The Nansemond River is shallow at Pig Point, shallow enough that on June 5, 1861, Captain John Faunce of the USRC Harriet Lane could not get his gunboat close enough to the Confederate battery on the bluff. He fired thirty shots anyway. Most of them splashed short in the muddy water. The Confederate gunners fired back with the heavy iron they had hauled from the captured Gosport Navy Yard a few weeks earlier, and they wounded five of his crew. Faunce decided the battery was strong, marked his mission complete, and turned for Fort Monroe. The whole thing took an afternoon. Nobody died. And yet it was one of the first naval shots fired in a war that would last four more years.
Fort Sumter fell on April 13, 1861. The next day President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers, and Virginia, asked to supply some of them, walked out of the Union instead. By late April Lincoln had extended the naval blockade to cover Virginia and North Carolina, and the Gosport Navy Yard at Portsmouth had been abandoned in panic by its Union commander, who burned what he could not take with him. Confederates moved into the smoking yard and hauled away cannon, including the guns they would soon mount at Pig Point. Across Hampton Roads at the tip of the Virginia Peninsula, Major General Benjamin Butler held Fort Monroe with a growing Union force. By late May he had pushed troops up to Newport News Point. To go any further, up the Nansemond River toward Suffolk, he needed Pig Point silenced.
The Harriet Lane was not built for this. Launched in 1857 for the Revenue Cutter Service, she was a graceful sidewheel steamer named after President Buchanan's niece, who had served as White House hostess for her bachelor uncle. In April she had carried supplies toward Fort Sumter in the doomed relief effort. Now she was a Union gunboat tasked with feeling out the strength of a battery on a Confederate bluff. Faunce came up the Nansemond with five guns and a clear mission. The Confederates, including the Portsmouth Rifle Company under Captain Robert Pegram, watched him come.
The river bed defeated him before the gunners did. Shallow water held the Harriet Lane farther from the bluff than her thirty-two-pound guns could effectively reach. Faunce fired thirty rounds, by Confederate count thirty-three. Pegram's gunners fired twenty-three back, and five of Faunce's crew went down wounded. One Confederate report later claimed the Harriet Lane had disabled a 48-pound cannon at the battery, but the practical result was clear: the Union could not take Pig Point with a single gunboat at low water. Faunce broke off. The same day, the USS Quaker City captured the Confederate ship General Greene off the Virginia Capes a few miles east, the kind of small blockade prize that would become routine over the next four years.
The battery held. The Confederates kept Pig Point for nine months, until the Peninsula Campaign of spring 1862 made their position in Norfolk and Portsmouth untenable. They abandoned the works on March 9, 1862, the same day the ironclads Monitor and Virginia fought their famous battle a few miles to the north in Hampton Roads. Union forces walked into Norfolk and Portsmouth on May 10 and 11 without a fight. The Confederate flag never flew over Pig Point again. The Harriet Lane went on, captured by Confederates at Galveston in 1863, recovered, eventually wrecked in 1881. The Civil War's first naval engagements were almost all like this one: small, inconclusive, deeply consequential only in aggregate. War rarely starts with grand battles. It starts with a captain at low tide, firing too far, going home to fight again tomorrow.
Battle of Pig Point at 36.92°N, 76.44°W, on the eastern bank of the Nansemond River where it meets the James River and Hampton Roads. The point sits north of Suffolk, just west of Craney Island. Look for the broad confluence and the I-664 Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel to the east. Best viewed from 2,000-3,000 ft AGL. Nearby airports: KPHF (Newport News/Williamsburg, 6 nm NE), KORF (Norfolk International, 11 nm E), KSFQ (Suffolk Executive, 10 nm SSW), KLFI (Langley AFB, 8 nm NE). Coordinate with Norfolk approach for class C airspace.