More history for the day

On 1 September 1864, Atlanta, Georgia fell:

Union General William Tecumseh Sherman laid siege to Atlanta, Georgia, a Confederate hub, on 1 September 1864, shelling civilians and cutting off supply lines. The Confederates retreated, destroying the city’s munitions as they went. On 15 November 1864, Sherman’s troops burned much of the city before continuing their march through the South. Sherman’s Atlanta campaign was one of the most decisive victories of the Civil War.
William T. Sherman, born 8 May 1820 in Lancaster, Ohio, attended West Point and served in the army before becoming a banker and then president of a military school in Louisiana. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Sherman joined the Union Army and eventually commanded large numbers of troops under General Ulysses S. Grant at the battles of Shiloh (1862), Vicksburg (1863), and Chattanooga (1863). In the spring of 1864, Sherman became supreme commander of the armies in the West and was ordered by Grant to take the city of Atlanta, then a key military supply center and railroad hub for the Confederates.
Sherman’s Atlanta campaign began on 4 May 1864 and, in the first few months, his troops engaged in several fierce battles with Confederate soldiers on the outskirts of the city, including the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, which Union lost. However, on 1 September, Sherman’s men successfully captured Atlanta and continued to defend it through mid-November against Confederate forces led by John Bell Hood. Before he set off on his famous March to the Sea on 15 November, Sherman ordered that Atlanta’s military resources, including munitions factories, clothing mills, and railway yards, be burned. The fire got out of control, leaving Atlanta in ruins.
Sherman and sixty thousand of his soldiers then headed toward Savannah, Georgia, destroying everything in their path that could help the Confederates. They captured Savannah and completed their March to the Sea on 23 December 1864. The Civil War ended on 12 April 1865, when the Confederate commander in chief, Robert E. Lee, surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia.
After the war, Sherman succeeded Grant as commander in chief of the Army, serving from 1869 to 1883. Sherman, who is credited with the phrase War is Hell, died on 14 February 1891 in New York City. The city of Atlanta swiftly recovered from the war and became the capital of Georgia in 1868, first on a temporary basis and then permanently, by popular vote, in 1877.

Rico says it was the beginning of the end for the Confederacy...