On 8 April 1865, Union cavalry under George Armstrong Custer reached Appomattox Station, Virginia, ahead of Robert E. Lee's retreating army, seized the supply trains waiting there and, in a fight that ran into the night, drove off the Confederate reserve artillery. Lee's road west was blocked, and the next day he surrendered at Appomattox Court House.
Battle of Appomattox Station
8 April 1865 · 161 years ago
A race for rations
By the evening of 8 April the head of Lee's column had reached Appomattox Court House, Lee and his chief of artillery, William N. Pendleton, report. Lee's goal was the South Side Railroad at Appomattox Station, where supply trains were waiting. Unknown to Lee, the Park Service writes, Ulysses S. Grant had sent cavalry racing ahead to cut him off. According to the historian Chris Calkins, Philip Sheridan's cavalry, Edward Ord's Army of the James and Charles Griffin's Fifth Corps took a shorter, more southerly route, about 30 miles against the 38 Lee's men had to march.1
Sheridan writes that shortly after the march began that morning one of his scouts, Sergeant White, told him of four trains of cars at the depot loaded with supplies for Lee's army. In his report his command then pushed on briskly for twenty-eight miles. Custer's Third Division had the advance. Custer signed his report as Brevet Major-General. The Park Service gives him 3,000 troopers.2
Three trains or four?
Custer reported that at Appomattox Station "we surprised the enemy and captured three large trains of cars loaded with rations for the rebel army", and that the trains were run back toward Farmville. Wesley Merritt, his superior, also has three trains taken. Sheridan's report has Custer capture four trains, and Grant's report credits Sheridan with four. The Park Service writes that three of the four trains were captured. Calkins writes that a single regiment, the 2nd New York Cavalry, took them without a fight. In his memoirs, Grant recalled that train men ran off three of the trains and wrote: "The other four were held by Custer".3
Sheridan recalled the soldiers who took over the locomotives "keeping up such an unearthly screeching with the whistles that I was on the point of ordering the cars burned". The Park Service puts Custer's arrival at around 4 p.m.; Calkins has Walker forming his guns at about that hour. The 15th New York Cavalry, its colonel reported, struck the railroad about 6 p.m..4
Cavalry against guns
The Confederate reserve artillery was camped nearby under Reuben Lindsay Walker, a brigadier general in the American Battlefield Trust's account and on one Park Service page. The Park Service gives him several thousand men and 100 cannon. Calkins gives about 25 to 50 guns, with artillerymen armed as infantry, engineers under Colonel T. M. R. Talcott and a small cavalry brigade under Martin W. Gary. Custer reported "about two divisions of infantry" and "over thirty pieces of artillery" under "Major-General Walker".5
Pendleton, who was in Walker's camp, called it "an attack wholly unexpected" on a "defenseless camp", repelled at once with the help of two artillery companies "armed with muskets as a guard". Lee told Jefferson Davis that the attack on Walker's train came "in the early part of the night" and was repelled. The Trust writes that Custer's men came under attack from the artillery, and that the gun crews fought mostly as infantry skirmishers. The Park Service calls it a fight of cavalry against artillery "with no infantry present on either side".6
Calkins describes two of Custer's brigades charging without success, until his newly arrived Second Brigade under Colonel William Wells came up and all three attacked between 8 and 9 p.m.. Custer wrote: "The enemy succeeded in repulsing nearly all our attacks, until nearly 9 o'clock at night, when by a general advance along my line he was forced from his position". One Park Service page speaks of a five-hour battle; another places it between 8 and 10 p.m..7
Guns, wagons and the dead
Sheridan, Grant, the Park Service and the Trust give 25 captured guns. Custer reported twenty-four, Calkins 24 to 30. The Park Service and Calkins give nearly 1,000 prisoners; the Park Service gives upwards of 200 wagons and five battle flags, Calkins 150 to 200 wagons. Custer reported "several battle-flags" and "a large number of prisoners".8
Custer called his loss "slight". Calkins gives about 5 Union soldiers killed, 40 wounded and 3 missing, with Confederate losses unknown. The Park Service estimates about 100 killed or wounded on both sides. The Trust lists estimated casualties of 121 Union and 1,000 Confederate; the Park Service's battle summary gives 48 and 1,000.9
That night part of the 15th New York Cavalry charged as far as Appomattox Court House, where, its colonel reported, the enemy was found in force. The Park Service writes that Confederate infantry stopped the charge on the stage road. For the night of the 8th the colonel reported 2 killed, 5 wounded and 1 missing in his regiment, among the dead Lieutenant Colonel Augustus I. Root, "shot about fifteen rods from [the] Appomattox court-house". One Park Service page has Root killed not far from the county jail, another near the courthouse. Pendleton, riding back, escaped the Union horsemen "by leaping my horse over the fence".10
The road to 9 April
On 8 April Grant wrote to Lee that he would insist on one condition: that the men and officers surrendered be disqualified from taking up arms again until properly exchanged. Lee replied that evening: "I do not think the emergency has arisen to call for the surrender of this army". Alexander writes that Pendleton told him that day of Lee's answer to his own suggestion of surrender: "There are too many men here to talk of laying down their arms without fighting".11
That evening Lee met his senior generals and decided to attack the next morning to reopen the road west. Alexander writes that the attack was to come at dawn. Sheridan sent word to Ord and Griffin that if they pressed on, the enemy had "no means of escape". Merritt wrote that "the night of despair fell with the night of the 8th of April darkly and terribly on the Army of Northern Virginia".12
On the morning of 9 April Ord's troops and the Fifth Corps reached the station as the Confederates tried to break through the cavalry, and the infantry was thrown in at once. Merritt reports that when the Confederates found infantry in position they gave up forcing the road. That day Lee surrendered. Our article on Appomattox Court House and the 9 April page tell the surrender.13
Crimean offensive, 1944: the Red Army retakes Sevastopol in a month
8 April 1944 · 82 years ago
In the Crimean offensive of World War II, Soviet troops of the 4th Ukrainian Front attacked the German 17th Army and its Romanian allies holding the Crimean peninsula. The Axis defense collapsed, Sevastopol was stormed, and the Germans evacuated Crimea with heavy losses.
Read the full story of Crimean offensive, 1944: the Red Army retakes Sevastopol in a month ›Also on this day
1864: at Sabine Cross-Roads near Mansfield, Louisiana, Confederate troops under Richard Taylor attacked Nathaniel Banks's army. Taylor ordered the attack at 4 p.m.; Banks has it at 4:30 p.m.. General Mouton fell in the first charge. Banks wrote that the cavalry's supply train blocked the road and cost him ten guns of Ransom's division; Taylor later claimed 2,500 prisoners, twenty guns and 250 wagons. The Trust estimates 2,117 Union and 1,000 Confederate casualties, the Park Service 2,235 and 1,000. The armies fought again at Pleasant Hill on 9 April.14
