[1] Woods joined the Confederate Army in August 1861 at the age of seventeen as a volunteer on the staff of John B. Floyd.

In 1863, he became a First Lieutenant in Thomas E. Jackson's Battery, Virginia Horse Artillery, and saw action at Gettysburg, New Market, and Cold Harbor.

[4] Woods is remembered locally as the prosecuting attorney in the murder trial of J. Samuel McCue, a three-term Mayor of Charlottesville who was convicted of murdering his wife[5] then became the last man to be hanged in Albemarle County,[6] and as the father of Maud Coleman Woods, the first "Miss America," at least for the Pan-American Exposition of 1901.

[2][7][8] He is also remembered for his role in attempting to legitimate the lynching of John Henry James, whom Woods indicted posthumously.

In 2023, at the request of Albemarle Commonwealth Attorney Jim Hingeley, Woods's indictment was dismissed, with the court noting that "[t]he indictment was not an instrument of justice; it was used as a sanction and to approve the lynching of a man simply because he was Black.