Mathias Point juts north into the Potomac River from the Virginia bank, a wooded promontory in King George County, about sixty miles below Washington. Whoever held the point could choke traffic on the river to and from the capital. They could also slip men and messages across the water to Confederate sympathizers in southern Maryland. In late June 1861, scouts reported that Confederate engineers were starting to clear ground at the point for a new shore battery. Commander James Harman Ward, commander of the Federal Potomac Flotilla, decided to deny them the position. Ward was 54 years old, a veteran officer who had helped found the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. He had literally written the textbook on naval ordnance used by his service. His plan was direct: bombard the woods, land sailors and marines to clear the trees, throw up earthworks of his own, and emplace Union guns on the point before the Confederates could finish theirs.

On the morning of June 27 the Thomas Freeborn - a converted New York harbor ferry now serving as Ward's flagship - anchored off Mathias Point with the USS Reliance in support. A landing party of about thirty sailors and marines under Lieutenant James C. Chaplin pulled for shore in small boats. Cannon fire from the Freeborn opened the engagement, breaking up the few Confederate skirmishers on the beach. Chaplin's men began to organize a defensive position and survey the ground for the planned battery. Ward had personally accompanied the landing but returned to the ship as soon as Confederate reinforcements appeared - 400 to 500 troops under Colonel J.M. Brockenbrough, operating under the overall command of Brigadier General Daniel Ruggles. The cannon fire from the Freeborn temporarily drove the Confederates back. Ward ordered Chaplin to land again and throw up sandbag breastworks. The Confederates, recognizing the danger, regrouped and approached through the cover of the forest rather than across open ground. The Federals tried to disguise their new earthwork with cut branches. By five in the afternoon the work was nearly done, but the Federals had still not unloaded their own artillery from the boats.

Just then the Confederate counterattack came in force. Major R.M. Mayo brought four fresh companies up to the line. The Federal position became untenable. Chaplin ordered his men back to the small boats. He himself stayed ashore to the last. One sailor in his party could not swim and the boats were already drifting away from the beach; Chaplin carried the man through chest-deep water out to the nearest skiff and got him aboard. For this act Chaplin would later receive the Medal of Honor. Meanwhile, on the deck of the Thomas Freeborn, the ship's gunner had been wounded by Confederate rifle fire. Ward stepped to the gun himself to sight it. The shot that killed him came from the woods. He bled internally for forty-five minutes and died on the deck of his command. The crew of the Freeborn, shaken by his death, stopped firing in support of the landing party even though some of the sailors were still struggling toward the boats. Five men in all were killed or wounded. Ward was the only fatality. He was the only fatality the day required to be remembered.

Command of the Potomac Flotilla passed to Commander Stephen Clegg Rowan of the USS Pawnee, who would later become a vice admiral. Rowan held the position until that fall, when he was sent to take part in the joint operations against the Confederate forts at Hatteras Inlet on the North Carolina coast, where he was succeeded by Captain Thomas Tingey Craven. The Confederates kept their position at Mathias Point. They built their battery. They held it through the winter of 1861-62, controlling that stretch of the river and forcing Washington-bound shipping to run a gauntlet of long-range fire. They abandoned the position only in March 1862, withdrawing their guns south to defend Richmond against George McClellan's coming Peninsula Campaign. Ward's body went home to Connecticut, where he had been born and where his widow was waiting. The United States Navy commissioned a destroyer in his name in 1918. She fired the first American shots of World War II, sinking a Japanese midget submarine at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and was herself sunk by a Japanese kamikaze attack on December 7, 1944 — three years to the day — off the Philippines. The promontory where he died is still wooded. The Potomac still bends around it. Nothing on the bank marks where he fell.