After the disaster at Sailor's Creek on April 6 and the smaller fight at Cumberland Church on April 7, Lee's army was bleeding men with every mile. Roads were mud. Horses were dying in the traces. The Confederate supply system had been reduced to a single hope: trains from Lynchburg meeting the army at Appomattox Station. Sheridan's Federal cavalry, riding parallel and south, learned of those trains from scouts in Confederate uniform who intercepted the supply order. On April 8, Sheridan ordered his cavalry to ride about thirty miles in a single day to seize the station before Lee's exhausted infantry could arrive. Custer's division led the column.

Between two and three in the afternoon, the lead troopers of Company K, 2nd New York Cavalry trotted into Appomattox Station and found four trains sitting unguarded - locomotives still hissing, cars half-unloaded with rations, ordnance, shoes, blankets, and medical supplies. The astonished crews surrendered without a shot. Union troopers with railroad experience climbed into the cabs and ran three of the trains east into Federal lines. A fourth locomotive escaped toward Lynchburg before the tracks could be cut. The car or two that did not get away were burned. In thirty minutes, the Army of Northern Virginia's last meal had been driven into Union camps.

Two miles north along the Lynchburg stage road, Confederate Brigadier General Lindsay Walker had parked the Third Corps reserve artillery - about a hundred guns in total, with twenty-five arranged in a defensive semicircle and the rest still in their wagon traces. Walker's guard was thin: five hundred dismounted cavalrymen under Martin Gary, gunners hastily armed with muskets, engineers, and stragglers picked up on the march. When Walker heard Custer's troopers at the station, he opened fire with his arrayed guns. Custer turned his division and rode toward the sound. The intervening woods were thick. The afternoon was sliding into evening. Custer's first three charges were beaten back by canister and rifle fire.

Custer was not a patient general. As darkness fell, he reorganized all three of his brigades for a single mass assault. At about 9 p.m., under the light of a full moon, the entire division charged together. The Confederate semicircle finally broke. Walker's gunners, with no infantry support left and the artillery horses panicking, began to limber up and pull guns away into the night. Custer's troopers took roughly 1,000 prisoners, including the ill Confederate Brigadier General Young Marshall Moody, captured in a hospital wagon. They seized about thirty guns. Union losses were strikingly small in numbers - five killed, forty wounded, three missing - but the wounded suffered severely from artillery fire at close range. Cavalry surgeons remarked afterward that they had rarely treated so many mangled cases in so brief a fight.

After the breakthrough, Custer's troopers pushed east toward Appomattox Court House and ran into Confederate infantry pickets in the dark. They stopped, dug in, and formed a blocking line across the road to Lynchburg. Sheridan sent word back to Grant: he was certain the army could be surrounded and forced to surrender in the morning if infantry could come up fast enough. Behind Custer's tired troopers, two corps of Union infantry under Edward Ord and Charles Griffin were marching all night - some of Ord's men, including two brigades of African-American troops of the XXV Corps, would march farther that day than any other Union unit. By dawn on April 9, Lee's army was effectively surrounded. The road to Lynchburg, the road to Danville, every road west - all closed. A few hours later Lee rode to Wilmer McLean's parlor to ask Grant for terms. The shots fired at Appomattox Station the night before were the last gunfire the Army of Northern Virginia would meaningfully exchange.