Vinnie Ream

This is the Remarkable story of a fascinating, talented, nineteenth-century American woman who was able, despite a lack of formal training, to build a successful, if controversial, career as a sculptor. When she was only seventeen years old, Vinnie Ream succeeded in prevailing upon her friends in Congress to convince President Lincoln to sit for her and, after his assassination, these friends managed to have a bill passed granting her a contract for the completion of a statue of the late president. The debate on this in the Senate was divisive: Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the powerful chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, argued that no woman could successfully execute a statue of such importance. But her statue of Lincoln, in Carrara marble, stands in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. Her "Sequoiah was the first statue of an American Indian to be placed in the Capitol's Statuary Hall, and her colossal statue of Admiral David Farragut is on display in a Washington park. Vinnie Ream was not a feminist, but her story is the story of a woman's remarkable achievement in a world controlled by men. She was untrained and did not have money, but she did have talent, intelligence, beauty and great charm, and she used these qualities in every way she could. She lived in exciting political times, and was involved with many famous men and events. She was in the midst of the controversy over Andrew Johnson's impeachment, and was accused of causing Senator Edmund Ross to cast the deciding vote for Johnson's aquittal. In this little-known slice of Americana, we learn about a woman who was ahead of her time in at least one respect: her tenacity in the pursuit of artistic achievement.