Lieutenant General Jubal A. Early’s (South) army broke and ran south, and it ran the worst possible way: not in an orderly fighting retreat but in a near-rout, divisions tangling together, men streaming back through the streets of Winchester itself and out the Valley Pike, the hard-surfaced turnpike running north and south through the town that was Early’s only good road out toward Newtown and Fisher’s Hill. A Confederate soldier remembered it as the most disorderly retreat he ever saw, the road choked with fugitives from every command, men of broken units mixed together and just going.

It is from this collapse that the battle’s most famous line comes. The image that stuck, repeated ever after on the Union side, was that Major General Philip H. Sheridan’s (North) men had sent Early’s army “whirling through Winchester,” the enemy spun out of the town and down the pike like something flung. The sources cannot agree who actually said it or wrote it, whether Sheridan himself or his chief of staff, in a telegram to one place or another. It is the way the winning side described the day, the picture of an army whirled out of a town it had held that morning.

Early got away. He still had an army, battered as it was, and he would turn and fight again at Fisher’s Hill three days later. But what happened at Winchester had already done the larger work. This was the largest and one of the bloodiest battles ever fought in the Shenandoah, more than 54,000 men engaged, over 8,600 of them killed, wounded, or missing by dark. The Union lost roughly 5,000; the Confederates somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,600 to 4,000. The raw totals undersell it, because the armies were not the same size. Sheridan lost about an eighth of the men he put in. Early lost better than a quarter of his, and Early’s smaller army could not replace those men or those dead generals. That disproportion is the whole significance: this one day began a run of losses for the Army of the Valley from which it would never recover.

Third Winchester was the first of three hammer-blows Sheridan landed in a single month, Winchester on September 19, Fisher’s Hill on the 22nd, and Cedar Creek on October 19, that together destroyed Early’s army as a fighting force and cleared the lower Valley for good.

With the Valley cleared, Sheridan carried out the order he had come to fulfill: The Burning. His men went systematically through the breadbasket torching barns and mills and crops and driving off the herds, thousands of cattle and sheep and hogs, hundreds of thousands of bushels of grain, dozens of mills and hundreds of barns gone, so that the corridor could never again feed or shelter a Confederate army. The slave-worked larder that had fed Lee’s soldiers stopped feeding them. The victory mattered beyond the Valley, too. It landed seven weeks before the 1864 presidential election, on top of William T. Sherman’s capture of Atlanta, and helped turn a war Northern voters feared was stalemated into one visibly being won, which helped carry Abraham Lincoln to reelection and meant the war would be fought to its finish and slavery to its end.

The day comes down to three things and a face. The breadbasket was the object. Slavery was the reason it was worth burning. And the man who told Sheridan when to swing the first blow was an enslaved man with a message in his mouth.