Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,716

This is the grave of Alexander Shepherd.

Born in 1835 in Washington, D.C., Shepherd grew up working class, dropped of school at the age of 13, and got a job as a plumber’s assistant. He was evidently good at it and worked his way up in the plumbing business over the next several years, finally buying everyone else out of the firm. He was a savvy operator and started buying real estate with his profits. That led to more and more money. He was part of the defenses of Washington, D.C. early in the war and was a staunch Republican. Being a good Republican meant government contracts. Getting government contracts meant graft. Running a political machine meant more graft and more profit and more contracts. So let’s just say that Shepherd became a master of the Gilded Age.

Like a lot of the most corrupt men of the Gilded Age, Shepherd was excellent on civil rights. He served on the DC City Council beginning in 1861 and stayed for a full decade, a pretty good run in those days. As such, he built connections in the city’s large and growing Black community and largely supported their growth and political power. In 1870, DC government was a complete disaster. The mayor was Sayles Bowen who had mismanaged the city so badly that his personal furniture was auctioned to pay city debts. Shepherd led a move to overhaul the entirety of the government, consolidating offices under a single government that would govern the entire District. That led to the Organic Act of 1871, reorganizing the ridiculously complex government of the District into something a bit more streamlined. Shepherd had tons of friends among congressional Republicans, so this wasn’t so hard to get made law. Ulysses S. Grant didn’t want to divide DC politics between its various factions so he appointed the seemingly nonpartisan financier Henry Cooke (brother of Jay) as the new governor (it was governed like a territory at this time). First, Grant always just assumed that rich guys were smart instead of crooks and Henry Cooke was definitely a crook. Second, Shepherd was close to Crook and got all kinds of sweet deals based on this.

Specifically. Shepherd became vice-chair of the Board of Public Works. This was just a moneymaker. Cooke was completely indifferent to his new post and Shepherd encouraged him to not show up for meetings and let him handle it. And he did. He intimidated and cajoled and openly demanded bribes. Now, DC was a pretty awful place still. Open sewers, unpaved roads, swampy land, it was a cesspool. It needed upgrades. There were even brief discussions to move the nation’s capital to St. Louis. Too bad, we could have a national law about provel as the proper fake cheese for pizza. So he did make the kind of infrastructure investments the city needed–covering sewers, paving roads, building water mains for clean, safe water, planting thousands of trees, tearing down one of the gross markets of the city, etc. Those things happened. It’s just that Shepherd stole a bunch of the money while he was at. As the Cincinnati Enquirer put it, “Boss Tweed  and his gang, to whom Shepherd’s enemies are so given to comparing him, were vulgar villians [sic], stupid sneak thieves, by the side of this remarkable man.”

In 1873, Cooke resigned as governor and Shepherd took over. He continued with his strong civil rights record. Frederick Douglass later stated, “I want to thank Governor Shepherd for the fair way in which he treated the colored race when he was in a position to help them.” But he also continued with his graft. The public works projects were estimated at $6.25 million. By the next year, the economy had blown up thanks in large part to the Cooke brothers’ greed. And by then the costs had already gone to $9 million. That’s a huge difference in one year! The way he tried to raise that needed money was property tax increases that were so high that some residents had to sell their property just to pay them. Also, the work was incredibly shoddy. Sure, the city needed better streets, but some of the streets were graded so low that it was like a floor down from a front door to a street and some of the streets were so high that they met the second floor of your house. Basically, Shepherd made sure his friends were taken care of and so where their neighborhoods.

Well, not surprisingly, DC residents freaked out. They demanded change. A petition started going around to get Congress to investigate and about 1,200 people signed it. Congress did investigate. They found all kinds of stuff. Now, this was an era of massive corruption generally. So Congress had a high bar of what they felt was legal or illegal, especially because a bar very much lower would implicate most of them. So they didn’t quite say Shepherd did anything illegal exactly, but they did once again change the governing structure of the District and stripped power from Shepherd. Instead, Congress mandated a three-member Board of Commissioners and that would remain the structure of its governance for almost a century. Grant of course had no problem with this corruption and so nominated Shepherd to the Board. Congress however rejected that nomination.

Now, again, this was very Gilded Age. Boss Tweed built some good stuff too! There was a very real need for infrastructure improvements, but the sheer level of graft and greed was unbelievable and a lot of money disappeared in the process. So after all this, Shepherd tried to hold on, but lost all his money and declared bankruptcy in 1876.

This led to a whole other second career. Shepherd moved to Batopilas, Mexico and became the King of Mexican Silver. He had bought a silver mine at the bottom of Copper Canyon for $600,000 when he had the money and in 1880, he decided to go there and run it. The mine was well worth the money–the claim was well proven–but this area was really, really remote. Hell, it’s really really remote today, I’ve been there. But if there was one thing Shepherd did understand, other than graft, it was infrastructure. He had rebuilt DC so he decided to build the infrastructure to get the silver to market. He had an easy ally in Mexican president Porfirio Diaz, a man with no objection to Americans taking a lot off the top for themselves if they would develop his nation. He built a silver processing facility in Batopilas (the ruins were still there when I was there in 2002 or so) and did it all onsite. Taking out silver bars from remote canyons made a lot more sense than taking out silver ore and processing it elsewhere. He just had to bring in the machinery and the experts to make it all work. Shepherd made a tremendous amount of money on this. Over the next 26 years, the mine extracted 20 million ounces of silver and employed up to 1,500 workers, mostly in horrific conditions, about which neither Shepherd or Diaz cared.

Shepherd died in Batopilas in 1902, a very rich man. He needed his appendix out and the surgery messed it all up. He was 67 years old. His infrastructure got the body out of there and back home for burial.

Alexander Shepherd is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C.

If you would like this series to visit other Americans involved in the Porfiriato pilfering of Mexico, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John Hays Hammond, who represented Guggenheim interests there and is the father of the radio guy named for him, is in Brooklyn, and so is Frederick Augustus Heinze. Obscure people, but very special, I assure you. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.