Episode Details

On April 1, 1865, after nearly 10 months of siege at Petersburg, the dirt crossroads of Five Forks guarded the South Side Railroad, Robert E. Lee's last supply line. Lee ordered George Pickett to hold it at all hazards, but Pickett's exhausted men, fresh from fighting at Dinwiddie Court House, built a thin line of shallow ditches and pine logs about a mile and three quarters long, ending in a vulnerable refused flank. That afternoon Pickett and Fitzhugh Lee rode off to a shad bake hosted by Thomas Rosser across Hatcher's Run without telling anyone they were leaving.

A temperature inversion and dense pine forest created an acoustic shadow, so the generals heard nothing while Philip Sheridan's assault struck their line. Gouverneur K. Warren's Fifth Corps, delayed by mud and a collapsed bridge at Gravelly Run, swung too far east but came out behind the Confederate flank and rolled it up. Thousands surrendered, Lee informed the government that Petersburg and Richmond must be evacuated, and the Appomattox campaign began. That evening Sheridan relieved Warren of command, a decision a court of inquiry overturned in 1883, months after Warren's death.

• The shad for the lunch had been caught in the Nottoway River and brought up to the lines packed on ice.
• Artillery chief Colonel Willie Pegram was the senior officer on the field without knowing the generals had left.
• Pegram was mortally wounded at the crossroads after ordering his gunners to fire canister low.
• Estimates of Confederates captured range from 2,400 to 4,000, against just over 800 Union casualties.
• Warren asked to be buried in civilian clothes rather than an Army uniform.