Throughout the afternoon of Saturday, April 8, 1865, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, accompanied by his second in command, Lieut. Gen. James Longstreet, rode west along the Richmond-Lynchburg Stage Road amid Longstreet’s slow-moving trains. Behind the creaking wagons, Longstreet’s hard-pressed infantrymen, bolstered by cavalry under Maj. Gen. Fitzhugh “Fitz” Lee, constituted the Army of Northern Virginia’s rearguard. Up ahead, along the same thoroughfare, the infantry under Maj. Gen. John B. Gordon was approaching the hilltop village of Appomattox Court House. Surprisingly, this day—thus far—had proved to be the quietest of the army’s disastrous six-day retreat from the defenses of Richmond and Petersburg.
At nightfall, as the rank and file lit their cookfires, Lee, Longstreet, and their staffs turned off the pike into the woods about two miles from Appomattox. There was a chill in the air as the generals established their headquarters. The moon was up—the sky partially filled with low-hanging clouds.
Suddenly, between 8 and 9 p.m., the booming of artillery to the southwest reverberated through the trees. It was the thunderous din of a one-sided fight near Appomattox Station. That afternoon, hard-riding Union troopers under Maj. Gen. George Armstrong Custer had captured three trainloads of quartermaster supplies at the station. Later on, just to the north, they’d encountered Lee’s surplus artillery train—about 100 pieces—and a small cavalry force. There, in darkness illuminated by sun-bright canister blasts, Custer’s men repeatedly charged and eventually overwhelmed the Southerners, capturing over two dozen cannon, about 1,000 artillerymen, and almost 200 wagons loaded with much-needed provisions. And now, from an open hilltop near Lee’s headquarters, more harbingers were visible on the clouds to the east, west, and south: the reflected lights of innumerable enemy campfires.
This was the evening of Lee’s last council of
