Soon after you cross into Maryland from Pennsylvania on I-70, you will find signs to Winchester, Virginia. It was from here that Union General Philip Sheridan made his famous ride to rally his troops and beat the Confederate forces led by Confederate General Jubal Early during the Civil War.

The Civil War had been going on for almost four years, and the country was tiring from it. Sheridan had been in Washington conferring on war strategy and was on his way back to his troops when Confederate forces made a surprise attack on his Army in the northern Shenandoah Valley.

Sheridan had stayed the night in Winchester and awoke on the morning of October 19, 1864 to the sound of distant gunfire. He rode toward it expecting the worst…and he found it. His troops were in a disorganized retreat coming north from a Confederate attack at Cedar Creek. In a decisive moment, reminding me of how U.S. Grant galvanized the troops at Pittsburgh Landing at Shiloh, Sheridan rallied his troops, turned them around, and by nightfall of the same day had achieved a great victory.

Many historians since then have credited Sheridan’s ride and victory at Cedar Creek for Abraham Lincoln’s reelection just a few weeks later. The Union needed some good news from the fighting front, and Sheridan gave it.

There is a powerful poem you might want to read called “Sheridan’s Ride” written by Thomas Buchanan Read. It is really more about Sheridan’s horse than it is about Sheridan, but I cite just a stanza or two to give you a taste of it. Winchester was 20 miles from the fighting at Cedar Creek and the mileage decreases as the horse gallops toward the battle:

“A steed as black as the steeds of night

Was seen to pass, as with eagle flight;

As if he knew the terrible need,

He stretched away with his utmost speed.

Hills rose and fell, but his heart was gay,

With Sheridan fifteen miles away.”

Sheridan’s horse became almost as famous as Sheridan. The horse, “Rienzi,” had been gifted to Sheridan in 1862 by his troops during the fighting around Rienzi, Mississippi. He was a big, black, beautiful horse and Sheridan road him to victory after victory during the Civil War. The horse, after the Battle of Cedar Creek, was renamed “Winchester” and upon his death some years after the war, was stuffed, mounted and is still somewhere in the custody of the federal government at the Smithsonian as Catalogue number 32870 (though “currently not on view.”)

It is no wonder that many of the sculptures of Civil War Generals have them sitting on a horse. In Washington, D.C., Philip Sheridan sits on Rienzi/Winchester in the middle of Sheridan Circle on Massachusetts Avenue for all to see. Without that horse, Sheridan may not have made it to Cedar Creek in time.

Rolland Kidder is a Stow resident.