You wrote...
  It's a UART.  Unless you wire it for loopback, you
normally won't read
 back the same data you wrote. 
Yeah, it's a UART. But I assumed you wrote data
to a register, then wrote
data to a different register to strobe the data out, etc. So I figured the
first register was just a temporary buffer that would hold it's contents
until replaced by data in the opposite direction. My bad.
I'll look up the test loopback adapter wiring.
Jay