The winter of 1864-65 was one of the harshest on record in Virginia’s war-torn Shenandoah Valley. Heavy snows and frigid temperatures conspired to freeze into place two opposing armies that had just spent the previous fall contending for control of the vital Southern breadbasket. In Winchester, at the northern end of the valley, the Union Army of the Shenandoah, commanded by feisty Major General Philip H. Sheridan, rested in comparative comfort, well-supplied by the efficient Federal Quartermaster Corps — notwithstanding the veteran soldiers’ seemingly unbreakable habit of eating up five days’ rations in four days’ time. Meanwhile, 90 miles to the south at Staunton, Lieutenant General Jubal A. Early’s Confederate Army of the Valley shivered and starved in stark contrast to their victorious enemy. Early’s thrice-beaten soldiers huddled in their run-down huts and ragged tents, their morale as low as the arctic temperatures outside. ‘Men’s spirits dull, gloomy and all are evidently hopeless, waiting for we know not what end,’ one private wrote.

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The two armies’ contrasting moods mirrored their commanders’ divergent fortunes. ‘Little Phil’ Sheridan, all 5 feet 5 inches of him, stood high in the ranks of public opinion. His three successive victories in the Shenandoah Valley, at Winchester, Fisher’s Hill and — most prominently — Cedar Creek, had effectively ended two years of Union frustrations in the Confederacy’s most important granary. Tough, unsentimental and confident to the point of cockiness, Sheridan had more than justified Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s controversial decision the previous summer to give him command of the Army of the Shenandoah. Told by more than one person that the diminutive Sheridan was ‘rather a little fellow,’ the taciturn Grant had responded, ‘You will find him big enough for the purpose before we get through with him.’

Sheridan’s Confederate counterpart, Jubal Early, was not so sanguine. ‘Old Jubilee’ could more than match Sheridan’s rough, salty language and personal bravery, but he could not match the Federals’ overwhelming advantage in sheer numbers. While Sheridan counted nearly 10,000 battle-tested cavalry troopers in his winter camp, Early could scarcely scrounge together one-eighth that number of Rebel soldiers. To make matters worse, the enemy’s destruction of farms and livestock in the valley had depleted the Confederates’ food and forage supplies. To keep his men and horses from withering away completely, Early had been forced to disperse his already dwindling command. He returned two cavalry brigades to General Robert E. Lee’s equally hard-pressed army at Petersburg and sent another brigade to winter in southwestern Virginia, along with an infantry brigade and an artillery battalion. The situation was so dire that artillerymen who accepted responsibility for feeding their horses were allowed to take them home.

Two months earlier, on the morning of October 19, 1864, neither commander could have guessed what their comparative conditions would soon be. That morning, while Sheridan was still sleeping in Winchester after returning from a whirlwind visit to Washington, Early had sent his army crashing into the Union lines outside Middletown at Cedar Creek. The pre-dawn surprise attack, spearheaded by three divisions under Maj. Gen. John B. Gordon’s command, had nearly destroyed Sheridan’s army. A prematurely jubilant Early, consciously echoing Napoleon’s words at the Battle of Austerlitz half a century earlier, had greeted the rising sun with the satisfied exclamation, ‘The sun of Middletown!’

An unaccountable delay in pressing the attack — Gordon accused Early of shrugging off his calls for another charge with the airy reasoning, ‘This is glory enough for one day’ — had allowed Sheridan to ride back to his army in a stirring 10-mile dash known ever afterward as ‘Sheridan’s Ride.’ Once on the field, the Union commander had managed to rearrange his lines and inspire his troops, telling them flatly, ‘We’ll sleep in our own beds tonight, or we’ll sleep in hell.’ A subsequent counterattack, ably supported by Union cavalry, had completely reversed the Confederates’ gains that morning and sent Early and his army stumbling southward in ignominious defeat.

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