Events moved fast in the spring of 1861. On April 14, Fort Sumter surrendered. On April 15, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers. On April 17, delegates in Richmond passed an ordinance of secession - subject to a public ratification vote on May 23, but the governor was already acting as if Virginia had left the Union. On April 22, Governor John Letcher appointed Robert E. Lee commander in chief of Virginia's army and navy. By May 3, Lee had assigned Colonel William B. Taliaferro to command the defenses at Gloucester Point, a strategic spit that could close the York River to Union ships. On May 6, fifty men of the Richmond Howitzers - a volunteer artillery company - left for the point with two six-pounder cannons. They arrived early the next morning, just hours before the Yankee.

The Yankee's mission was reconnaissance, not battle. Selfridge needed to know what the Virginians were building. As his boat closed to within about 2,000 yards of the shore battery, a six-pounder fired a warning shot across the bow. The Yankee continued. A second shot followed. Selfridge ordered his own guns to return fire, but the range and the small caliber of his weapons meant most of his shots fell short or wide. Onshore, Lieutenant John Thompson Brown commanded the small detachment of Richmond Howitzers manning the battery. Some sources credit him with firing the first cannon shot of the war in Virginia. Colonel Taliaferro arrived after the engagement was already over, confused enough about who had directed the firing that he and Captain William C. Whittle later disagreed about it in their reports. What was clear was that nobody had been killed, the Yankee had withdrawn, and the rebels still held the point.

What had been a thin defense became a real fortification quickly. By May 11 - four days after the Yankee retreated - the Virginians had two nine-inch guns mounted at Gloucester Point with two more ready to install. The point would dominate the York River for almost exactly a year. The Richmond Howitzers were transferred to Yorktown on May 26, replaced by other units. Similar small engagements began breaking out elsewhere as Union ships probed the Virginia coast: Sewell's Point, Aquia Creek, Pig Point. The pattern set at Gloucester Point - shore batteries against gunboats, reconnaissance turning to combat, both sides taking each other's measure - became the rhythm of the early Chesapeake war. Brown was promoted to captain on May 9, just two days after firing what might have been the war's first Virginia cannon shot.

The Gloucester Point batteries never faced a real assault. In May 1862, almost exactly one year after the skirmish with the Yankee, the Confederates withdrew up the peninsula during George McClellan's Peninsula Campaign. Overnight on May 3-4, they abandoned the heavy guns at Gloucester Point and Yorktown and retreated toward Richmond. The Union took the point without a fight. The earthworks remain today, partially preserved at Tyndall's Point Park - reminders of how easily the war's opening shots could have produced casualties, and how strange it is that they did not.

John Thompson Brown's war ended differently than it began. After Gloucester Point, he rose through the artillery ranks of the Army of Northern Virginia, ultimately commanding the artillery of Stonewall Jackson's old Second Corps at Gettysburg. On May 6, 1864, near the Wilderness - the same day fighting raged through the tangled woods west of Fredericksburg - Brown was killed in action while commanding a division of three artillery battalions. From firing what may have been Virginia's first Civil War cannon shot to dying in one of its bloodiest battles, his three years were a compressed history of the war the Gloucester Point skirmish had opened.