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.
Chapter Three
“We Want an Honest Board of Commissioners and No Broken-down Political Demagogues”
Building His