What an opportunity is presented to this Republic to vindicate her consistency and become immortal. The occasion is forced upon us, and the invitation presented to strike the chains from four millions of human beings, and create them men: to extinguish slavery on this whole continent; to wipe out, so far as we are concerned, the most hateful and infernal blot that ever disgraced the escutcheon of man; to write a page in the history of the world whose brightness shall eclipse all the records of heroes and of sages.
—Thaddeus Stevens, speech in Congress, Jan. 22, 1862.
