Spring 1867 brought significant personal and professional change for Shepherd when he was approved by Congress for the Levy Court, the governing body for Washington County. The county was not a corporation like Washington City and Georgetown, and the Levy Court was based on a law inherited from the original Mary land land grant to the national government. The court, composed of nine judges appointed by the president for three-year terms, governed a large, thinly populated area consisting of farms and occasional grand houses. Shepherd was one of the three judges appointed from Washington City.39 His duties no doubt brought back memories of living on the farm next to Rock Creek Church before his father died. If, perhaps, the affairs of Washington County seemed far removed from the concerns of Washington City and Georgetown, development was pushing out into the county. The Levy Court experience was useful for Shepherd in working closely with men whom he would encounter professionally in the future, as well as providing a complement to his earlier work with the Washington City Common Council.
In 1867, when Alexander and Mary Shepherd decided to build an out-of-town home for their growing family, they returned to the vicinity of the old family farm in the county north of Rock Creek Cemetery. Consistent with his new wealth and embrace of conspicuous consumption, Shepherd built an elegant house that the family named “Bleak House” from the title of the Charles Dickens novel the children were reading at the time. A family account described the approximately 260 acres as the highest spot in the District, with old apple trees, meadows, and woodland running back to Rock Creek.40 The Second Empire–style wooden main house was one of the showplaces of this remote suburban district and considered large in its time. The estate contained a bowling alley and gymnasium, a barn and overseer’s house, as well as trout ponds and a cherry orchard.41 The formal entrance to Bleak House was a stone porter’s lodge on Seventh Street Road (today Georgia Avenue) at some distance from the residence.42 Bleak House was to hold many memories—both happy and sad—for the Shepherd family. Daughter Grace Shepherd Merchant later described Bleak House as meaning much more to the family than the mansion Shepherd later built on Farragut Square.43
Mount Pleasant, Shepherd family home in Charles County, Maryland. (Courtesy of Samuel Ward Collection, College of Southern Maryland)
Union troops parading on an unpaved Washington street, ca. 1865. (Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)
Long Bridge, 1865 (from Washington side of Potomac River). (Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)
Harper’s Weekly (June 8, 1861) print depicts Union troops crossing Long Bridge into Virginia in May 1861. (Courtesy of Kiplinger Library, Historical Society of Washington)
Union soldiers on the Mall (unfinished Washington Monument in background). (Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)
Downtown Washington road scene (F Street NW) before Shepherd’s paving operations. (Courtesy of Kiplinger Library, Historical Society of Washington)
Shepherd Building, Pennsylvania Avenue NW, during an 1871 parade celebrating paving of the avenue. (From the collection of Robert A. Truax)
Bleak House, Shepherd’s suburban Washington residence north of Walter Reed Hospital, was built in 1868. (Courtesy of Kiplinger Library, Historical Society of Washington)
Shepherd seated portrait, 1880. (Courtesy of Kiplinger Library, Historical Society of Washington)
Shepherd residence at 1125 Tenth Street NW, where the family lived before completion of the K Street mansion. (Courtesy of Kiplinger Library, Historical Society of Washington)
This certificate signed by President Grant appointed Shepherd governor of the District of Columbia in 1873. (Courtesy of Kiplinger Library, Historical Society of Washington)
Sayles J. Bowen, former Washington City mayor and Shepherd critic. (Courtesy of Kiplinger Library, Historical Society of Washington)
William Wilson Corcoran, influential Washington banker and Shepherd opponent. (Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)
Mary Grice Shepherd, 1880. (Courtesy of Kiplinger Library, Historical Society of Washington)
Drive for Change in Governance
The five years before 1870 saw the unfolding of a complex political process to determine the future governance of the District, and Shepherd was well positioned to be a major player, even though he held no elected legislative position. As an ambitious, self-made businessman from a conservative social tradition, Shepherd understood the importance of remedying the dysfunctional nature of the District’s governance if the city was ever to move beyond haphazard, piecemeal development. An advocate of giving the decision-making responsibility to those who paid the taxes, Shepherd was able to justify his campaign for a commissioner government, which had a platform of removing authority from newly enfranchised blacks and other non-landowning residents and giving it to presidentially appointed commissioners, who, under a conservative Republican president would be expected to favor a conservative course of action.
During 1865 and 1866, blacks in Washington had in effect transformed the public spaces of the District of Columbia, strengthening new prerogatives such as access to streetcars.44 Encouraged by Shepherd and the Board of Trade, Senator Lot Morrill (R-Maine), chairman of the Senate District Committee, introduced a bill in January 1866 calling for cancellation of the District of Columbia’s corporations and replacement by three presidentially appointed commissioners.45 Morrill argued, “The District of Columbia never was designed to be a government. It is a seat for the Government of the United States; and that is all it ever was designed to be.”46 The same day Morrill’s bill was presented, Representative William Kelley, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, introduced a bill in the House of Representatives that called for giving blacks in Washington the vote. Kelley quoted from a petition submitted to Congress by a delegation of Washington blacks that said, “Without the right of suffrage we are without protection and liable to combinations of outrage.”47 Enfranchising blacks in Washington would have little meaning if elected local government was replaced by an appointed—not elected—form of government.
The Board of Trade resolution that supported the Morrill bill had the backing of important Washington civic leaders, including Riggs, Corcoran, and Cooke, and provided a focus for the charge that supporters of presidentially appointed commissioner government sought a means of denying black voting rights by taking them away from all voters. The timing of these bills provided a striking and tense