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
