On 8 April 1865 Union cavalry under George Armstrong Custer rode into Appomattox Station, Virginia, and captured the trains of rations waiting there for Robert E. Lee's hungry Army of Northern Virginia. Then, in failing light, the troopers fought the Confederate reserve artillery parked nearby, a rare battle of horsemen against guns with no infantry on either side. By nightfall Custer had taken the guns and a foothold across the road west. The next morning Lee found his way blocked, and he surrendered at Appomattox Court House that afternoon.
A race for rations
In the first days of April 1865, harried by Union troops and cut off whenever it tried to turn south toward General Joseph Johnston's army in North Carolina, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia marched west along the Appomattox River. It was short of everything, above all food. Lee's goal was the South Side Railroad at Appomattox Station, where trains of rations were waiting.1
Lee did not know that Ulysses S. Grant had divided his forces and sent cavalry racing ahead to cut him off. The leading division, about 3,000 troopers under Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer, reached the station first.2
Trains and guns
Custer's men arrived at around 4 p.m., according to the National Park Service, and quickly captured three of the four trains standing on the line. The only Confederates nearby were the army's reserve artillery under Brigadier General Reuben Lindsay Walker, several thousand men and about 100 guns in the Park Service's count, with a handful of cavalry. They were not expecting a fight.3
Walker quickly formed a defensive line while sending much of his force out of harm's way. What followed, in the words of the National Park Service, was one of the strangest engagements of the war: Union cavalry against Confederate artillery, with no infantry on either side. The American Battlefield Trust notes that the gunners spent most of the fight acting as infantry skirmishers. Much of the five hour battle was fought in darkness, in dense woods and thickets that hampered both sides. After several failed mounted charges, Custer's troopers broke through Walker's line.4
What was taken and lost
Both the Trust and the Park Service count 25 captured guns. The Park Service adds nearly 1,000 prisoners, five battle flags and upwards of 200 wagons. Because the fighting was so confused, losses were light: the Park Service estimates about 100 killed or wounded on both sides together, though Union surgeons said they had never treated so many extreme cases.5
Later that night a detachment of the 15th New York Cavalry under Lieutenant Colonel Augustus Root charged under a full moon along the stage road into the village of Appomattox Court House, looking for the rest of Lee's army. Confederate infantry just arriving from the east stopped it in a short, sharp firefight, and Root was killed near the county jail.6
The last night
The loss of the station ended Lee's hope of feeding his army. That night, the Park Service relates, Lee held a council of war and decided to attack the next morning to reopen his escape route west, while Union reinforcements were already moving up behind Custer. When the Confederates attacked on the morning of 9 April, they found infantry as well as cavalry in front of them, and that afternoon Lee surrendered. The surrender is told in our article on Appomattox Court House.7
