of the races. The wealth and social standing built up by his grand fathers as Mary land tobacco planters and by his father as an enterprising businessman in early Washington, D.C., formed Shepherd’s frame of reference as he strove to make his own place in the capital’s economic, social, and political life. His father’s early death forced Shepherd to become the male head of the family in his early teens. Thrust prematurely into the adult world, he responded with the single-minded drive, energy, and ambition that would characterize the rest of his life. He rarely if ever questioned his motives or methods but rather pressed forward, confident in the correctness of his actions.
Shepherd’s paternal grand father, Thomas, died in 1817 in Charles County, Mary land, leaving the family relatively well off, with an estate worth $4,000 (exclusive of land holdings) that included nine slaves.1 This was at a time of significant migration from the Tidewater region, when an estimated 250,000 whites abandoned the area between 1790 and 1820 as a result of the depletion of the tobacco fields.2 Perhaps this was the reason that Alexander Robey Shepherd’s father, Alexander Shepherd Sr., left in 1822 to seek his fortune in Washington, D.C. Why he chose to migrate to the nation’s capital is conjectural, but he may have been attracted to the business potential of the infant city—only a quarter-century old—that President George Washington had envisioned as both the commercial center and the seat of government of the new nation.
Shepherd Sr. returned to Charles County in 1833 to marry Susan Davidson Robey, daughter of Townley Robey, a wealthy planter. Robey had seen military service in the War of 1812, was an Episcopal Church vestryman, and served as sheriff of Charles County, all roles associated with the county’s financial and social elite.3 Later, Alexander Robey Shepherd would remember his maternal grand father as “a tall old gentleman in a white beaver hat, coming from church on a Sunday and drawing water from the well, in a bucket with a long pole.”4 The marriage to Susan Robey gave Alexander Shepherd Sr. enhanced social standing and the wealth she inherited after her father’s death in 1844. This wealth consisted of land and money from an estate totaling almost two thousand acres and physical property valued at $5,000 (including eighteen slaves), a considerable sum at the time.5
Shepherd’s father developed coal and lumberyards near his Washington City residence at Twelfth Street and Mary land Avenue SW and in Market Square, the area next to Center Market on Pennsylvania Avenue NW, adjacent to the Washington Canal. He was a director of the Georgetown-based Potomac Insurance Company and active in public life, serving as an assistant commissioner for Ward 5, responsible for overseeing public improvements such as streets and walkways.6 He remained a slave owner; the 1840 District of Columbia census recorded five slaves in the house hold, although in 1841 he sold a thirteen-year-old slave, with instructions for manumission at age twenty-five.7 At Shepherd’s death in 1845 he still owned seven slaves, although he left instructions for their eventual manumission.8
Turning his back on the family’s Episcopalian tradition in Charles County, Shepherd’s father joined and played a leadership role in two of Washington’s Presbyterian churches, the First and the Fourth. While the Episcopal Church was the church of the upper classes, Presbyterianism was a fast-growing Protestant faith in Washington. Alexander Shepherd Sr. significantly increased his participation in church affairs after joining Fourth Presbyterian, being elected to the board of trustees and then elected its president the following year. It is likely that he had developed a group of friends among the young businessmen of Washington who were already Presbyterians and that he became a Presbyterian more as a social than a religious decision. This would be a pattern his eldest son would also follow.
After the birth of the couple’s second child, Alexander Robey Shepherd, on January 30, 1835 (their first child, Anna, was born in 1832), four other children—Bettie (1837), Thomas (1839), Wilmer (1841), and Arthur (1842)—followed in quick succession. The family continued to live in southwest Washington City until Shepherd, in failing health, purchased a farm in neighboring Washington County adjacent to St. Paul’s, the Rock Creek Episcopal parish, where the family lived for a little more than a year before his death from an undisclosed illness in June 1845. In the period that he owned the farm, he turned it into a showcase, no doubt assisted by the wealth inherited following the death the previous year of his father-in-law.9 The time Alexander Robey Shepherd passed as a youngster on a working farm must have had an impact on him, since there was always work to be done, and he demonstrated an early willingness, even eagerness, to engage in it. As a man, he was often remarked to outwork his employees.
Alexander Shepherd Sr.’s will directed that his eldest son, Alexander, upon reaching the age of twenty-one, be advanced the sum of $4,000 (approximately $127,000 today) “to enable him to prosecute advantageously such business as he may select for his future support.” The will also directed the executors to provide a suitable education for the children to prepare them for business, adding that if any of the sons demonstrated a talent for the “learned professions,” funds should be made available for university studies.10 A newspaper column a few days after Shepherd’s death paid tribute to his sterling character and dedication to the church, describing him as industrious, honest, and enterprising and pointing out his kindness not only to his own family but also to anyone in need.11
The Young Capital
The Washington, D.C., area to which Alexander Shepherd Sr. came in 1822 as a young man seeking a better life was a young, straggling place with a total population of some thirty-three thousand, composed of two-thirds whites and one-third slaves and free blacks.12 James Monroe had been reelected president two years previously, and Washington was in the early stages of defining itself physically and socially. The most striking characteristic of Washington in the first half of the nineteenth century was the discrepancy between its untidy reality and the grandiose scale of the original intent of the founders. Peter Charles L’Enfant, the French-born architect and engineer chosen by President Washington in 1791 to plan the city, had envisioned a magnificent city of grand avenues, sweeping vistas, and magnificent public monuments and buildings.13 Published maps of the District of Columbia portrayed L’Enfant’s plan, but the city experienced by visitors and residents fell far short. Scattered but imposing government buildings stood alongside undistinguished hotels and commercial establishments, graceful row houses alongside undistinguished frame houses and squalid shanties. These differences were the more dramatic because of long, undeveloped spaces separating the “arc of settlement.”14 The streets were muddy when wet and dusty when dry, and the Washington Canal was polluted. Many of the city’s roads were still only lines on the plan drawn by L’Enfant in 1791, and almost all those in use were unpaved. Only a few major public buildings had been erected, among them the White House, Post Office, and Patent Office; repair work on the Capitol, which had been burned during the British invasion in 1814, was ongoing. Congress was the principal institution in the city, but evident only when it was in session. Boarding houses for members of Congress were numerous, as were taverns and restaurants catering to the legislators. Georgetown, across Rock Creek to the west, was the center of organized local society and had been a river port before L’Enfant laid out Washington City in 1791. Georgetown boasted elegant brick homes and a social set; Washington City suffered by comparison.
When one thinks of modern Washington, D.C., with its elegant public buildings, parks, avenues, and Potomac River vistas, it is almost inconceivable that, for the first seventy years of the city’s life sporadic efforts were made to “remove” the capital from Washington or to retrocede pieces of it to Mary land and Virginia. Yet this debate was only a continuation of intense discussions prior to the selection of the site for the capital in 1790.15 Washington’s residents, who believed that the decision by Congress to site the national capital in a ten-mile square on the Potomac River would put the location debate to rest, were to be proved wrong time and again.
The starting point for Washington’s development was the original plan for the city by L’Enfant. Drawn after consultation with President George Washington, the plan envisioned an elegant, continental design imitating the grandeur and aesthetic coherence of European planning without overlooking the republican values of the new country.16 Key to L’Enfant’s plan was a vision of a capital city that would serve as both political symbol and commercial hub, reflecting the