After the successful attack of the Union Eighth Corps, Confederate Gen. Early consolidated his lines closer and closer to Winchester as his men faced coordinated infantry attacks and powerful Union cavalry forces fighting along the Valley Pike, threatening to surround his army. Although the Confederates offered stubborn resistance at Fort Collier, Star Fort, and from fencelines and barricades, Early had to choose between retreat and the destruction or capture of his army, and by nightfall Winchester was in Union hands. The Third Battle of Winchester was the bloodiest battle ever fought in the Shenandoah Valley, producing more casualties than the entire 1862 Valley Campaign. Union Gen. Sheridan lost 12 percent of his army, with 5,000 of 39,000 soldiers killed, wounded, and missing, while Early suffered 3,500 casualties but lost 25 percent of his army. After the battle, Early's men retreated twenty miles south to Fisher's Hill, where they were outflanked on September 22 and forced to retreat again. A Confederate cavalry force was beaten at Tom's Brook, but Early nearly defeated the Army of the Shenandoah at Cedar Creek on October 19 before Sheridan organized a powerful counterattack that almost completely destroyed the Army of the Valley. The Confederates never again controlled or conducted substantial operations in the Shenandoah, and thereafter Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant shifted his focus to forcing Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee out of Richmond, accomplishing this seven months later and effectively ending the war.
