ELEVEN
Local democracy in the District didn’t die overnight. The new territory had twenty-two wards, each allowing voters to send a representative to a lower chamber of the legislature, the House of Delegates. But the president appointed the upper chamber, the Legislative Council, and all executive offices including the governor.1 This arrangement gave the chief executive a great deal of power over local matters, which Ulysses S. Grant was only too happy to use.
A month after the creation of the territory, Grant installed financier Henry Cooke, brother of Republican banker and power broker Jay Cooke, as territorial governor and appointed other Republican stalwarts to major offices. Democrats fumed, and in April they raged even more when Norris Chipman, Grant’s handpicked and nonvoting delegate to Congress, was elected to the House of Delegates along with fifteen Republicans, among them two African Americans. The reactionary newspaper The Patriot—the instrument of W. W. Corcoran, who turned against the Republicans who had helped him lobby for the Organic Act—cried fraud, the first in a long string of verbal brickbats that it leveled against its enemies.2
But battles over DC voting habits had become passé. Everyone knew the real power lay not with the territorial legislature, the congressional delegate, or even the governor. Instead, the Board of Public Works flexed the muscle behind the capital government, and its new vice president was Alexander Shepherd.
The Ruling Ring
Henry Cooke frequently left town to attend to financial matters in the Northeast, and his stand-in, Edwin Stanton—eponymous son of the former secretary of war—happily acted as rubber-stamp governor. (Technically the territorial governor acted as president of the Board of Public Works, and Stanton, like Cooke, acted as chief executive in name only.)3 When the Board of Public Works took control of the executive machinery of the District, The Patriot and other old-line interests took alarm, warning of “Ring Rule” if Shepherd and his cronies were allowed to dictate policy from their perch on the board. In response, Shepherd assumed the rhetoric of an Old Testament patriarch, warning that if his extensive program for the improvement of the District weren’t enacted:
You shall continue the same old patchwork system which has rendered the nation’s metropolis a disgrace and an eye-sore at home and a by-word and reproach abroad. You shall continue to drive over unpaved streets and exposed ravines and be as successfully lost in the blinding dust as was Elijah of old in the clouds which enveloped him as he ascended into the sky.4
To tamp down any such dust, Shepherd advocated a series of proposals for the capital that cost six million dollars, a third of it coming from increased taxation on properties adjoining the improvements and the rest through a loan. Opponents had a US district judge issue an injunction against the plan, but Cooke and Shepherd appealed the decision and went for broke by calling a snap election in November, gambling that voters might approve four million dollars themselves in a plebiscite.5 As part of their high-risk strategy, they put all of the seats in the House of Delegates up for a revote—just seven months after the last election. The gambit paid off: The Republicans enjoyed a landslide victory and won all but two seats in the House. At nearly the same time, the US Supreme Court overturned the injunction. The Board of Public Works was in business.6
Fractured Franchise
Shepherd still faced the suspicions of African Americans in the District, though, who had won the vote only four years earlier and now saw their franchise dramatically crimped, having to settle for five seats in the neutered House of Delegates. It didn’t help his cause that Shepherd’s own father had owned slaves or that many black leaders had protested Shepherd’s rise to executive power as a politician hostile to their interests.7 Still-bitter Sayles Bowen even charged that Shepherd opposed equal education for blacks in the District as well as mainstream Republicanism. In response, early in 1871, Shepherd engaged in a Gilded Age version of spin control, exchanging a series of public letters with O. O. Howard in which he called himself a friend to African Americans, a supporter of “unified” education for both white and black students, and an opponent of racial discrimination in any form—while conspicuously avoiding the topic of black suffrage.8
In reality, Shepherd was no more or less prejudiced than any white mainstream Republican of the era, and he didn’t count race his primary concern anyway. He wanted to limit the franchise of any voter without property—white or black—on the dubious premise that anyone whose votes could be bought with “whiskey and money” inevitably would abuse the local elites.9 In this way his views mirrored those of other Parvenus in the GOP, who had little patience with old-fashioned ideas of democracy. Seven decades of District voting had resulted only in stagnation and decay, and these merchants and magnates didn’t want to wait any longer to force change upon the decrepit capital.
Still, Shepherd knew that he had to appeal to core supporters of the Republican Party in the city, most of them African American. He accordingly made a vocal effort to support striking black railway workers in summer 187110 and later steered a good number of construction jobs to blacks and other party loyalists. He also had the good fortune to have a firm, notable ally in the black community.
The Ship and the Sea
Frederick Douglass had been appointed to one of the seats on the Legislative Council. The position was one of five appointed jobs in District government that Douglass filled in the postwar era, but probably the least important of them. (He served only two months before turning the job over to his son Lewis.) Nonetheless, despite his minor role in the chamber, Douglass remained an important figure, both for his prominence and for his allegiance to the GOP, of which he said, “The Republican Party is the ship and all else the sea.”11
Initially the newspaper that Douglass had purchased, the New National Era, vented hostility at Shepherd and his Board of Public Works, but it soon came around to argue that they “deserve the earnest, active support of the city, and the earnest, active, practical support of Congress.”12“Practical” was the key word here, for if blacks and other citizens of the District lost their voting rights, Congress had to provide something in return, such as sufficient funding for urban improvements and full political support for civil rights. In due course, Lewis Douglass introduced a bill into the Legislative Council that outlawed segregation and discrimination in restaurants, saloons, and soda fountains. A year later the bill passed, and the governor approved it. In 1873 the law was strengthened, and that same year a theater antisegregation bill passed the council too.13 Realistically, the Republican Party represented the only real alternative. Local Democrats remained wedded to antebellum notions of racial relations and the white supremacy that went along with them, and the GOP had demonstrated more than once at least a passing interest in the black voters who regularly helped it win elections in the District—even as those elections counted for less and less. With the firm support of Frederick Douglass and other African Americans, along with the already fervent backing of the nouveau riche Parvenus and the president, Alexander Shepherd had a clear road to change the capital, starting with the roads themselves.
Capitalizing the District
Emboldened by his success in court and at the ballot box, Shepherd threw his Board of Public Works into hasty action. Major property owners wanted him and his board to pay for public improvements as they went, but the man increasingly known as “Boss” Shepherd was having none of it. In autumn 1871, he ordered work to start in all wards of the city at once and enlarged the board’s staff to more than two hundred employees. They took on the huge challenge of leveling the roads—a dream project if ever there was one. The District’s streets had long been a hodgepodge of different slopes and angles, and clear perspectives down the thoroughfares had proved elusive because only Pennsylvania Avenue had ever been leveled.14 Shepherd demanded that asphalt or wood be used for the paving instead of a cheaper macadam surface, and he ordered uniform grades on the major boulevards and avenues, including those directly around the US Capitol, without authorization from Congress.15
The board’s work on the roads went beyond just making them functional. Employing three arborists, the board planted sixty thousand trees during two years, which helped narrow the giant, inhumanly scaled boulevards with green strips and foliage. It also provided new street parking for horses and carriages.16 Shepherd further ensured that major roads had illumination by ornamenting them with thousands of gas lamps, the largest street-lighting program in the city’s history to date. Never one to miss an opportunity, Shepherd allowed for his own plumbing and gas-fitting company to submit bids for the work, including placing fifty-eight lampposts around the Capitol itself.17
In earlier decades, fixing and lighting the roads would have presented an enormous enough task, requiring years to get started. But the board wasn’t working only on the streets. It was adding even more duties to its agenda, including a redesign of the water system.
Water Work
The grand aqueduct of Montgomery Meigs had been a good start, but large parts of the capital on higher ground still didn’t have access to water. The board addressed this problem by laying 180 miles of new water mains, largely in 1872, and giving residents of the District more water per capita than any other city in the world.18 New sewer lines followed as the old inadequate system of drainage gave way to a more streamlined network that included freshly laid conduits like those along Slash Run. Doing so turned one of the capital’s last major creeks, with all of its bogs and marshes, into a channel for the filth and runoff of the city.19
To scrape up more funds for his water projects, Shepherd created new sewer districts and assessed each a tax, then levied additional taxes on those areas improved by the conduits.20 As a further sanitary measure, the territory passed new laws in 1871 to control barnyard animals. Two years later it outlawed scavenging and began cleaning privies with the aid of the Odorless Evacuating Apparatus Company.21 It was one business Shepherd thankfully didn’t have a hand in.
However, one dirty bit of business he couldn’t help but be involved in was the town’s longest-standing problem: the pestiferous ditch known as the Washington City Canal. In 1864 former mayor Richard Wallach had commissioned a comprehensive survey illustrating just how noxious the open sewer running through the center of town was. Even for a dry civil engineering report, the conclusions were damning. Not only was the canal dysfunctional and stagnant, it posed an active and ongoing health hazard. Rich with “putrescent and decomposing organic matters” that were “tough and viscous,” it was enriched by runoff from “the offal of kitchens, and the soil and filth from water closets which are brought in by the sewers discharging in the canal.” It was strewn with “carcasses of all kinds, from the bloated horse to the skeleton kidden which have found their way into the canal by divers modes.”22 The canal’s rank pollution extended beyond the water: “The accumulated filth and excrement of the city is constantly held in a state of semi-solution in this hot-bed of putrefaction, by means of the ebb and flow of the tides, over a surface of more than a million square feet . . . the miasma from which contaminates every breath of air which passes, from that direction, through or over the city.”23
With powerful members of Congress threatening to withhold funding for urban improvement unless the canal was removed, Shepherd and his board took quick action. By the end of 1871, Shepherd’s men had filled in a large stretch of the ditch from 3rd to 14th Streets. They followed that with halving the width of the canal flowing south of the Capitol and making an actual sewer out of it.24 Within two years, the old canal vanished beneath pavement. Taking its place was an enlarged B Street, which was later named Constitution Avenue.
Orville’s Industry
Shepherd wasn’t alone in cleaning up the capital. Orville Babcock, head of the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds for the Army Corps of Engineers, nearly matched Shepherd in his undertakings. A former aide-de-camp to Ulysses S. Grant when he was a Union general and his executive secretary as president,25 Babcock rose in power above his predecessor, Nathaniel Michler, thanks to Grant’s influence, becoming more heavily involved in the Republican machine than almost any engineer up to that time. A buddy of Shepherd, Babcock helped establish an almost incestuous relationship between the Army Corps of Engineers and the Board of Public Works, including giving Shepherd thirty-five thousand dollars in 1872 to install a new copper roof on the White House, one of many actions that invited scrutiny in future years.26
The industrious Babcock aggressively steered the corps into remodeling and beautifying the “reservations”—the ugly plots of dirt, mud, and weeds in various circles, squares, and triangles—created by L’Enfant’s plan. In just his first year, Babcock oversaw the laying of forty-six thousand square feet of sod, ten thousand yards of pavement, and four miles of drains. He oversaw the installation of countless fences, fountains, and trees, plus gaslights and running water, and rustic furniture and decor.27 He even created tree nurseries and mini-zoos thick with deer and prairie dogs and imported eagles, owls, and European sparrows to perch above the parks, paying for some of the new critters from his own pocket when funds ran short.28
Turning his attention to the forlorn site of the stumpy, unfinished Washington Monument, Babcock improved the grounds by draining and grading them, installing ponds and a fish hatchery, planting trees, and constructing a scenic drive,29 all of which quickly helped people forget that the site had served as an ugly cattle pen during the Civil War. Just east, he planned to add greenery, walkways, and a unified layout to the jumble of uneven turf and rutted pathways of the decrepit Mall.30 Babcock also smartly oversaw the publication of a comprehensive survey of the park system, showing how the corps had made “green and beautiful” sites from “places of sand and mud.”31
Height of Hubris
Despite Babcock’s accomplishments, there was still but one boss in town, and that was Alexander Shepherd. In a town that had never had party bosses, Shepherd ran an electoral machine that turned out core supporters to ensure victory at the polls and applied a heavy hand to control appointed boards and assemblies.32 Construction jobs and political patronage served as the carrot that went with the electoral stick, and Shepherd expertly glad-handed legislators in the local and national governments to do his bidding, trading their support of his costly projects with helping them gain admission to the upscale clubs and organizations they wanted to join.
He regularly favored bids from contractors smart enough to buy materials and services from companies in which he had a stake. To publicize his projects, he used government funds to buy advertising in local newspapers that promoted the sale of the board’s construction bonds. He purchased $140,000 in ads from November 1871 to March 1872, more than all the state governments in New England spent on advertising combined.33 Of course, with near-absolute power came great hubris, and Shepherd took actions by fiat that no local DC politician had attempted before or since.
On September 3, 1872, Shepherd aimed to have the shambling Northern Liberties Market north of downtown razed and replaced with new structures. Only one judge in the District could stop him with an injunction, so Shepherd cheerfully invited him to dinner while leveling the structure. But he didn’t warn the vendors that their building was going to come down. A butcher was killed in the demolition along with the son of a former court justice, and thieves descended on the chaotic scene to purloin whatever the unprepared merchants hadn’t managed to secure. The public reacted with outrage: The funeral train for those killed stretched half a mile, and local opinion soon turned furiously against the Boss, to the point where an armed guard had to escort him from his office.34
In November, his fortunes improved when his staunch ally President Grant won reelection in a landslide and his nemesis, The Patriot, went out of business. Having a free hand once more, Shepherd single-handedly altered the Mall without requesting permission from anyone. His men tore up the tracks of the B&O Railroad near Capitol Hill while other workers laid new tracks across the Mall at 6th Street.35 The head of the railroad expressed his annoyance, but Shepherd placated him with a friendly meeting, after which the B&O chief allegedly offered the Boss a position as vice president of the railroad itself.36 With its new ally in the Board of Public Works, the B&O received permission in 1873 to build a grand new station on the Mall itself, putting smoke-belching locomotives and rail yards on land once designated for trees and gardens.37
Indomitable Perseverance
A greedy but benevolent tyrant, Shepherd resembled the party bosses and ward heelers who ran most cities in the northern US at the time, minus the benevolence. A master builder in the style of his contemporary Baron Haussmann in Paris, Shepherd had fewer than three years to execute his plans, whereas Haussmann had seventeen. But, driven by Shepherd’s domineering attitude and boundless energy, the magnitude of the territorial government’s achievement was stunning:
150 miles of road graded and paved
208 miles of sidewalks created
120 miles of sewer lines installed
30 miles of water lines laid
39 miles of gas lines laid
60,000 trees planted
1,000 buildings renovated
1,073 houses constructed 38
Other departments of the territorial government achieved their share of accomplishments too. Most notably, the Board of Health made some headway with disease control and sanitary inspections, along with condemning unsafe houses, inspecting meat and produce, controlling polluting businesses, and outlawing barnyard animals in the streets. The health department didn’t have an Alexander Shepherd at its helm, however, so its efforts didn’t receive as much publicity.39
Ultimately, according to one estimate, the District had by the mid-1870s become the “best-lit and best-paved city in the United States and its water supply was more plentiful than that of New York.”40 Shepherd and the board trumpeted their achievements in the press and through their own publications, and their allies in the Parvenu class were just as breathless. Mary Clemmer Ames saw Shepherd as a figure of “unvarying integrity and fearless independence,” as well as “positive manliness” approaching the stature of a demigod, “with a large, well formed head, sharply-defined features, massive under jaw and square chin, indicative of [his] indomitable perseverance and firmness.”41
The square-chinned hero capped his career in late 1873 by becoming governor of the Territory of the District of Columbia following Henry Cooke’s retirement.42 It should have been the crowning triumph in the career of the civil servant turned urban savior. Instead, the District was already sinking, and the former plumber was underwater.
Mudholes and Money Traps
The problems had begun soon after the Board of Public Works came into being. Since the board was undertaking so much work throughout the District simultaneously, construction activity tore up streets and sidewalks on nearly every block. The Patriot alleged that three-quarters of the capital’s streets were damaged or inaccessible, and that “Mudholes and mantraps, dangerous alike by day and by night, swarm in all directions . . . a putrid stench comes from all sections of the city, offensive to the sense and dangerous to the public health.”43 This situation caused turmoil for residents, who found their roadways and sidewalks ripped up, their street grades dramatically altered, and their houses perched twenty feet above the sidewalk in some cases. Construction so damaged the foundations of some houses that they risked collapsing, and the city brazenly issued condemnation warnings to their owners if they didn’t repair them within thirty days. Influential citizens benefited from the usual favoritism—in this case reimbursing repair costs—while most homeowners received nothing for their trouble.44
Many pavements that the board laid down were inadequate or, worse, dangerous. Chunks fell out of the wooden roadways, or they rotted altogether in a short time. The quality of the work had little to do with the amount the board paid for it. Shepherd steered work to his contractor friends for inflated amounts and even rejected bids when they came in too low. He set high financial floors for these “straw bids” and did all he could to ensure they would enrich his cronies.45
In slapdash fashion, Shepherd often graded city streets without regard to those who lived along them.
Congressional investigations of the board began in early 1872, and the charges were myriad: The board met infrequently and without oversight, overpaid on project bids, spent more funds and carried more debt than was legally allowed, arrogated power from other agencies, acted with haste and secrecy, lacked effective recordkeeping, and used construction work—and the jobs that went with it—to win elections and reward friends.46 The Republicans who controlled the committees that oversaw the District naturally found little wrong with the Board of Public Works or the “high-minded” men who ran it.47
But Congress did set a limit to the borrowing authority of the District at ten million dollars. Including preexisting debt and the four million dollars that voters had approved, that left only one million dollars to complete all of Shepherd’s projects.48 The Boss didn’t let minor concerns like debt or legality deter him, though, and he went ahead with his plans. Congress raised its appropriation for the District by $3.25 million in 1872 and 1873, and Shepherd pushed through an increase in local property taxes to their legal maximum, hiked the sewer tax, and looked into tightening tax exemptions for churches and other institutions.49
In the end, it wasn’t enough. With the territory spending money faster than it could take it in, the board resorted to increasingly creative means of financing, including issuing “certificates of indebtedness,” or bonds backed by the estimated increase in taxes on improved land. They sold poorly, but that didn’t stop the board from using them as collateral in lieu of cash to pay contractors, who later learned they were redeemable for eighty-five cents on the dollar rather than for their full face value.50
Bubble Economy Redux
Undeterred by controversy, Shepherd made a brash, conspicuous target for his critics. His three-hundred-acre “Bleak House” farm, six miles from the city, boasted its own orchard, fish pond, rustic barns, and pony rides for kids. In 1872 he constructed a great bluestone mansion at K Street and Connecticut Avenue, featuring a towering mansard roof, rooms with blue-satin curtains and red-velvet walls, crystal chandeliers, an art gallery, and a billiard room.51 The mansion sat, not coincidentally, in the northwest quadrant of the capital, which saw the most development and improvement during the Boss’s tenure and became home to a wide array of politicians, magnates, merchants, professionals, bureaucrats, generals, and admirals52—some of whom later worked in the State, War, and Navy Building, west of the White House, yet another symbol of the board’s corruption for its inflated costs and construction graft. (Mark Twain thought it the nation’s ugliest building, which we know today as the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.) Shepherd and his allies stood to make a killing on the appreciation of their holdings as the capital expanded northwestward, and the Board of Public Works raked in even more taxes from higher assessments on property in the area.53
The board-approved expansion of the street railway up Connecticut Avenue intentionally drove wealthier residents from the central city to develop lots on the fringes of town.54 Land near the avenue doubled or quadrupled in value in a short time, creating a dizzying property boom not seen in the District since the eighteenth century. Only the ghost of James Greenleaf could match Alexander Shepherd in his flair for speculative building, but Shepherd proved much more successful at it, overseeing the development of twelve hundred buildings in 1872 alone.55
But in improving this section of the capital and the neighborhoods that became Dupont Circle, Embassy Row, and Kalorama, Shepherd largely ignored the part of town south and east of Capitol Hill, ensuring that it remained poor and underdeveloped for years to come. Indeed, while the west was booming, property in the eastern half of the capital either stagnated or depreciated.56 The imbalance of construction was obvious: From November 1872 to November 1873, Northwest DC saw the addition of 603 houses, 134 more than all the rest of the capital combined.57
The Terra Firma of Hell
The building frenzy came to a sudden end with a financial collapse. This disaster, the Panic of 1873, even had a direct link to the territorial government, as Henry Cooke’s brother, power broker Jay Cooke, forced him to resign as governor to attend to the desperate straits of their teetering Northern Pacific Railroad Company.58 The firm collapsed anyway, and a six-year national depression ensued. Unemployment exploded, banks failed and suspended customers’ credit, and the market for municipal bonds and the payment of local taxes fizzled.59 An angry public and the public servants in their thrall quickly demanded solutions to the economic mess. Another congressional investigation of the territorial government began in February 1874.
Whereas Shepherd’s smooth talk and glad-handing overcame the earlier, cursory congressional review of the District, he couldn’t thwart this one. The year before, on his way out of Congress, reform Democrat Robert Roosevelt, uncle of future president Theodore, leveled particularly bitter scorn on the board. He claimed it operated on “the terra firma of Hell” and estimated the District would buckle under a debt of twenty million dollars to pay for the board’s actions.60 He was right. After countless hours of research and investigation and a three-thousand-page report, congressional examiners determined that the District did indeed carry that colossal amount of debt, twice the legal amount allowed.61
To get the District back in the black, Congress increased property taxes, cut municipal salaries by 20 percent,62 and authorized fifty-year bonds for the rest of the debt. It abolished the Board of Public Works, the territorial government as a whole, and the roles of governor and legislature, giving a three-person commission temporary but total charge of District affairs.63 In an embarrassing footnote, members of the House of Delegates tried to spirit away the legislature’s desks, chairs, and office supplies on their way out the door. One politician even stuffed a feather duster down his pant leg, giving his legislative body, as well as the territorial government in general, the nickname “feather-duster legislature.”64
Ballot Box and Blame
Unfortunately, one of the most honest former members of that government was a prime victim of the economic collapse. In 1874, Frederick Douglass accepted a position as president of the Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Bank, taking a job in public service as he had always done, not knowing that the bank was about to default.
Founded at the close of the Civil War as a depository for the funds of black citizens, the bank operated well for five years. In 1870, though, it began investing in riskier ventures, and when Shepherd’s associates, including Henry Cooke, took seats on its finance committee, disaster was all but inevitable. The bank’s managers schemed to find an unwitting scapegoat for their own bad investments in the Northern Pacific Railroad and other failed enterprises, and they found their mark in Douglass.65 Losing ten thousand dollars,66 he called being tied to the bank like being “married to a corpse” and castigated those who had brought the bank to ruin by “squandering in senseless loans on bad security the hard-earned moneys of my race.”67
The meltdown of the Freedmen’s Bank wasn’t the only example of territorial leaders abusing the trust of their African-American constituents. Shepherd and his peers used them to win elections and in return provided temporary construction jobs and passed the occasional civil rights bill. But the Boss and his board did almost nothing in the long term to build up the poor and working-class parts of town where most blacks lived, especially east and south of the Capitol. With their real estate improvements focused in Northwest DC, they actually stifled the development of such neighborhoods as The Island, East Capitol Hill, and parts of downtown. Even worse, Congress, which had offered the opportunity for black voters to become major players in local elections in the late 1860s, rolled back their franchise in 1871 with the creation of the territory and then, when the territory folded three years later, curtailed their suffrage entirely.
The Demise of Suffrage
In 1874 Senator Justin Morrill of Vermont introduced a bill to reorganize the District and permanently strip voting rights from its citizens. Senator Allan Thurman of Ohio, like others supporting the bill, tried to blame the failings of the territory on the African Americans who had supported the Board of Public Works. He made the specious claim that the previous municipal governments of the District did “tolerably well,” and “There was never any great complaint about them until Negro suffrage came.”68 Thomas Bayard of Delaware spoke more bluntly as a representative of a former slave state: “negro suffrage has been a very sickening business to the unhappy people of this District and to those who brought it here; and I have no doubt that as a matter of fact this bill seeks to accomplish the complete abandonment of that most absurd attempt to govern this District though the instrumentality of its most ignorant and degraded classes.”69
The elderly Frederick Douglass: icon of America, victim of DC bankers.
Old-line white supremacists of course supported removing the franchise from DC citizens, but they had company. Outside Congress, even the stalwart National Republican went along with the antivoting camp, saying the Republican Party should acknowledge the “failure” of suffrage. If it didn’t, “The Party would be putting a sword in the hands of the enemy to slay itself.”70 Many local whites spoke grimly of a return to suffrage in the District, and the emergence of “Murder Bay politicians,” that is, blacks who would rise to power if it occurred.71
A few brave politicians did speak out against the tide of reaction, noting the odium of permanently removing all voting rights for District residents. Senator Oliver Morton of Indiana said of the Morrill bill:
It takes from them the right of local self-government; it takes from them the power of considering and acting upon their own local and, so to speak, domestic affairs . . . In that respect this bill is anti-republican; it is anti-democratic; and I do not feel that I could vote for it without violating the very spirit of our institutions. . . . when we undertake to disenfranchise 100,000 people we are taking a step backward, and I know what will be said about it . . . that it is intended to get clear of colored suffrage. In this District, where it was first established, it is to be the first stricken down.72
The Shepherd Legacy
Congress wrestled with a permanent form of District government for a few more years but rendered a verdict on Alexander Shepherd much more quickly: In 1874 it exonerated him from charges of fraud or any other misdeeds. He was simply too likable, too influential, and had too many friends in the Republican Party to be held liable for the failings of the territory, however grievous and however much his fault they were.73 Ulysses Grant even had the nerve to nominate him as one of the District’s temporary commissioners, but for once the Senate didn’t assent to the president’s dubious choice.74
But as the myth took hold that the failures and fraud of the territorial government derived from “degraded” African-American voters and a few corrupt public servants, Alexander Shepherd’s reputation grew. In later years he was hailed a “latter-day L’Enfant, with more brains and more power,” and an engineering genius who had “cautiously and carefully” reconstructed and improved the city.75 Although Shephred declared personal bankruptcy in 1876, he amazingly restored his fortunes six years later with a speculative gold mine in Mexico, and returned to the capital in 1882 to be “feted, honored, and commemorated in a deluge of congratulatory parties, parades, and balls.” By then memories of the nasty little village of Washington City had faded, and writers sang the praises of the national capital as a hub of political power and prestige, with its “dazzling vistas and public edifices reminiscent of grand European capitals.”76
Real District Power
In the end, Shepherd received more credit than he deserved. The far-sighted vision of Montgomery Meigs and Nathaniel Michler provided the underlying template for the improvement of the District, even as the Board of Public Works took credit for their ideas and gloried in them. In subsequent years the popular press added to the legend that the board alone had driven all change in the capital, even assigning credit for the army corps’ major accomplishments—such as replacing the wood pavers in the street with asphalt—to the board years after Congress had abolished it.77
One figure who bridged the divide between the Army Corps of Engineers (as a superintendent) and the Board of Public Works (as an advisor) was Orville Babcock. Linked to nearly as many accomplishments and as much corruption as Shepherd, Babcock was indicted in 1875 and tried for his role in the Whiskey Ring to evade federal liquor taxes.78 A year later he was tried again for planting evidence on one of Shepherd’s enemies. In both cases he was acquitted, though a later historian said that he “fished for gold in every stinking cesspool, and served more than any other man to blacken the record of Grant’s administration.”79
Capital Emergent
Disregarding Babcock’s antics, Congress elevated the role of the corps when it passed the Organic Act of 1878. This act codified the District of Columbia as the capital’s sole governing entity, subject to the will of Congress, and made the federal government responsible for funding half of the city’s budget, with the other half raised from local taxation.80 It was a long-overdue change from those dreadful decades when citizens had to beg the legislature for any scrap of funding at all.
The Grant administration featured a high-wire act of corruption, with two prominent DC officials—Shepherd and Babcock—key players.
In executing its plan for the city, Congress handed control of municipal affairs to three appointed commissioners. Leaders of each major party chose one, and the third, by law, would be an “Engineer Commissioner” from the US Army.81 With all former boards of the city abolished, the new commissioners had direct responsibility for the capital, a power they retained for nearly a century.
This was the ultimate payoff for the Army Corps of Engineers’ steady role in building up the capital, which had only increased since the war until it now gained “almost total control over Washington’s public buildings, infrastructure, and physical environment.”82In due course, it executed plans to correct the flaws in Shepherd’s shoddy construction work, expand the water supply, extend the sewer system, pave and grade more streets, and reclaim the dreaded Potomac Flats. It even began finishing the embarrassing stump of the Washington Monument, finally completing the massive obelisk in 1884, a great triumph for the city.83 Indeed, as it acquired unprecedented power in the peacetime governance of the American capital, the corps seemed capable of achieving almost anything.84
The End of the Franchise
But there was one thing the corps couldn’t and wouldn’t do: provide the citizens of the District of Columbia with a shred of power to choose their own leaders or run their own government. Early versions of the Organic Act of 1878 called for a local elective council and a member in Congress, but these disappeared from the final version of the bill and ensured that DC residents had the same influence over their local leaders as their federal ones—none.85 Surprisingly, the act passed with the support of a racially retrograde House of Representatives run by Democrats and a nominally more progressive Senate under Republican control. Both parties stripped the vote from capital residents because, at their core, there wasn’t much difference in their motivations. A quick look back shows why.
Two rival forces had whipsawed Washington City throughout its troubled history. Initially Southern congressmen paralyzed the growth of the capital to keep it weak and undeveloped so the national government, by extension, remained feeble and inhibited with respect to the states. After the war, Northern congressmen emboldened the growth of the capital so the federal government would stand dominant and uninhibited over those states.
In both cases, the interests of local voters were irrelevant. Southerners didn’t care to aid a city for which they had so little use. Residents’ rights became even more constricted once Northerners decided to use their power to develop the capital. Any threat to that power—even voting in municipal elections—had to be stymied. Racial politics only added to the equation and ensured that white residents could, through statutory and constitutional law, keep African Americans from exercising their franchise in the District, even as they grew to a residential majority in future decades. In stripping away the franchise, Congress ensured that the District remained a ward of the nation, the sole province of national politicians. The day-to-day rulers changed, their motivations differed, but the disenfranchisement stood.
A Founder’s Legacy
Ultimately the victor was Alexander Hamilton’s political philosophy, which proved remarkably resilient. Nearly a century had passed since he pontificated on the dangers of relinquishing power to the mob, imagining a place where the federal government would reign supreme. Although the capital had suffered more than seven decades of misery, his dream had come to pass by the Gilded Age. The city changed for the better, as grand new buildings, parks, infrastructure, and neighborhoods took shape. The once dysfunctional village emerged as the world-class capital that—if not quite the baroque fantasy of Pierre L’Enfant—at least kept critics at bay and gave us a respectable urban center for the nation. As part of the deal, the city’s residents stood no closer to having a stake in their governance than they had a century before. The light of their democracy was finally extinguished.
In the end, the language of Hamilton’s philosophy may have been dressed up in legalese and constitutional purpose, but at root it involved two simple motivations: fear of the masses and need for dominion over them. Washington, DC, acted as the test case. It took decades of mud, chaos, and struggle, but by the end of the nineteenth century the city emerged as the paradigm for Hamilton’s idea of urban development as well as his imperial, profoundly antidemocratic perspective.
Little has changed since then but for one striking mood swing: Regardless of political faction, US citizens have come to view the capital as an example of everything wrong with their national governance. The reasons may stem from the imperious attitudes of American politicians, inflated delusions of grandeur, or an ongoing frustration with the elephantine federal bureaucracy. Or perhaps the public understands something deeper about the nature of political power—perhaps realizing the darker motivations of their leaders and the absurdity of running a democracy from a place that has no use for it.