Today, the Abraham Lincoln Commemorative Silver Dollar Coin remembers the unveiling of the statue in the Capitol Rotunda of the late president on the evening of January 25, 1871.
The book, Vinnie Ream, published in 1908, Richard Leveridge Hoxie, et al, included descriptions of her efforts on the statue and the subsequent unveiling.
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In the last speech of the event, Senator Carpenter, of Wisconsin, said:
In this changeful world our most general emotion, in regard to our friends and benefactors, is the desire to perpetuate our remembrance of them, and to secure some representation that shall recall to our senses their exact appearance long after their forms are hidden in the grave.
In this field, striving to satisfy his longing of human nature, the sculptor and the painter have ever been rival laborers, and the museums of the world contain their famous efforts to represent important events in human history, and to preserve the exact forms and features of the greatest and best of the race; and it would have been strange, indeed, if when Abraham Lincoln was stricken down by the hand of an assassin, at the close of the war through which he had conducted the government to victory, our people had not desired to preserve the likeness of his personal presence; and, as if inspired by the fitness of things, the representatives of the people resolved to place a statue of Mr. Lincoln in the National Capitol, and Vinnie Ream was employed for that purpose.
Surprise has been expressed that Congress should have passed by many American artists of world-wide renown, and have employed A Young Girl Unknown to Fame, who had never been abroad, nor studied the master-pieces of ancient art, to execute a great work which national affection demanded.
But here, whether from design, or from what is called accident, which not infrequently guides human affairs more wisely than could wisdom itself, the selection was most fortunate.
A young artist is content to imitate nature. His highest ambition is to make a likeness. But, succeeding in this, and gaining a name, he aspires to be more than a mere imitator, and almost invariably resolves to become a creator.
He falls in with the master-pieces of Grecian art, in which mythology so fearfully predominates over nature, and, unable to surpass what he finds already accomplished, becomes at last a mere imitator, not of nature, for that he scorns, but an imitator of the ancient schools of art; and the result is a mongrel production, neither resembling a god nor looking like a man.
An imitator of other men’s work, a mere copyist, is necessarily a humbug; and that there is no great American work of art is because our artists are Content to Imitate, and lack the courage to strike out for themselves.
The art of a nation should be a part of the nation, inspired and developed by the national surroundings.
The war of ’76 established our political separation from, but not our independence of Great Britain. For full half a century no man thought of any other standard of judgment than the public sentiment of England.
The literature of the Eastern States is not yet altogether enfranchised. Even the abolition of slavery by the thirteenth amendment has not abolished the slavery of custom in those States which possess most of the fruits of what is called education.
It is only in the West, where we are very like nature herself, that men speak and act as they feel, never fearing the censures of a foreign school, because they never hear of it.
On the broad savannas of the West, by its boundless lakes, its endless rivers, man feels so humbled in the presence of nature, where God has poured out his richness and greatness that he regards nature as everything; and from nature, not from man, from the will of God revealed in his works, not from the dogmas of the schoolmen, he draws his inspiration.
The master-piece of Grecian art may unquestionably be studied with profit; but mainly to see how the sculptors of that day represented the ideality of their race.
The Athenians believed that human affairs were conducted by innumerable gods — every great man to be a god in disguise — and the funeral of such a man was his apotheosis.
God and Men were confounded, and the statuary of that period may be consulted to learn how that idea could best be represented in marble.
But it is little less than absurd, in this practical age and country, to clothe the statues of great men with drapery and surroundings appropriate only to the gods of Greek mythology. [Applause.]
Those who have visited the studio of our fair artist, and studied the little gems of beauty and the stately representations of her conception of grace and majesty, cannot doubt that she is capable of embodying in a statue of Lincoln a creditable conception of Jupiter hurling his thunderbolts, or of Mars, with his red right hand bared to execute vengeance, or of Cicero in the Senate, animated by debate, tossing back the ample folds of The Roman Toga.
Thus she might have produced a fable in marble, beholding which no man could say where Lincoln stopped and Jupiter commenced, nor distinguish that which represented the fact from that which embodied the fancy of the artist.
Thus she might have cheated her employers and have libeled the great departed, and her statue might have been placed in the Capitol amid the hosannas of the artist, while an Illinois neighbor could not detect the remotest resemblance to the plain old man with whose incomings and outgoings he had been familiar for years. [Applause.]
Our artist was aware that no flattery was expected at her hands. When the people employed her to execute this work, they were in no mood for dissembling.
War is a severe teacher of sincerity and truth. The people did not desire somebody’s conception of what a great leader of a mighty people, in the most fearful crisis of their history, ought to look like.
But they did wish for an exact likeness of Abraham Lincoln.
And who was this Abraham Lincoln, the remembrance of whom they desired to perpetuate? Was he like Jupiter or Apollo — like Caesar or Cicero — like Cromwell or Napoleon?
No, no; like neither of these. And the people did not employ Vinnie Ream to make a statue of either of these, but of Abraham Lincoln as he appeared in the White House, and there he appeared just as he did on the prairies and in the court rooms of the West.
He was half farmer, half lawyer, and altogether a child of nature.
He never punished his great feet by wearing small boots, nor disguised his huge hands with kid gloves.
All the embellishments of dress and observances of mere fashion he left to those who have a mind for such things.
But he was a very remarkable man, and his appearance commanded attention and compelled respect.
He was tall and gaunt of figure, wholly destitute of grace, slovenly in dress, with a face sadder than ever was worn by man before; a face which mirrored the melancholy scenes in which he was so prominent an actor; a face which spoke of the trials which made his life almost insupportable, of nights without sleep and days full of trouble, of governmental cares, of personal griefs, of war and the sufferings which war begets, of battlefields, hospitals and graves, of widows and orphans, of a great heart-bleeding, a great soul sorrowful.
This was the man, whose likeness our people desired to preserve for themselves and for coming generations.
Engaged upon such a work, it would have been little less than blasphemy to represent Lincoln in the trappings of mythological heroes, or to take the slightest liberty with his appearance in any respect— to tamper with his form, gestures, features or expression.
Cromwell commanded his artist to paint him just as he was, with every wrinkle of his brow and the wart on his cheek.
And Vinnie Ream has executed her task in the same spirit of fidelity to the fact. If she has failed at all, it is in presenting a statue more attractive than the original.
But failing in this is no impeachment of her genius, for God only could make a face so sad, so nigged, so homely as Lincoln’s was.
Of this statue, as a mere work of art, I am no judge.
What Praxiteles might have thought of such a work, I neither know nor care; but I am able to say, in presence of this vast and brilliant assembly (most of whom knew him well), that it is Abraham Lincoln all over.
Yes, it is more than that; to quote the affectionate appellation employed by his familiar friends and neighbors, it is “Honest Old Abe Lincoln” all over; and I am happy to say that I am authorized by Judge Davis — who, we all know, was Mr. Lincoln’s warmest and ancient friend, and of whom Mr. Lincoln said, that if his term of office should expire without his having made him a Judge of the Supreme Court of the United States, he should consider that his administration had been a failure; and on another occasion Mr. Lincoln said that he expected to have, after the expiration of his Presidential term, about twelve years to practice law among his old associates of the Springfield bar, and his only regret was that David Davis would not be there to hold the court.
I am authorized by the Judge to say — and no man living is a better judge of the fact — that the statue is an admirable representation of Mr. Lincoln in the mood of serious contemplation as when, for example, he was deliberating upon the emancipation proclamation.
This is an exact copy of the rough casket in which God lodged one of his brightest jewels — Lincoln — second only to Washington, and in history to be compared only with Washington. Lincoln stands there deficient in nothing that belonged to his outward form and physical appearance.
Therefore, as a member of the Senate committee appointed to inspect this work, I pronounce it satisfactory, and declare that, in my opinion, Vinnie Ream has faithfully executed the task which she was employed to perform. [Applause.]
But, I should only half perform my duty, did I fall to express to our artist the thanks of the State of Wisconsin, which I have the honor, in part, to represent, and whose daughter she is.
The glory of a State consists in the achievements of her sons and daughters.
We know Athens only from the works of her philosophers, her law-givers and statesmen, her sculptors, painters, and orators. We speak of Rome, but we mean Caesar and Cicero, and others, and what they accomplished.
Vinnie Ream, born on the heights overlooking the four lakes of Wisconsin’s capital city — a spot beautiful enough to be the birthplace of all the artists in the world — has contributed a work which may outlast all the recorded opinions of Wisconsin’s ablest judges, and all the spoken orations of her Senators and Representatives; and in the name of the State I give her thanks. [Applause.]
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The Abraham Lincoln Commemorative Silver Dollar Coin shows with an image of the evening’s arrangements and a photo of the statue, courtesy of the Architect of the Capitol.
