Yeah, that was actually the first question Captcha like that that I've run in to, so I figured I'd double check that I wasn't just being deeply stupid. I kind of look forward to seeing how they resolve my issue. I think I'm now locked out anyway because I tried too many times.

Call The Midwife was excellent, but it plays with my brain when the next big PBS period piece is dated after my birth.

Unrelatedly--I saw the Lincoln trailer, and curse them for putting JGL in it. Anyway, Lincoln seems to be portrayed (again) as an endlessly noble man who knew a black kid when he was young, and is now the only man in the North or South who's firmly against racism.

But "Abraham Lincoln owned slaves" is a sentence I know I've seen a million times, without having any larger reference. What is closer to the truth of his stance?

I'm pretty sure he came late to abolitionism, but would have to do actual research to give you any facts there.

Lincoln's family didn't but Mary Todd's family did own slaves.

Yeah, Lincoln to my knowledge was not a slave owner. But he did not become an abolitionist until necessity forced him on it late in his presidency. He did not believe slavery could survive in the long term, and was unwilling to do anything to prop it up, but he was not anxious to speed up the process either.

He spend his early years in Kentucky, but his family moved to Indiana, briefly--and I do not believe that Indiana was a slave state. But they moved to Illinois before he was 10 and Illinois was a free state.

I figured political expedience had a fair amount to do with it. A hard and fast "they are our property" man would be hard-pressed to push that position, but someone going with the flow might be more flexible.

I regularly mis-saw a signal sign reading "This is your signal" as "This is your life" in a rather dank period in my life. My reaction varied between laughing and crying.

Kentucky was a border state. Mary Todd's father was a slave owner, but her family was divided over the war. She was a staunch supporter of Lincoln and the Union, but some of her brothers fought for the Confederacy.

Lincoln was always opposed to slavery, but like many well-meaning people of the era, did not know what the solution was. He supported repatriation to Africa or some type of gradual end to slavery, possibly including the government reimbursing slaveholders for the value of their slaves. He thought the main issue of the war was retaining the Union, but after Antietam, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation to weaken the South and encourage slaves to fight for the Union.