Sevenscore and 10 years ago ...

Future generations will learn as much, if not more, about Abraham Lincoln from Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” as my generation and yours learned about the Civil War from watching “Gone With the Wind” since 1939.After seeing the film, Congressman Joe Courtney has asked Spielberg to correct a scene showing two of three Connecticut congressmen voting against the 1865 House resolution abolishing slavery, the resolution that sent the 13th Amendment to the states for ratification.It is altogether fitting and proper that he should do this.At the very least, a printed correction on the DVD, to be released in April, is in order, if only because the vote of Connecticut’s four, not three, House members, was of some historic significance. The resolution, which had passed in the Senate early in 1864, had been held up in the House for nearly a year. It required a two-thirds majority of those voting and it passed by a vote of 119 to 56, and so, without Connecticut’s four — not three — affirmative votes, the resolution would have fallen short.The four forgotten men are Augustus Brandegee of New London, James English of New Haven, Henry Deming of Hartford and John Henry Hubbard of Salisbury. Also worthy of note here are the two senators who supported the resolution earlier, James Dixon of Enfield and Lafayette Foster of Norwich. They had one thing in common. All six were out of office after the first postwar election.Hubbard was a Salisbury lawyer and prosecutor until he succumbed to the bright lights of Litchfield in his 50s, ran for Congress, served two terms and was denied renomination to a third term in 1866. Deming had the most colorful career. He was mayor of Hartford before going into the Union Army as a colonel in a Connecticut volunteer regiment. In the army, he became a mayor again, in New Orleans, when it was occupied and under martial law. While in New Orleans, Deming found the time to run successfully for Congress in Connecticut and served two terms, losing a bid for a third term in 1866.English was known as a War Democrat and a biographer noted “he voted with Republicans on all important questions” from 1861 to 1865 but that wasn’t enough to get him a third term in Congress. However, he later enjoyed a comeback and got to be governor.Brandegee chose not to seek a third term after the war and returned to New London where he was elected mayor. An obituary in the State Library describes him as “a trusted friend of President Lincoln,” who “zealously supported the anti-slavery movement when its supporters met contumely and contempt” from his fellow Democrats, among others.The Connecticut senators would play somewhat dramatic, if rather brief, roles immediately following the war and the death of Lincoln. Foster, as president of the Senate, became first in the line of succession after Vice President Andrew Johnson became president in 1865, a distinction he enjoyed until Connecticut voters retired him in 1866. Dixon was a moderate and some historians cite him as the first Republican to declare his opposition to impeaching Johnson but others ignore him. He did vote against impeachment but Edmund Ross of Kansas got all the credit for casting the deciding vote. This is because Ross was the last Republican in the alphabet whose decision was unknown until he cast his vote.But Ross was apparently on the take, a rather common practice in both parties at the time. He had been elected to the Senate by a bribed Kansas legislature and was said to have continued supplementing his income while in office. In fact, there was so much bribery on both sides going on during the impeachment process, I don’t think anyone really knows how many senators voted out of conviction. Dixon was known as an Episcopalian and a poet, but not a crook. He did, however, pay the price for his kindness to Mr. Johnson along with Ross and other Republicans who defied the party’s dominant radicals. It is said Dixon was drummed out of the party and was forced to run for re-election — and lose — as a Democrat.And let’s not forget Mrs. Dixon, known as Mary Lincoln’s best friend in Washington. Lincoln historian David Herbert writes that after Lincoln’s son Willie died in the White House, the president’s oldest son, Robert, upon seeing how distraught his mother had become, asked that Dixon’s wife be summoned to comfort her.I see the film’s screenwriter, the talented Tony Kushner, doesn’t seem pleased about being caught. He argues he changed the facts to serve the larger story, presumably that abolishing slavery was not universally supported in the North. He seems to think it was just fine to change the names of the men whose votes he changed. It isn’t. Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.