3rd Winchester • Tour the Battlefield • Battle Maps • Battle Facts • The Armies
The Battlefield • Dawn • 10 a.m. • Attack • Counterattack • Early p.m. • Late p.m. • Dusk
At first light on September 19 McIntosh’s brigade of Wilson’s Union cavalry division crossed Opequon Creek. Led by the 2nd and 5th New York Cavalry Regiments, McIntosh’s men scattered the Confederate pickets of the 23rd North Carolina Infantry. Colonel Charles Blackmall, commanding the 23rd, tried to rally his men but took a bullet to the ankle. He was captured and would die in a Union hospital in November.
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Behind the Union cavalry three infantry corps started to cross the Opequon and move toward Winchester. This was Sheridan’s first error in the battle, and it was costly. Ignoring good parallel routes on both sides of Berryville Road to send his entire infantry force – over 20,000 men – along one two lane road was very time consuming. This gave Early time to force march his distant divisions to the field and concentrate, foiling Sheridan’s plan to defeat him in detail. To make matters worse, Union Sixth Corps commander Horatio Wright brought his supply wagons in the line of march, further delaying the two corps which followed him.
The three infantry brigades of Confederate Major General Stephen Dodson Ramseur’s division were bivouacked just beyond the end of Berryville Canyon. He quickly formed his division across the road, with Pegram’s Virginia Brigade on the left flank, Johnston’s North Carolina Brigade in the center, and Godwin’s Brigade, also from North Carolina, on the southern flank. Ramseur’s men threw the Union cavalrymen back, wounding McIntosh in the leg, which he would lose that night. His cavalrymen held the exit to the canyon and waited for the infantry to come up and take over the fight.
To the north at Stephenson’s Depot Jubal Early set the bivouacked divisions of Rodes and Wharton into motion. Seven miles to their north (and off the map) at Bunker Hill, John Gordon’s Division had orders to march for Stephenson’s Depot at dawn, where he would be directed onward to the battlefield. It was a race to see who reached the battlefield first.