But Lincoln received not an ounce of his praise for this momentous turn to emancipation. Instead, Phillips declared that the people had wrung the proclamation from this reluctant president, who had now taken only the “first step in the direction of a union that every man may love and die for.” The proclamation itself did not secure an American nationality, Phillips insisted, for it offered no guarantee for a “Union of the future … as indestructible as the granite that underlies this continent.”
