Original, Used Invitation to Abraham Lincoln’s Inaugural Ball, Sent to a New York Congressman and His Wife, Requesting the “Honor” of Their Attendance

Obtained directly from the descendants and never before offered for sale
 

With the Civil War in its final stages, on March 4, 1865, President Lincoln was inaugurated for a second term. In his Inaugural Address, perhaps the best ever given, he pleaded for reconciliation, asking for “malice toward none” and “charity for all”. That evening, his second inaugural ball was held in the elegant building that now contains the Smithsonian American Art Museum. After nearly five years of a terrible war, Lincoln hoped that this inaugural ball would mark a new beginning.  He also understood that for nations as well as for individuals, there were times to pause and celebrate the moment.

Engraved invitations were sent to dignitaries on behalf of President Lincoln and Vice President Andrew Johnson, requesting the “honor” of their company at the “National Inauguration Ball”. Engraved by Demsey & O’Toole, the invitation listed the Inaugural Ball committee managers in three columns, and included such luminaries as former Vice President Hannibal Hamlin. It also had banners reading, “E Pluribus Unum” and “We are one and indissoluble”.

The day of the ball, according to Margaret Leech’s evocative “Reveille in Washington”, the building bustled with preparations for the big event: the ballroom band rehearsed while gas jets were strung from the ceiling in the north wing to provide lighting. Workers were draping the walls with American flags and a raised dais was built for the presidential party and furnished with blue and gold sofas.

Earlier in the war, the ball’s site had served as a hospital for soldiers wounded at Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. Poet Walt Whitman, who worked as a clerk in the Patent Office Building, had been an orderly who treated those soldiers. The evening of the inaugural ball, he watched people arrive and then wrote in his diary, “I have been up to look at the dance and supper rooms…and I could not help thinking, what a different scene they presented to my view since filled with a crowded mass of the worst wounded of the war…” Now, for the ball, he recorded that the building was filling up with “beautiful women, perfumes, the violins’ sweetness, the polka and the waltz.”

The occasion was used by Lincoln to express the idea of reconciliation.  While he walked to the dais with House Speaker Schuyler Colfax, Mrs. Lincoln was escorted by Senator Charles Sumner, who had fought the President’s reconstruction plan and was considered persona non grata at the White House. In a clear display of what is today called “optics,” Lincoln wanted to show publicly that there was no breach between the two of them, and he had sent Sumner a personal note of invitation to the ball.

The 4,000 ball-goers then settled in for a long evening of merry-making. As Charles Robertson describes in “Temple of Invention”, the Lincolns greeted friends and supporters until midnight, when they went to the supper room and headed a large banquet table filled with oyster and terrapin stews, beef a l’anglais, veal malakoff, turkeys, pheasants, quail, venison, ducks, ham, and lobsters, and ornamental pyramids of desserts, cakes, and ice cream. Although the President and First Lady left about 1:30 a.m., other revelers stayed on and danced until dawn.

Congressman Addison H. Laflin was elected as a Republican to the 39th, 40th, and 41st Congresses, serving from March 4, 1865 until March 3, 1871. Thus his own term started the same day as the Inaugural Ball. As an incoming Congressman, he and his wife were invited to the Ball. This is their actual invitation, with the name as invitee filled in, obtained by us from the family descendants and never before offered for sale. One sees these invitations from time to time, but they are almost always “in blank”, not filled in, meaning they were extras or printer’s overruns. This is one of the only ones filled in that we have ever seen.