Emancipation Proclamation: Turning Point?

Was the Emancipation Proclamation the most decisive event of the US Civil War?

I realized I forgot to leave my opinion. 

Was President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation a watershed moment of the Civil War? Yes.  The Emancipation Proclamation authorized the enrollment of black soldiers into the Union Army and was both a political move and a military move. In the end the Union enrolled about 180,000, or ten percent of its fighting force, from emancipated slaves. The proclamation did not free all the slaves with a single stroke from Lincoln's pen on January 1, 1863  nor did it address or define the future status of freed slaves.  It had no bearing on the fate of the half million slaves living in the four Border States, it only applied to the slaves in the Confederacy.  It also did not apply to Tennessee or southern parishes in Louisiana for a total of nearly four millions slaves, their freedom would have to come with future Union military victories.  President Lincoln took it upon himself to issue this questionable document without the authority of Congress, he felt as commander in chief that it was within his power to target slavery as it enabled the Confederacy to carry on its war with the Union.  He told Secretary of the Navy Gideon Wells  in July 1862 that he had "come to the conclusion that it was a military necessity absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union, that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued."[1]

The Emancipation Proclamation would provide the basis for a transformation of Southern life, politically, economically and socially.The proclamation addressed many questions about European intervention, the failure of taking out slavery in crippling the Confederacy's ability to make war, the need for more Union troops and pressure from abolitionists and Radicals for action upon slavery

That is very true. The Civil War is one of those events that rational people,otherwise reasonable, 

bend their duty to their senses, and become irrational.

"As in 1861, dissension over dealing with slavery flared within the Army the most dramatic incident took place in southern Louisiana. Hoping to conciliate local whites, Gen. Benjamin F. Butler abandoned his earlier contraband policy and ordered most of fugitives barred from Union lines."

The Fiery Trial; Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner, page 209.

But do you see this event as THE one turning point of the war? Or some other event?