#quote I didn't get to use in full in my paper. I'll prob be posting more because Smith's essay has some just fab adjective-filled

[ravencromwell]

Speaking in June of that year on the concessions that he and other Radicals had made in fashioning the Fourteenth Amendment, Stevens regretted the measure’s limited racial reforms. He had long envisioned that, when given the chance, "the intelligent, pure and just men of this Republic, true to their professions and their consciences, would have so remodeled all our institutions as to have freed them from every vestige of human oppression, of inequality of rights, of the recognized degradation of the poor, and the superior caste of the rich, that no distinction would be tolerated and in this purified Republic but what arose from merit and conduct. This bright dream has vanished," Stevens lamented, quoting Shakespeare’s The Tempest, "‘like the baseless fabric of a vision.’"

--from a fab essay by John David Smith on Thaddeus Stevens and land confiscation