In the fall of 1864 a Union army went into one of the richest farm valleys in Virginia carrying orders to set it on fire: not to beat the enemy and move on, but to burn the place. Torch the barns, fire the mills, drive off the herds, leave the corridor unable to feed an army ever again. A valley of prosperous farms was worth that because of what those farms were doing, and who they were doing it to.

The valley was the Shenandoah Valley, the long farm corridor running down the western edge of Virginia between two mountain ranges. It did two things for the Confederacy, and both made it priceless. First, it was a larder. Its farms grew the grain and raised the livestock and put up the hay that fed Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, the main Confederate army, dug in around Richmond and Petersburg well off to the east. The Valley fed that army so reliably that the period gave it a nickname: “the breadbasket of the Confederacy.” Second, the Valley was a covered highway pointed straight at the North. Because of the way the land drains, going north in the Valley is going “down” it, and an army marching down the Valley came out near Washington, screened by mountains the whole way, while a Union army marching the other direction threatened nothing that mattered. That lopsided geography made the Valley a favorite Confederate invasion chute. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson used it in 1862, and in the summer of 1864 Lieutenant General Jubal A. Early (South), commanding a small, separate Confederate army of his own rather than Lee’s main one, used it to march all the way to the outskirts of Washington itself.

The breadbasket was the object, not the reason. The Confederacy existed to preserve slavery. Eleven states had broken from the United States rather than accept any limit on the enslavement of Black people, and built their economy, their society, and their armies on it. The Shenandoah’s farms were part of that economy: this was a slave society (enslaved people made up roughly a fifth of the Valley’s population in 1860), and enslaved and free Black laborers worked the very fields whose grain and cattle were loaded up and sent east to feed Lee’s soldiers. So when Ulysses S. Grant, the Union general-in-chief, looked at the Valley in 1864, he did not just see an invasion route to plug. He saw the material engine of a slaveholding rebellion, and he decided to break it. He sent Major General Philip H. Sheridan (North) into the Valley with orders that went past beating Early’s army: he was to strip the place, burn the Valley’s farms to the ground, drive off the herds, take the breadbasket out of the war for good. That campaign of deliberate destruction became known as “The Burning,” and this battle was the door it had to come through first.

The battle has two names, and the second one is a clue. On the War Department’s books it is the Battle of Opequon, named for Opequon Creek, the stream the Union army splashed across to reach the field. Almost nobody calls it that. To everyone who tells the story it is the Third Battle of Winchester, after Winchester, Virginia, the town it was fought beside. Winchester sat on so many roads, and changed hands so many times, that armies fought three separate named battles over it across the war (First Winchester in 1862, Second in 1863, and this one, the third and by far the largest). So there is one fight with two names: a formal one hardly anyone uses, and a common one that quietly records that the town had been bled three times.