Third Battle of Winchester
Near Front Royal, Virginia
By the summer of eighteen sixty-four, the Shenandoah Valley had changed hands so many times that Washingtonians were beginning to call it a Confederate highway, a corridor that Lee could use to threaten the capital whenever the pressure at Petersburg grew too great. Ulysses Grant had seen enough. He gave Philip Sheridan command of a new Army of the Shenandoah and a simple order: destroy Jubal Early's army and render the Valley useless to the Confederacy.
On the morning of September nineteenth, eighteen sixty-four, Sheridan sent about forty thousand men streaming toward Winchester along the Berryville Pike, the largest Union force ever assembled for a single engagement in this valley. Early had about fifteen thousand. The opening hours went badly for the North. Sheridan's columns had to squeeze through Berryville Canyon, a narrow defile that took hours to clear, and the delay gave Early time to concentrate his scattered divisions around Winchester's northern approaches.
What followed was one of the most punishing single days of fighting in the entire war in the East. Federal infantry hammered the Confederate line through the morning and into the afternoon, paying heavily for every field. Sheridan's army suffered five thousand casualties, roughly twelve percent of his force. Early lost close to four thousand, about a quarter of his smaller army, and far harder to replace.
The crisis came at dusk. Sheridan released his cavalry, six brigades thundering against the Confederate left flank like what one officer called a thunderbolt, and Early's line cracked. His troops poured through Winchester in retreat, and Sheridan rode through the town to cheering residents who had lived under Confederate authority for much of the war.
The victory at the Third Battle of Winchester, also called the Battle of Opequon, broke the back of Early's army in the Valley. It began a cascade of Confederate defeats that stripped Lee of his most reliable buffer to the north and contributed directly to the atmosphere of collapse that reached Appomattox the following spring.
