Of course not! If the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves, why would we have needed the 13th Amendment?
-Give slaves in Confederate-held areas hope that they would be free, and flee with their families to Union lines, thereby disrupting the Confederate work force dependent upon them for domestic labor since all the young white males were fighting.
-Give the Union the moral high ground in regards to Europe (until then, France and England were sympathetic to the Confederacy because of their rebellion against the U.S.). The public of both nations at that time were strongly anti-slavery, and the EP pretty much put them on the side of the Union.
The tiff is interesting only in that it exemplifies again, for anyone who wasn't aware of it, of the ideologization of American history by the Left, esp. by the Clinton Administration and the Red professors of Columbia University's history department, who colluded with Clinton to rewrite the public displays at Gettysburg to skew public perceptions in a fashion congenial to Clinton's South/Republican-bashing.
No, but clinging to the rest of the myths in the book cover just might.
"Secession was legal." Unilateral secession was not.
"The South had the moral high ground in the war (and the editorial support of the Vatican's own newspaper)" Highly questionable claim to begin with, and meaningless even if true. Political recognition would have been seen as tangible support of the rebel cause. Such recognition never happened.
"That Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis thought that slavery would fade away eventually." Neither men thought slavery would fade away naturally in their life time, or their children's lifetime. Or their grandchildren's lifetime. Both thought that slavery was the best condition for blacks in the South. Both were slave owners.
"If the South had won we might be able to enjoy holidays in the sunny state of Cuba." And Mexico. And Guatamala. And Honduras. The confederate founding fathers were very keen on expanding south into Central and South America as a way to expand slavery.
Overall I really enjoyed the book. But I've always liked good comedy.
Some real un PC events:
Free Blacks who owned slaves
Race riots which killed thousands in the North
Blacks who fought for the Confederacy
The disbanding of the KKK because it became violent
Draftees in the North who paid to get out of the service
The dreadful condition of POW camps in both north and the south
Foreigners who fought in both the north and the south
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