http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/pickett_george_e_1825-1875
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Pickett rejoined the Army of Northern Virginia in May 1864, even regaining his old division, but nothing was the same. The last ignoble chapter of his military career came on April 1, 1865. At the Battle of Five Forks, Union troops successfully attacked Lee’s right flank, ending their ten-month siege and forcing the fall of Petersburg and the Confederate capital of Richmond. Pickett, however, left his troops poorly positioned for the fight when he left the lines for an infamously long lunch—a shad bake with Fitzhugh Lee, Robert E. Lee’s nephew. The “food was abundant,” the historian Douglas Southall Freeman has written, and “the affair was leisured and deliberate as every feast should be.” In the meantime, the battle was lost and Pickett was removed from command. The surrender at Appomattox Court House came just eight days later, on April 9.
“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago....”
William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust