Lincoln's second inaugural ball: a party in a hospital

Lincoln's second inaugural ball at the Patent Office, from the Illustrated London News, April 8, 1865.

On the night of March 6, 1865, more than four thousand people crowded into the top floor of the Patent Office in Washington for Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural ball. It was the first time a government building had been used for one. The war was nearly won, the President had been decisively re-elected, and the capital wanted a party. Two years earlier the same halls had been a hospital.

The inauguration

Lincoln was sworn in on March 4 on the east front of the Capitol, after days of rain had left the streets ten inches deep in mud. His second inaugural address, 703 words long, is the shortest and perhaps the best remembered in American history:

"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds… to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations."

That evening more than two thousand people squeezed into a public reception in the White House's East Room, and many more were turned away. The ball came two nights later.

The building

Congress approved a patent office on July 4, 1836, as a monument to American invention — the Constitution itself gives Congress the power to protect inventors' rights, and the first patent act dates from 1790. Commissioner Henry Ellsworth imagined it as a "national gallery" of American genius. It took thirty years and several architects to finish, and it was the largest Greek Revival building the government built in the nineteenth century: four wings around a courtyard, filling two city blocks, with temple porticos, columns and pediments in Virginia sandstone, Maryland marble and granite.

Washington ringed by its Civil War forts, 1862: E. G. Arnold, "Topographical map of the original District of Columbia and environs showing the fortifications around the city of Washington." Library of Congress.

The hospital before the ball

Walt Whitman, who worked as a clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the building, went up to look at the rooms being dressed for the ball, and remembered what he had seen there before:

"I could not help thinking, what a different scene they presented to my view since, fill'd with a crowded mass of the worst wounded of the war, brought in from second Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburgh. To-night, beautiful women, perfumes, the violins' sweetness, the polka and the waltz; then the amputation, the blue face, the groan, the glassy eye of the dying…"

The night

Clara Barton's invitation. Clara Barton National Historic Site, National Park Service.

Officials and dignitaries were invited by engraved card. Anyone else could buy a ticket for ten dollars, admitting a gentleman and two ladies, and the takings went to soldiers' families. In practice "anyone" meant white men and their guests: Black Americans were shut out of society events like this one.

A ticket. Library of Congress, Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana.

• Arrival. Carriages began arriving around nine. Guests climbed the great stair of the south portico to the third floor, where three halls opened off one another, each with its own band — promenade music in the east gallery, dancing in the north hall, dinner music in the west.
• The hall. The dancing hall was 280 feet long and about 60 wide, floored in blue and white marble, hung with the Stars and Stripes and the flags of the army corps. The New York Times found the gaslight disappointing.
• The Lincolns. They arrived at half past ten, the President with Speaker Schuyler Colfax, Mary Lincoln on the arm of Senator Charles Sumner, and took blue-and-gold sofas on a dais. The Times thought Lincoln "evidently trying to throw off care for the time; but with rather ill success, and looked very old; yet he seemed pleased and gratified". He wore a plain black suit and white gloves. Mary Lincoln wore white satin under fine lace, with pearls, and jessamine and violets in her hair; her gown was made by Elizabeth Keckley, a dressmaker who had bought her own freedom from slavery. Their son Robert came in his captain's uniform.
• Supper. At midnight a 250-foot buffet opened among the patent-model cases of the west hall, with a sugar model of the Capitol at its centre: oyster and terrapin stews, beef, veal, turkeys, pheasant, quail, venison, duck, ham, lobster and towers of cakes and ice cream. The corridor was only twenty feet wide and could serve three hundred at a time; four thousand came at once. Men grabbed whole platters for their parties and spilled them over the crowd. "In less than an hour," the Times reported, "the table was a wreck… positively frightful to behold."
• The end. The Lincolns left at half past one. The dancing went on until dawn.

Five weeks later Lincoln was dead.

Inaugural balls before and since

Visiting

The Old Patent Office Building, at 8th and F Streets NW above the Gallery Place–Chinatown Metro station, now houses the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. Admission is free.

Sources

Written from "'The Honor of Your Company is Requested': Lincoln's Second Inaugural Ball at the Patent Office", a Teaching with Historic Places lesson of the National Park Service. Quotations are from Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address, Walt Whitman's Specimen Days, and "The Inauguration Ball", The New York Times, March 8, 1865, all in the public domain. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.