By the spring of 1865 the war in Virginia had narrowed to a single question of supply. For nine and a half months Ulysses S. Grant had held Robert E. Lee pinned inside a ring of trenches around Petersburg, the rail hub twenty-odd miles south of Richmond that fed both the city and the army defending it. It was not a battle so much as a slow strangling. Grant kept reaching west, stretching his lines a little further each month, and Lee kept stretching to match him, thinner and thinner, his ranks worn down by desertion and hunger until he could barely cover the ground. Whoever ran out of line first would lose the war.

Grant’s reach finally found the end of it at a crossroads called Five Forks. Five roads met there in the woods of Dinwiddie County, and three miles north of the junction ran the South Side Railroad, the last line still carrying food and ammunition into Petersburg. The Weldon and the Richmond and Danville railroads were already cut or threatened. If the South Side went too, the city could not be held, and if Petersburg fell, so did Richmond. Everything had come down to a backwoods intersection most maps did not bother to name.

To take it, Grant sent his hardest-driving subordinate. Major General Philip Sheridan (North) had spent the autumn burning the Shenandoah Valley and wrecking Lee’s last breadbasket, and Grant brought him east to swing wide around the Confederate right and cut the railroad for good. Sheridan came with his cavalry, and Grant gave him an infantry corps to go with it, the V Corps of the Army of the Potomac under Major General Gouverneur K. Warren (North). The plan was simple in outline and miserable in practice: get around the end of Lee’s line and break the last road.

Lee saw it coming and could not afford it. He pulled together about ten thousand men, infantry and cavalry, and put them under Major General George E. Pickett (South), the same Pickett whose division had been wrecked making the famous charge at Gettysburg two years before. Lee’s instruction to him was blunt in substance if not in its exact words: hold Five Forks, protect the railroad, keep the Union army off it. Pickett marched his command out to the crossroads, beyond the end of the main Confederate trenches, on its own. It was the right call and the worst possible position, a detachment hung out in the open at the far end of a line that could no longer reinforce it.