Ha! Thank you, Unionblue. I think there must be something wrong with me. Feeling slightly blue, I decided a Thaddeus Stevens thread would be JUST the thing for a pick-me-up, and it worked. The thing is, if it hadn't, there's a Benjamin Butler thread in reserve, how funny is that? Hmm, I must have a thing for grumpy men with big hearts, would have been the first annoying groupie 150 years ago.
Now I suspect it's going to be disapointing to get to heaven one day and find Thaddeus Stevens doesn't look at ALL like TL Jones, since he was kind of my idea of Stevens exactly in ' Lincoln '. I hadn't heard the red-hot stove exchange, awesome! SO many of those stories turn out not to be true when they're about other people, but when it's Thaddeus Stevens you can generally guess ok, he would have said that, no need to invent outrageous statements about him.
Now, Daniel Day Lewis and Lincoln, those 2 will just confuse everybody up there in heaven one day ( hopefully a long, long time from now, Lewis being awfully young ), one of them is going to have to wear a name tag.