward 3 in the June election for alderman. Shepherd stepped down as president of the Sixty-First Common Council (1863–64) in June 1864 in order to run for Brown’s Ward 3 Board of Aldermen seat. After a series of no-holds-barred public exchanges, Brown defeated Shepherd by a vote of 483 to 395.²⁸ After the legislative defeat, Shepherd may have decided that his bid to move to the higher legislative chamber was too ambitious, and he took the opportunity to shift his focus to building his fortune and laying the groundwork for the grand plans that were to be unveiled a few years later.

In 1864 Shepherd was twenty-nine years old and the de facto head of the J. W. Thompson plumbing establishment, although the original name remained in use until Shepherd purchased the firm the next year. Even during the dark days of the war, Shepherd and his wife quickly established a lively social presence, making their home a focal point for merrymaking and building political relationships. At their Tenth Street residence they hosted events that were to fill the social pages of Washington newspapers for years to come. The Shepherds loved to show off their means through elaborate and expensive entertainments. A typical party in February 1864 was described in the Evening Star as among the most agreeable parties of a season distinguished for the number and brilliancy of such affairs.²⁹

Shepherd was also becoming a leader in church affairs at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. He was appointed chairman of the church’s Northern Presbyterian Mission, which was successful at raising money, purchasing land, and establishing a chapel just north of Boundary Street (now Florida Avenue).³⁰ Shepherd’s public generosity was expressed in his gift of a white marble pulpit for the Metropolitan Presbyterian Church on Capitol Hill.³¹ The church had just completed construction of a major edifice, and President Ulysses S. Grant would attend the dedication.³² Shepherd was becoming astute in linking charitable contributions with high-visibility political situations.

Shepherd was also in the process of launching an investment initiative in local street railroads. Among the first was the Metropolitan Railroad, which was planned as a double track from near the Capitol, along D Street to Fifteenth Street NW, and a single or double track back along New York Avenue to Ninth Street, then south to the Washington Canal. Following the railroad’s incorporation by Congress, a July meeting of shareholders elected seven directors: Shepherd and six friends and business associates who would remain in his inner circle for years to come.³³

Two weeks after Shepherd lost his bid for the Ward 3 alderman seat in June 1864, his first son, also named Alexander, died at the age of six months, the first of three Shepherd children to die in infancy. Shepherd purchased a plot of ground in Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, a favorite project of banker and philanthropist William Wilson Corcoran. Eventually the plot would hold the graves of several members of Shepherd’s immediate family, although he and his wife are buried in a granite mausoleum in Rock Creek Cemetery across town. Following the death of his son, Shepherd, his wife, and his brother Tom joined his sister-in-law Susan Young and other members of the Young family on a vacation in New Eng land, visiting the White Mountains of New Hampshire and New York’s Niagara Falls and Saratoga, among other stops, before returning through New York City and Philadelphia. The change of scenery appeared to do Alexander and Mary good, although Mary said pointedly in one letter home, “Yankee land is horrid.”³⁴ One of Shepherd’s few surviving personal letters from the vacation is worth quoting because of the unusual glimpse it gives into his spirituality. Writing to his mother from Niagara Falls, he spoke at length of the moving nature of the experience, demonstrating a naïve and unquestioning acceptance of the divine:

One has only to view such grand proofs of old dame nature to feel what a terribly small and despicable thing man is. What a tiny atom in the great work of creation and what a kind and merciful being Our God is in putting in man that spirit from on high which makes him the superior of all other created beings. I assure you that I have never heard a sermon which so inculcated humility and thrilled me with a sense of my own utter insignificance as that which thundered over the rocks of Niagara Falls . . . as I stood for the first time and looked upon this wonderful work of God. Oh, what a powerful sermon was preached in its thunder tones. How any atom like man could stand here and doubt the existence of a God is more than I can comprehend. As I stood on the shore at the Cave of the Winds and looked upward at the rocky cliffs which overhung one and seem about to fall and overwhelm me, I experienced a feeling of terror such as I have never before felt.³⁵

The Union is Preserved

In April 1865 the Civil War ended, and President Lincoln was assassinated. In the wake of these two major events, the United States struggled to establish a new equilibrium. Two critical issues faced the nation: reintegration of the devastated former Confederacy into the national polity and the future of millions of unskilled or semiskilled and vulnerable freedmen. The Union victory had affirmed the unity of the nation and brought a renewed sense of national power and a dramatic shift in the relationship between the states and the national government.³⁶ Like the nation as a whole, the District of Columbia was reeling, its primitive streets having been churned into mud and dust by soldiers’ horses, its trees cut down for firewood, and former Confederate sympathizers straggling back to reestablish their lives in a hostile social environment. Blacks now made up one-third of the District’s population, and their political and civil rights would be a vexing political issue for leaders such as Shepherd. After its first sixty-one years of halting progress, the nation’s capital had experienced four war years of disruptive change. The stage was set for the next act in the post-bellum human drama, with Radical Republicans in Congress arguing that denial of rights to blacks was an insult to the enlightened sentiment of the age.³⁷

The chief business of the capital was government, and local government, such as it was, ultimately rested in the hands of Congress, where District residents had no representation, and local elites could not bring the crucial spheres of economic and political power under their control. The Confederate defeat was a disaster for the city’s old southern elite, who were dispersed, defeated, disgraced, or impoverished, and sometimes all four. Into the vacuum created by the demise of the old southern aristocracy rushed a host of newcomers eager to fill the vacancies they left behind.³⁸ In the decades before the war, the unfinished capital had been the physical embodiment of American distaste for centralized government, but the Civil War brought new vigor and a vastly expanded scale to the federal bureaucracy in Washington. Only a strong, centralized government could provide the leadership that the war effort ultimately demanded. The same war that strengthened the federal government, however, had left Washington a physical mess. The immediate postwar capital was the ugly antithesis of the almost mythic image of the “Great Republic,” “the Nation,” and “the Union” that was filling the print and oratory of the day. The new crop of federal officials who wanted the scope of government enlarged also insisted on a capital that would project its grandeur to the rest of the nation.³⁹

The gap between reality and expectations was vast. Pennsylvania Avenue, the one paved street between the White House and the Capitol, was home to “cheap saloons, gambling houses, and pawnshops. Ford’s Theatre, notorious for President Lincoln’s assassination, had been requisitioned by the government. The National Theater and Wall’s Opera House provided what meager legitimate entertainment options as were available; high- and low-class gambling establishments still flourished. Unpainted wooden buildings that had served as barracks and stables for army mules still stood mute, months after the end of the fighting.”⁴⁰

Taking Care of His Business Interests

Shepherd remained out of elective politics for several years and devoted his energies to two principal goals: becoming a successful, wealthy businessman and advancing the cause of Washington’s transformation. The long-expected transition at the J. W. Thompson plumbing firm took place in mid-May 1865, when newspaper announcements confirmed the company’s dissolution and the elevation of Shepherd, the former junior partner, to owner of Alexander Shepherd & Brothers.⁴¹ The firm then consisted of five shops for gas fitting, plumbing, brass finishing, carpentry, and blacksmithing.⁴² Much of the merchandise boasted a Philadelphia pedigree, and advertisements in Washington papers for current lighting models frequently cited their having been brought from Philadelphia. This became a Shepherd trademark to be repeated in his later development work, when he made use of the text of the Philadelphia Board of Trade document in his next major civic venture, the Washington Board of Trade. Aside from any intrinsic superiority, Philadelphia was also the home of Mary Shepherd’s maternal ancestors, and it would have been natural for Shepherd to strengthen family ties while conducting personal or public business.

A key element in Shepherd’s plans for Washington was the Board of Trade, which he helped launch at a meeting at City Hall on October 17, 1865, bringing together some fifty leading businessmen and twenty-one firms. He understood the nexus between commerce and politics and saw a business development organization as a useful tool to address political issues indirectly. Shepherd was one of the first speakers at the meeting, and he eloquently described the advantages of a merchants’ exchange and urged cooperation among members of the business community, including those in Georgetown, in order to make it happen. Not surprisingly, Shepherd was spokesman for the planning committee, whose draft preamble noted that a lack of unity had been a detriment to the interests of the community and that commercial advantages were best obtained by united action.

The Board of Trade’s initial skirmishes included criticism of a proposed license for a Washington and Alexandria Railroad line through the city as “a gross outrage upon the industrial interests of this city; of incalculable harm to the interests of its citizens; and calculated to destroy the business prospects of this Metropolis.”⁴³ At a meeting with the Washington Board of Aldermen in November, Shepherd argued against the license because, he asserted, it would further monopolize control of local rail lines by outside interests and degrade vital parts of the city with tracks, water towers, and parked rail cars. Employing a technique he would use effectively throughout his career, Shepherd arranged for an elegant repast at the end of the meeting in an effort to create goodwill.⁴⁴ Always a gregarious figure, Shepherd had become adept at using the leverage afforded by his wealth, more than his physical size and aggressive personality, to influence others to his way of thinking.

Shepherd’s strategic objective with the Board of Trade became clear in November 1865. He returned to a favorite topic by proposing to create a new, single charter for the whole of the District of Columbia built around consolidation of the capital’s three fragmented and separately governed jurisdictions (Georgetown, Washington City, and Washington County). He argued that Congress should be persuaded to create an “efficient and harmonious” government for the District through consolidation and that the Board of Trade, which represented such a large proportion of the District’s commerce, was the proper vehicle for advancing the project.⁴⁵ A number of board members objected to using a business promotion organization for political purposes, but Shepherd framed the issue differently: the resolution was only a business necessity that “should not be mixed up in any degree with politics, negro suffrage, or anything else. . . . We have nothing to do with politics in this District, and they should never be dragged into matters of District interests.”⁴⁶

At the December 6 meeting to discuss consolidation, Shepherd provided insights into his thinking about how the consolidated entity might be governed: “Whether the Government should be territorial or be vested in appointed commissioners, or a ruler to be elected by the people, are questions which might cause a diversity of opinion, but the advantages [are] fully recognized by businessmen and taxpayers.” He went on to argue that “there are no politics here, and we had no political rights,” assuring his audience that the initiative would not be viewed by the people as political and asserting that nine-tenths of the residents would favor consolidation.⁴⁷ Despite general agreement that Georgetown would also support the move, one participant noted that the people, not the Board of Trade, should initiate such an important change in local government. Shepherd retorted that he expected the cry of politics to be raised, “as is always so when something of benefit to the District of Columbia is proposed.” He reiterated his view that consolidation was a pure business issue, “and if the municipalities were placed under one good man, and Congress pay the Government’s portion,” there would be positive results and reduced corruption. “As for political rights, we haven’t any, and are not as good as darkies.”⁴⁸ Shepherd pressed the point by noting, “The City has few privileges, and Congress may at any time enact obnoxious laws, and it would therefore seem much better if Congress had entire control.”⁴⁹ To give additional weight to the initiative, Shepherd also offered a resolution for the Board of Trade to urge Congress to consolidate the District of Columbia. With these assurances from its most forceful member, the board passed the resolution unanimously.

Shepherd was playing a sophisticated political game. He used the newly established Board of Trade to advance a radical political initiative while maintaining that it was nonpolitical and that business promotion alone was the focus. He was able to identify an issue that combined commercial development with an implicit appeal to the conservative “old citizens’” rejection of black enfranchisement. He was well aware of but not sympathetic to the rapidly changing goals of black Washingtonians. Although blacks were not to receive the vote until January 1867 and their votes were not yet in play, class and politics mattered a great deal. As businessmen and loyal Republicans, members of the board had the ear of Congress. The board made no explicit case for or against voting rights and steered clear of inflammatory language. Instead, it emphasized the vocabulary of progress and prosperity to make the case against black voting rights and, more generally, against democratic government.⁵⁰ Board members wanted a unified District above all, and Shepherd’s formula for charter consolidation avoided addressing the racial issue.

Deploying the Board of Trade, a nonpolitical entity, as a tool of influence to achieve political ends was a tactical if not a strategic change because in the years before 1864 Shepherd had made every effort to use his initiatives in the Common Council for the same purposes. He may also have realized that his defeat for a seat on the Board of Aldermen provided him with an opportunity to change gears. For the next several years he would work officially outside the political system in order to bring about change within.

Notes

¹Robert Harrison, “An Experimental Station for Lawmaking: Congress and the District of Columbia, 1862–1878,” Civil War History 53 (Mar. 2007):33.

²Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital (Prince ton, N.J., 1967), p. 18.

³Jefferson Morley, Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835 (New York, 2012), pp. 144–56.

⁴Josephine F. Pacheco, The Pearl: A Failed Slave Escape on the Potomac (Chapel Hill, 2005), pp. 53–57, 92, 112.

⁵Alan Lessoff, The Nation and Its City: Politics, “Corruption,” and Progress in Washington, D. C., 1861–1902 (Baltimore, 1994), p. 18.

⁶Green, Secret City, pp. 89–90.

⁷Social equality was “a container for every thing that (opponents) considered anathema.” Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D. C. (Chapel Hill, 2010), pp. 9–10.

⁸Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), Mar. 11, 1862.

⁹Green, Secret City, p. 60.

¹⁰Evening Star, Apr. 1, 1862; National Republican (Washington, D.C.), Apr. 1, 1862.

¹¹National Republican, Apr. 29, 1862.

¹²Ibid., Mar. 22, 1864.

¹³Evening Star, Apr. 11, 1862.

¹⁴Ibid., Apr. 18, 1862.

¹⁵Ibid., Nov. 12, 1861.

¹⁶Ibid., Sept. 24, 1861; Mar. 18, Mar. 25, Apr. 18, May 13, 1862.

¹⁷National Republican, May 1, 1864.

¹⁸Hutchinson’s Washington and Georgetown Directory (Washington, D.C., 1863). Due to a map adjustment in 1869, 358 Tenth Street W. would become 1125 Tenth Street NW.

¹⁹Wilhelmus Bogart Bryan, A History of the National Capital from Its Foundation through the Period of the Adoption of the Organic Act, 2 vols. (New York, 1914), 1:448.

²⁰John Addison Porter, The City of Washington: Its Origin and Administration, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 3rd ser., nos. 11–12 (Baltimore, 1885), p. 19.

²¹Ibid., p. 19.

²²Ibid., pp. 20–21.

²³Evening Star, June 9, 1862. Another newspaper added, “Let us labor, fellow-councilmen, to make this metropolis worthy [of] the hallowed name it bears, and worthy to be the capital of the ‘Great Republic’ of the world” (National Republican, June 10, 1862).

²⁴Evening Star, June 30, 1863; Journal of the 61st Council (Washington, D.C., 1863), p. 25. The resultant digest of Washington City laws was completed in the fall of 1863, and the Common Council approved purchase of fifty copies in January 1864 (Journal of the 61st Council, pp. 326–27).

²⁵Evening Star, Apr. 12 and 19, 1864.

²⁶Ibid., Feb. 2, 1864.

²⁷Ibid., Feb. 2–3, 1864.

²⁸Ibid., June 1–4 and 7, 1864.

²⁹Ibid., Feb. 17, 1864.

³⁰“Minutes of Session of the F St. Church 1819–1859 and the New York Ave. Presbyterian Church 1859–1871,” p. 177, National Presbyterian Church Archives, Washington, D.C.

³¹Evening Star, Dec. 5, 1872.

³² Ann Nickel, “A Church on the Hill,” Hill Rag Magazine (Sept. 2011): 60–61.

³³Evening Star, Jan. 28, July 27 and 29, 1864. In addition to Shepherd, the directors were William B. Todd, Matthew G. Emery, Lewis Clephane, John R. Semmes, J. W. Thompson, and S. P. Brown.

³⁴Mary Shepherd to her parents, Shepherd Papers, box 2, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

³⁵Alexander Shepherd to his mother, Aug. 21, 1864. Shepherd Papers, box 2, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Shepherd Papers, donated by the family, appear to have been extensively edited.

³⁶Robert Harrison, Washington during Civil War and Reconstruction (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 56–57.

³⁷Ibid., p. 112.

³⁸Kathryn Allamong Jacob, Capital Elites: High Society in Washington, D. C., after the Civil War (Washington, D.C., 1995), p. 8.

³⁹Ibid., pp. 9, 58.

⁴⁰James Huntington Whyte, The Uncivil War: Washington during the Reconstruction, 1865–1878 (New York, 1958), pp. 14–15.

⁴¹Evening Star, May 17, 1865.

⁴²Ibid., Sept. 12, 1865.

⁴³Ibid., Oct. 31, 1865.

⁴⁴Ibid., Nov. 16, 1865.

⁴⁵Ibid., Nov. 23, 1865.

⁴⁶Ibid.

⁴⁷Ibid., Dec. 8, 1865.

⁴⁸Ibid., Dec. 8, 1865.

⁴⁹National Intelligencer, Dec. 7, 1865.

⁵⁰Masur, An Example for All the Land, pp. 195–96.