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The carriages began arriving at the brilliantly lit White House around 9 p.m. All the Washington elite were present—the cabinet members and their wives, generals and their high staff, the members of the diplomatic corps, senators and congressmen, lawyers and businessmen. McClellan, in dress uniform, attracted much attention, as did the new secretary of war. The Green, Red, and Blue parlors were open for inspection, along with the East Room, where the Lincolns received their guests. Society reporters commented on both the “exquisite taste with which the White House has been refitted under Mrs. Lincoln’s directions” and the magnificence of the women’s attire. The “violet-eyed” Kate Chase was singled out, as usual. “She wore a dress of mauve-colored silk, without ornament,” one reporter wrote admiringly. “On her small, classically-shaped head a simple wreath of minute white flowers mingled with the blond waves of her sunny hair, which was arranged in a Grecian knot behind.”

At midnight, the crowd began to move toward the closed dining room. During a slight delay occasioned by a steward who had temporarily misplaced the key, someone exclaimed, “I am in favor of a forward movement,” and everyone laughed, including General McClellan. The doors were thrown open to reveal a sumptuous banquet, which was to be served with excellent wine and champagne. “The brilliance of the scene could not dispel the sadness that rested upon the face of Mrs. Lincoln,” Elizabeth Keckley, the seamstress who had become a close confidante, recalled. “During the evening she came up-stairs several times, and stood by the bedside of the suffering boy.”

Despite Mary’s worry and watchfulness, the ball was a triumph. “Those who were here,” Nicolay told his fiancée, “will be forever happy in the recollection of the favor enjoyed, because their vanity has been tickled with the thought that they have attained something which others have not.” Although there was some caviling about “frivolity, hilarity and gluttony, while hundreds of sick and suffering soldiers” were “within plain sight,” reviews in the capital city were overwhelmingly favorable. The Washington Evening Star pronounced the event “a brilliant spectacle,” while Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper described Mary as “our fair ‘Republican Queen,’” garbed in a “lustrous white satin robe” and black and white headdress “in perfect keeping with her regal style of beauty.”

The success of the White House ball was followed by two Union victories in Tennessee, the captures of Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland. These twin victories shifted the defensive struggle in the West to an offensive war and brought national recognition to a new hero: General Ulysses S. Grant. A West Point graduate whose weakness for alcohol had contributed to his resignation from the army eight years earlier, Grant was struggling to support his family as a leather salesman in Galena, Illinois, when the Civil War began. He volunteered to serve immediately, and was put in charge of a regiment in Missouri. From the start, Grant understood that a southward movement from Missouri was essential, but he was unable to persuade General Henry Halleck, Frémont’s successor, to authorize the move. Hearing rumors that the unkempt, bewhiskered Grant still drank too much, Halleck was unwilling to trust him with an important mission. Finally, on February 1, after the navy’s Admiral Andrew Foote agreed to a joint army-navy expedition, Halleck gave the go-ahead for Grant “to take and hold Fort Henry.”

Grant and Foote set out at once. The navy gunboats opened a blistering attack, forcing the retreat of 2,500 rebel troops to the more heavily reinforced Fort Donelson, twelve miles away. The remaining troops surrendered. “Fort Henry is ours,” Grant telegraphed Halleck in the terse, straightforward style that would become his trademark. “I shall take and destroy Fort Donelson on the 8th.” Though a severe rainstorm delayed the eastward march to Donelson, Grant remained confident.