Qualla: Battle of Gloucester Point (1861)

Battle of Gloucester Point (1861): Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the morning of May 7, 1861, the USS Yankee crept up the York River toward a half-finished earthwork on the Gloucester Point shore. Three weeks earlier, Confederate forces had taken Fort Sumter. Two weeks earlier, Virginia had voted to secede. The Yankee's captain, Lieutenant Thomas O. Selfridge Jr., had been ordered to find out what the rebels were building opposite Yorktown. He found out at about 2,000 yards. A six-pounder cannon on the bluff fired a warning shot across his bow. He kept coming. The battery fired again, then again - thirteen shots in all, by one Confederate account. The Yankee fired back, but Selfridge later admitted his guns were too small to do real damage. Nobody on either side was hit. By the day's end, the first cannon shots of the Civil War in Virginia had been fired, and history had its strangest battle: a fight in which nothing decisive happened, and nobody died, but the war had begun.

Battle of Gloucester Point (1861): The Three Weeks That Made a War

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ac...

Battle of Gloucester Point (1861): The First Shot in Virginia

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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. S...

Battle of Gloucester Point (1861): Days After the Skirmish

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

Battle of Gloucester Point (1861): The Fort That Was Abandoned

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Glou...

Battle of Gloucester Point (1861): The Officer Who Didn't Survive

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...