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.
Chapter Three
“We Want an Honest Board of Commissioners and No Broken-down Political Demagogues”
Building His Business and Political Base for Civic Reform, 1865–1868
WITH THE COUNTRY struggling to find a new equilibrium in the aftermath of the Civil War, Shepherd—and Washington—faced numerous challenges. Shepherd used the years after the war to build his fortune and establish himself as a major player on the local scene while crafting a strategy to consolidate the District of Columbia and change its form of governance. An additional distraction—and spur to action—was the per sis tent campaign to “remove” the nation’s capital closer to the geographic center of the expanding nation. Membership on the Levy Court1 would provide Shepherd with a vehicle for launching trial political balloons on Washington’s future.
Shepherd’s tactics, if not his strategy, on one issue—the civil rights aspirations of Washington’s black citizens—appeared to change after he resigned from the Common Council and was defeated in his bid for alderman in 1864. He had repeatedly offered views on racial issues in the past, opposing both the black franchise and attempts to put blacks “on an equality” with whites. His use of what would today be considered racist language (e.g., “darkies”), while not uncommon at the time, suggests a paternalistic attitude at minimum. As the 1860s drew to an end and the District’s black citizens obtained the vote, Shepherd downplayed his racial views by promoting consolidation of the District of Columbia charter in the name of government efficiency and economic prosperity. He abandoned explicit calls for black subordination, despite continuing to champion policies that would eliminate black suffrage.
Washington’s black residents were well aware of the changed political environment brought about by the defeat of the Confederacy. Following the District of Columbia Emancipation Act of April 16, 1862, the city’s black population intended to push for full rights as Americans. Black Washingtonians, with Radical Republican congressional support, fought for the vote.2 More than 2,500 of the city’s leading black residents petitioned Congress in fall 1865, arguing for political equality on the grounds that “we are intelligent enough to be industrious, to have accumulated property, to build and sustain churches and institutions
