distribution and sewerage systems. Following the establishment of a committee of distinguished residents that included Mayor Walter Lenox, banker William Wilson (W. W.) Corcoran, and Smithsonian Secretary Joseph Henry, architect Andrew Jackson Downing produced a plan for the redesign of the Mall. By the time the Civil War had worn down the city with the demands of war, Washington had created—at least on paper—a framework for modernization.47
War Comes to Washington
The country watched with growing concern as North-South tensions escalated in 1860, and Washington, D.C., became a focal point of conflict. The election of Abraham Lincoln as president in November was widely considered a portent that war would surely come, despite Lincoln’s protestations in support of an undivided Union. During his unsuccessful bid for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois in 1858, Lincoln had given his famous “House Divided” speech, in which he said, “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.”48 Lincoln steadily strengthened his central theme of preserving the Union, the core idea around which Shepherd, as a fledgling politician, would build his political platform when he entered politics. Even though Shepherd came from a slaveholding family and held conservative social views, he was enough of a practical politician to realize that Lincoln and the Republican Party were the wave of the future, and he was determined to conform sufficiently to benefit from the momentum.
On the eve of the Civil War, Washington was a slaveholding city wedged between two slaveholding states, Mary land and Virginia. A vivid portrait of the city described it as “a southern town, without the picturesqueness, but with the indolence, the disorder and the want of sanitation.”49 The city’s water supply was augmented by wells and by springs in the hills. With only scattered sewer lines, privies were plentiful. In 1860 Washington had a population of 75,080, with 60,793 (81 percent) whites and 14,316 (19 percent) blacks, of whom 3,185 were slaves and 11,131 free.50 The whites were mostly southern born: 57 percent had been born in the city, 13 percent in Virginia, and 18 percent in Mary land.51 An easy social alliance existed between Tidewater families and southern politicians in Washington; moreover, southern members of Congress were more likely than those from the North to bring their families to Washington, reinforcing the southern ambiance of the city.52 Congress had imposed a partial ban on the slave trade as part of the package of legislation making up the Compromise of 1850, but residents could still buy and sell slaves for personal use. Newspapers advertised slave traffic, and the occasional slave coffle still passed through the city.53
The gloom in Washington over the worsening national political situation also affected the economy: the real estate market had virtually collapsed in the wake of Lincoln’s election as president. Many would-be sellers retained their property, fearing that they would be unable to obtain the desired price, while others traded D.C. properties for western lands. As 1861 dawned, the Evening Star reprinted an article from a Philadelphia newspaper sure to cast a pall over the expectations of the Washington business community by linking political chaos and economic failure with the threat of the physical removal of the capital: “If there is the slightest danger or disturbance at Washington, the ultimate result will be, and before any far distant day, the removal of the seat of government.” The article predicted that any disturbance of public tranquility would deal a body blow to real estate values. It further predicted that any reverse for the Union in a conflict with the South would make transfer of the capital to the safe and growing West a certainty, leaving Washington “a waste, howling wilderness.”54 As a young businessman who would make his fortune building and outfitting houses in Washington, Shepherd would have been sensitive to anything that would have a negative impact on the local economy.
The tone of Washington society on the eve of the war was set by the larger property owners, many of whom were linked by marriage to aristocratic, slave-owning families of Mary land and Virginia. It was common for Georgetown residents to refer to themselves as Mary landers, but they were known locally as “old citizens” or “antiques,” and money alone was not sufficient to gain admission to their circle. At the national level, the male residents were primarily government officials, military officers, and businessmen. Democrats had controlled Congress for several years prior to 1860, and southern-leaning Democrats held many of the top appointive positions, along with a large percentage of the clerkships in the federal bureaus.55 To the small, Georgetown-based clique that dominated Washington life, Shepherd would always be a parvenu seeking acceptance and respectability that they were determined not to give to a self-made, school-dropout plumber.
By the eve of the Civil War, the twenty-six-year-old Shepherd, by then a partner in the J. W. Thompson firm, was making his mark as an ambitious young member of Washington’s business community. Still a bachelor, he supported his widowed mother and siblings while living in the family home on Ninth Street. For young, patriotic men like Shepherd yet to make their mark, the political tension resulting from southern secessionism became nerve-wracking as 1861 began. Rumors of sedition in Washington became standard fare. Government clerks, often emboldened by whiskey at the Willard Hotel and elsewhere, proclaimed that Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4 would never take place.56
Concern was widespread that the secession of two slave states—Virginia and Maryland—from the Union would make it impossible for Washington to continue as the capital of the United States. Governor Thomas Hicks of Maryland—who ultimately stood with the Union and blocked a special session of the legislature expected to vote for secession—received anonymous letters describing plans to capture Washington and convert it into the capital of the Southern Confederacy by seizing the federal buildings and archives before exacting de jure and de facto recognition from foreign governments.57 On Christmas Day 1860 the Richmond Examiner published an editorial calling for Mary land men to join with Virginians in seizing the federal capital.58 In response to rumors of sedition swirling around Washington, a nervous Congress convened a select committee at the end of January to investigate but found no evidence of a serious conspiracy.59
As winter turned into spring in 1861, the lines between North and South were drawn, and the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12 marked the onset of hostilities. On April 15 President Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand volunteers to defend the Union, and Shepherd and his younger brother Thomas enlisted with the National Rifles. This volunteer Washington militia unit reflected political tensions in Washington over the future of the Union. Events earlier in the spring had revealed seditious scheming in the National Rifles, whose pro-Southern captain had molded a sympathetic unit and amassed weaponry far in excess of need. The unit was purged, and disloyal members, including the leader, dismissed, which meant that the National Rifles were under strength at the first call for volunteers on April 10.60 By April 15, however, the unit listed seventy-five privates enrolled, plus sergeants and officers—exceeding the minimum forty per unit established by the War Department. The National Rifles claimed to be the first Washington militia to muster that day, thanks to marching double-quick to the War Department.61
The Alexander Shepherd who heeded his president’s April 15 call for volunteers was ready for personal testing. He had been shaped through years of hard, physical work and sports, as well as his own combative personality. He was still unmarried and had progressed from clerk to partner at John Thompson’s plumbing establishment. He had become active in Washington Republican Party politics on a pro-Union ticket. Shepherd’s National Rifles mustering-in card for Company A, Third Battalion, gives a snapshot of inductee number 49, who signed on as a private for a standard ninety-day enlistment: Washington-born plumber, twenty-six years of age and six feet tall, with light blue eyes, dark brown hair, and sallow complexion.62 Shepherd’s fellow enlistees that day were a varied lot, with a wide range of employment: clerk, draughtsman, lawyer, bank teller, law student, upholsterer, patent lawyer, pharmacist, mechanical dentist, printer, soldier, architect, tobacconist, reporter, sawyer, jeweler’s clerk, civil engineer, carpenter, editor, stenographer, student, physician, and messenger.63 Among the volunteers was William G. Moore, a reporter who became Shepherd’s decades-long friend and
