Battle of Fisher's Hill

Soldiers on both sides called Fisher's Hill the Gibraltar of the Shenandoah Valley. Stand here and you understand why. To the east, Massanutten Mountain rises from the valley floor in a wall of blue-green ridge. To the west, Little North Mountain closes the gap. Between them, the Shenandoah Valley narrows to a bottleneck, and Fisher's Hill fills that bottleneck like a cork. In September of eighteen sixty-four, Confederate General Jubal Early planted his army across this high ground and dared Philip Sheridan to come get him.

Sheridan had already beaten Early at Third Winchester two days earlier, on September nineteenth. Early fell back south and anchored on Fisher's Hill on September twenty-first, stretching his roughly nine thousand five hundred men along the ridge from mountain to mountain. He was outnumbered nearly three to one, but the position seemed impregnable. Frontal assault up those slopes would be suicide.

Sheridan agreed, which is why he sent General George Crook around the Confederate left. Crook's corps crept along the forested slopes of Little North Mountain on the afternoon of September twenty-second, moving unseen through thick timber until they were behind and above the Confederate cavalry holding Early's left flank. When Crook struck, the flank collapsed almost instantly. Confederate soldiers panicked and the entire line unraveled from west to east. Early's army fled south in disorder, losing more than a thousand men killed, wounded, or captured.

The Union lost fewer than seven hundred.

Fisher's Hill shattered whatever offensive capability Early had retained after Winchester. More consequentially, it opened the door for Sheridan's systematic destruction of the valley's agricultural resources, a campaign so thorough that Sheridan boasted a crow flying over the Shenandoah would need to carry its own rations. That scorched-earth logic, executed through October of eighteen sixty-four, starved Confederate logistics and helped end the war six months later.