Lee's army had evacuated Petersburg and Richmond on the night of April 2-3, 1865, after the Union breakthrough at the Third Battle of Petersburg. The four columns of the Army of Northern Virginia were supposed to converge at Amelia Court House and resupply from rations Lee had ordered shipped there. The rations were not there. Some sources said a clerical error sent them past Amelia; others blamed Confederate logistics already broken beyond repair. Whatever the cause, Lee's men spent April 4 and most of April 5 hunting the countryside for food while Union forces under Sheridan rolled forward and seized Jetersville and Burkeville Junction, blocking the southwestern road to Danville. The trap was tightening. Lee turned west toward Farmville, where, he hoped, more rations could be found.

On the afternoon of April 5, Union Brigadier General Henry E. Davies Jr. took his cavalry brigade through Amelia Springs and swung north to Paineville, about four miles out of Jetersville. There he found a Confederate army wagon train, mostly headquarters baggage. His troopers attacked, destroyed the wagons, captured equipment and animals, and took somewhere between three hundred and possibly as many as a thousand prisoners. Among the documents that burned was the war diary of the Army of Northern Virginia, the headquarters record of the army that had won at Chancellorsville and lost at Gettysburg. Some accounts claim a few of the prisoners were armed Black men in Confederate uniforms, possibly the only such incident in Virginia; other historians argue they were teamsters rather than soldiers. Davies himself, writing later in his biography of Sheridan, did not mention Black troops at all.

When word of the disaster at Paineville reached Robert E. Lee, he dispatched two divisions of his nephew Fitzhugh Lee's cavalry, joined by Brigadier General Martin Gary's brigade, to chase Davies down. The Confederate counterattack caught Davies's brigade returning south toward Jetersville and turned into a running fight through and beyond Amelia Springs almost to the Union main body. The engagement was inconclusive. Davies's troopers eventually joined other Union forces. Confederate cavalry pulled back to Amelia Springs. Union casualties were reported at 158; Confederate casualties were not recorded but were probably under 100. Both armies had bigger problems than the day's numbers.

After dark on April 5 and into the morning of April 6, Union divisions under Nelson A. Miles and Gershom Mott collided with the Confederate rear guard near Amelia Springs. Major General John B. Gordon, commanding the Confederate Second Corps, was running the army's tail. His men, exhausted and hungry, fought a brief inconclusive action in the dark. The real catastrophe waited for them at Sailor's Creek the next afternoon, where roughly 8,000 of Lee's remaining soldiers, about a sixth of the men who had left Petersburg and Richmond, would be cut off and most of them captured, including Lieutenant General Richard Ewell and eight other Confederate generals.

Amelia Springs had been a resort. Antebellum Virginians, like spa-goers elsewhere in nineteenth-century America, had traveled there for the mineral waters, believing in their curative properties. By April 1865 the resort was already declining. The war found it almost by accident, as the path of Lee's retreat crossed through it on the way to Farmville. After the surrender at Appomattox four days later, the spring lost what little reputation it had retained, and within a generation the resort was gone. The battlefield today is heavily wooded, privately owned, and largely unmarked. A single roadside historical marker stands at 37 degrees 20 minutes north, 78 degrees 6 minutes west, the most precise location anyone now bothers to assign to a battle that helped end a war.