By October 1864 the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia had been the most fought-over ground in the East for three years, and the reason was written into the land itself. The Valley is a long, fertile corridor running southwest-to-northeast between two mountain ranges, which made it two things at once. It was the Confederacy’s “breadbasket,” a rich grain belt whose wheat and cattle fed General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. And it was a natural invasion highway: because it points toward Washington, an army marching down the Valley (down meaning north, the way the rivers run) could threaten the U.S. capital while the mountains screened its movement. Food for the South and a knife at the North’s throat, in one piece of geography. Both armies wanted it for both reasons.

A breadbasket is the object and not the cause. The Confederacy existed to preserve and extend slavery, and the Valley was a slave economy that proved it. The wheat that fed Lee’s army was grown by enslaved people, and the proof of it sat in the middle of the ground this battle would be fought on: a working slave plantation called Belle Grove, built and worked by enslaved labor, with 276 enslaved men, women, and children tied to the estate across its history. So when the Union set out to wreck the breadbasket, it was not attacking a granary in the abstract. It was attacking the food supply of a slaveholding army, raised on land worked by the very people the war was being fought to free. By the end of this story that house stands in the middle of the battlefield, with a name on it.

That summer the Valley had nearly won the war for the South. Lieutenant General Jubal Early (South) had marched his Army of the Valley down the corridor and right up to the outskirts of Washington in July 1864, close enough to rattle the capital. The Union’s general-in-chief, Ulysses S. Grant, decided to end the threat for good and sent Major General Philip Sheridan (North), a short, ferocious cavalryman, to do it. Through the fall Sheridan beat Early three times running: at the Third Battle of Winchester on September 19 (the biggest, bloodiest fight of the whole campaign), at Fisher’s Hill on September 22, and at Tom’s Brook on October 9, where Union horsemen routed Early’s cavalry. Early had been driven up the Valley a beaten, written-off man, which is what makes what he did next so surprising.

And then Sheridan did the thing the Valley had been built to prevent: he burned it. Acting on Grant’s order to leave the Valley “a barren waste,” his army spent roughly thirteen days in late September and early October systematically destroying the breadbasket: about 1,400 barns torched, some 435,000 bushels of wheat burned, mills and furnaces wrecked, around 11,000 head of cattle driven off, across a swath roughly 70 miles long and 30 wide. Soldiers called it, simply, “The Burning.” The goal was cold and explicit: starve Lee’s army by destroying the slave-worked farms that fed it. This battle would be fought in the smoking ruin of that harvest, which is exactly why hungry Confederate soldiers could not keep their eyes off the well-stocked Union camps.

Believing the beaten Early was finished, Sheridan’s army went into camp on the north bank of Cedar Creek, a stream running roughly east-to-west across their front. The creek was the line they thought protected them. Early, reinforced and out of options, decided to bet the whole campaign on proving them wrong.