Vinnie Ream poses with her bust of Abraham Lincoln.
“She seems in fact to think of nothing but her art, having that unbounded enthusiasm in it and love for it that leaves no room for trivialities.”
—A reporter from the St. Louis Evening News
Washington, D.C., 1865
Vinnie Ream grew up in a log cabin on the Wisconsin frontier, where her father worked as a surveyor. Most of her childhood friends were Winnebago Indians. She was a small, smart, energetic girl, with thick ringlets of black hair.
When Vinnie was ten her father bought her a guitar from a medicine man who came through southern Wisconsin in a covered wagon. The guitar came with a book of songs, and the salesman promised to stay around and teach each new customer how to play. He disappeared the next night, but it really didn’t matter. Vinnie learned all the songs within three weeks and taught them to the other five guitar purchasers—all adults. She gave them guitar lessons in her cabin every night and formed them into a band called Little Vin’s Musicians. They performed at hoedowns and barn raisings all through her part of Wisconsin. After the family moved to Missouri, she also mastered the harp, banjo, and harpsichord.
The Ream family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1861, when Vinnie was fourteen. It was the first year of the Civil War, and Washington was a city in chaos. As they rode by carriage from the train station to their boardinghouse, they passed makeshift hospitals
whose open windows carried the cries of sick and dying soldiers. The streets were congested with army wagons and cannons on wheels. Pigs, chickens, and ducks foraged for garbage in the streets. In the midst of this clamor, Vinnnie spotted a man a head taller than everyone around him, his great height accentuated by a tall stovepipe hat. It was President Abraham Lincoln, making his way calmly through a crowded street as guards scrambled to protect him. Vinnie was amazed that the president of the United States would walk around in public, especially when so many Washingtonians favored the Confederacy. Wasn’t he worried about being killed?
Vinnie kept busy. She got a job as a clerk in the post office, replacing a worker who had gone off to war, and also volunteered in hospitals. In her free time, she liked to go sightseeing around Washington. She found herself powerfully drawn to the city’s statues. She inspected the many marble busts inside the Capitol building and admired the statues of officers on horseback that had been placed within circles where Washington’s major streets came together. She spent hours running her fingers over the smooth surfaces. Somehow, sculptors had been able to turn slabs of cold stone into forms and figures that seemed to breathe and cry. She wanted to learn how to do it herself.
As usual, she found a way. Vinnie met people easily and could, as her father put it, “charm the pearl out of an oyster.” One afternoon U.S. congressman James Rollins of Missouri—whom she had met when she lived in that state—escorted her to the studio of Clark Mills, the most famous sculptor in Washington. When Mills learned that Vinnie wanted to try sculpting, he tossed Vinnie a lump of clay (she missed it) and told her to make a model of anything she wished. She wrote, “I felt at once that I, too, could model it … In a few hours I produced a medallion of an Indian chief’s head.” Mills was so impressed that he offered to take her on at once as a student and assistant.
Vinnie learned so rapidly with Mills that she was soon earning money as an artist, fashioning clay likenesses of people who came into the studio, including several congressmen. But she had a special dream. Ever since the day she had seen Abraham Lincoln walking in the street, Vinnie had longed to mold his features in clay. She felt a deep bond of sympathy with the president. Like him, she had grown up in a log cabin. The Civil War was tearing her apart, too. Her brother had run away to fight for the Confederacy, while the rest of her family supported the Union. President Lincoln became her obsession. Whenever she saw him ride by in his carriage, she stared hard at his face and then rushed back to her studio to try to develop a clay likeness. It always came out wrong. She wanted a chance to fashion President Lincoln in clay as he sat still.
FEEDING TIME AT THE WHITE HOUSE
At times, the Lincoln White House reminded visitors of a zoo. Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s sons Tad and Willie loved animals, and so did their parents. The family had a turkey, rabbits, kittens, a goat, and a dog named Jip. They had their own ponies, which they rode on the White House lawn. “I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights,” Abraham Lincoln said. “It is the way of a whole human being.”
HEARING THE NEWS OF LINCOLN’S DEATH
President Lincoln died just five days after Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union commander Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Civil War. There were still many thousands of soldiers in the field, or making their way home. “The Rebs appeared to be as sad over it as we were,” wrote Elisha Stockwell. “Minute guns were fired all day and the flag was at half mast.” William Bircher was with his unit in the field: “Literally, the whole army wept. Thousands would willingly have received the fatal bullet in their own hearts if thereby they could have saved the life of our own leader.” Of course, not everyone felt that way. Seventeen-year-old Emma LeConte of Columbia, South Carolina, lived in a city that had been burned to the ground by Union soldiers. She wrote, “Hurrah! Old Abe has been assassinated! It may be abstractly wrong to be so jubilant, but I just can’t help it … This blow to our enemies comes like a gleam of light.”
In the fall of 1864, Vinnie made her move. She convinced Congressman Rollins to ask the president to allow her to mold his likeness as he worked at his desk. She said to tell him she would be “quiet as a mouse.” It was a good time to ask. Abraham and Mary Lincoln were still trying to recover from the sudden death of their eleven-year-old son, Willie, from typhoid fever in February 1862. The prospect of having a young person around seemed to brighten President Lincoln. He was intrigued by the story of the poor frontier girl who had become Clark Mills’s student. To Vinnie’s astonishment, the president agreed. Just before Christmas, seventeen-year-old Vinnie sent her tools and a large tub of clay to the White House. A few days later she put on her best dress and made the first of many half-hour-long visits over a period of five months. She described in her diary what it was like to be near him:
“I sat in my corner and begged Mr. Lincoln not to allow me to disturb him. He seemed to find a sort of companionship in being with me, although we talked but little … I made him think of Willie and he often said so and as often wept. I remember him especially in two attitudes. The first was with his great form slouched down into a chair at his desk, his head bowed upon his chest, deeply thoughtful. I think [at these times] he was with his generals on the battlefields … The second was at the window watching for Willie, for he had always watched the boy playing every afternoon at that window. Sometimes great tears rolled down his cheeks.
“[He seemed] a man of unfathomable sorrow … He never told a funny story and he rarely smiled. He had been painted and modeled before, but when he learned that I was poor, he granted me the sittings for no other purpose than that I was a poor girl. Had I been the greatest sculptor in the world, I am sure that he would have refused at that time.”
On the afternoon of April 14, 1865, Vinnie worked her usual half hour at the White House. She was almost finished with her clay molding, and Lincoln told her he liked her work. It was the last time she would see him. That night he was shot as he sat watching a play at a downtown theater. He died the next morning.
Not long afterward, Congress appropriated ten thousand dollars for a sculptor to produce a life-size marble statue of the late president, to be placed in the Rotunda of the Capitol. Nearly every prominent sculptor in the United States competed for the award. Besides the great honor, ten thousand dollars was a small fortune in 1865. Vinnie wrote a
letter to Congress, pointing out that she had had considerable, recent experience in shaping Lincoln’s features. And though she was young, Vinnie had very powerful friends: Congressman Rollins and Senator Edmund Ross of Kansas, who both boarded at her house, supported her. They arranged for other congressmen to see Vinnie’s molding of Lincoln, which wasn’t quite finished but showed her strong talent.
On January 28, 1866, Congress awarded Vinnie the contract. At the age of eighteen, she had become the first female ever to receive a contract from the people of the United States to make a statue. She had even beaten out her teacher, the famous Clark Mills. Soon thousands wanted to know, “Who is Vinnie Ream?” Some sculptors were jealous. A newspaper columnist wrote that she had flirted her way to the prize. Vinnie tried to keep a level head, decorating her studio with flowers and working each day in a dust-covered smock, an oversized apron, and old shoes with rubber toes. She kept her door open and allowed anyone in who wanted to watch her work.
It took Vinnie nearly five years to complete the statue. At one point she traveled to Italy to pick out the marble with which she would work. The statue was finally unveiled in the Capitol Rotunda on January 7, 1871. A Washington newspaper reporter described how the senators and representatives reacted:
“The veil was raised slowly, disclosing first the base, bearing the simple words ABRAHAM LINCOLN; then the well-remembered form; and finally … the head of the patriot martyr. There was a momentary hush, and then an involuntary, warm and universal demonstration of applause gave the verdict of the distinguished and critical gathering.”
She worked as a sculptor until the age of thirty-one and then married a wealthy naval officer named Richard Hoxie, who didn’t want her to work. Reluctantly, she gave in. They continued to live in Washington and had one son. In 1906, suffering from a kidney disease, Vinnie finally convinced her husband that her work meant too much for her to give it up forever. He built her a studio and a chair that could be raised and lowered to help her as she carved. She worked as long as she could. She died in 1914 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Vinnie Ream’s statue of Lincoln is still on display in the Rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, D.C.