At 6:30 AM in late February 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln and his security team headed by Alan Pinkerton slipped quietly into Willard's Hotel on this site because of assassination threats, and the Lincoln family stayed there for ten days before his March 4 inauguration. At the same time, the hotel hosted a peace conference, a last-ditch meeting of delegates from 21 states that hoped, but failed, to avert civil war. During the war, Julia Ward Howe attended a review of troops in nearby Virginia, heard the soldiers' marching song John Brown's Body, and after being challenged to produce better words, awoke the next morning inspired to write "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord," creating the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which became the Union anthem. After the war, the lobby became known as the place where President Ulysses S. Grant relaxed after work with brandy and a cigar, and although the term "lobbyist" already existed, it became widely known as newspapers used it for the men who gathered there hoping to approach the president about their causes. A hotel has stood on this site since 1816; Henry Willard became manager in 1847, bought it three years later, and brought his brothers to help run it. During the Civil War, rooms cost between $2.75 and $4 per night and included lavish meals. A century later, in August 1963, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., finished work on his "I Have A Dream" speech in his suite there. The current Willard InterContinental Hotel, built in 1901 as one of Washington's first skyscrapers, is a Beaux-Arts structure designed by Henry Hardenbergh, whose other work includes the Plaza Hotel and the original Waldorf-Astoria in New York City.
