17, 1861. Considering Shepherd’s later massive expenditures, including taxing Washington residents for public improvements, his attention to tax reduction in his initial term on the Common Council is noteworthy.
81War History of the National Rifles, pp. 36–37; Third Battalion, D.C. Militia, “Description and Morning Report,” vol. 1, RG 94, NARA.
82Certificate no. 893.510, Civil War and Later Survivors’ Records, RG 15, NARA. Since commutation via cash payment cost $300, not the $400 recollected by Thomas Shepherd fifty years later, his statement about paying for “both” could be taken to mean that he paid for substitutes for himself and for his brother, Alexander. Why the less well-off brother would have paid for the wealthier one is unknown, but it is possible that Alexander wished not to be on the record as having paid for a substitute to avoid further military service.
83Evening Star, Nov. 11, 1860.
84“Sessions Book, Fourth Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C., First Book, Session 1828–1878.” Shepherd Family Bible, courtesy of Shepherd great-grand daughter Alexandra Wyatt-Brown Malick; photocopy of marriage certificate courtesy of Shepherd granddaughter Mary Wagner Woods.
85White, A. Lincoln, pp. 403–4; Mitchell Snay, Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, 1997), is an excellent source for understanding the break between the two wings of the Presbyterian Church.
86Dewey D. Wallace, George Washington University, conversation with the author, Mar. 3, 2006.
87Dewey D. Wallace, “The New York Avenue Presbyterian Church: Context and Overview,” unpublished draft, 2006, pp. 22–23.
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