The Battle of Gloucester Point, Virginia was the first reported exchange of fire in the American Civil War, following the surrender of Fort Sumter. As Lincoln extended the Union blockade to include Virginia, the rebels (notionally Confederates) tried to deny Union access to the local estuaries. On May 7, 1861, Lieutenant Thomas O. Selfridge Jr. commanding the USS Yankee was ordered to reconnoitre the new fortifications at Gloucester Point opposite Yorktown. Shots were exchanged, causing no casualties, Selfridge claiming that his guns were too small to damage the battery, commanded by Lieutenant John Thompson Brown, credited with firing the first cannon shot of the war in Virginia.
On April 15, 1861, the day after the U.S. Army garrison surrendered Fort Sumter to Confederate forces, President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the rebellion of the seven Deep South Slave states that had formed the Confederate States of America and to reclaim the federal property that had been seized by the Confederacy. Four Upper South States that permitted slavery, including Virginia, refused to furnish troops for this purpose and immediately began the process of secession from the Union to join the Confederacy.
On April 17, 1861, the delegates previously elected to the Virginia Secession Convention in Richmond, Virginia passed an ordinance of secession from the Union. The ordinance was subject to a ratification vote of the people of the state to be held on May 23, 1861, but the actions of the convention and Virginia's Governor John Letcher effectively took Virginia out of the Union before the vote could be taken, as the convention authorized the governor to call for volunteers to join the military forces of Virginia to defend the state against Federal military action.
On April 22, 1861, Governor Letcher appointed Robert E. Lee as commander in chief of Virginia's army and navy forces. On April 24, 1861, Virginia and the Confederate States agreed that the Virginian forces would be under the overall direction of the Confederate President, pending completion of the process of Virginia joining the Confederate States. As these developments showed that Virginia would complete the process of secession, president Lincoln did not wait for the people's vote before he took action against Virginia that treated it as part of the Confederacy. On April 27, 1861, Lincoln extended the blockade of the seven original Confederate States which he had declared on April 19, 1861, to include the ports of Virginia and North Carolina.
On May 3, 1861, Major General Robert E. Lee of the Virginia forces appointed Colonel William B. Taliaferro commander of defenses at Gloucester Point, Virginia on the York River opposite Yorktown, Virginia. General Lee instructed the colonel to cooperate with Virginia Navy Captain William C. Whittle in the construction and defense of a shore battery to cover the York River at that location. On May 6, 1861, Taliaferro ordered a company of fifty men of the Richmond Howitzers, a Virginia volunteer artillery regiment, with two six-pounder cannons, to report to Gloucester Point to assist in the defense and operation of the shore battery. The artillerymen arrived at Gloucester Point early on May 7, 1861. This force had not yet been formally transferred to the Confederate States Army or Confederate States Navy, but the Virginians were acting in concert with the Confederacy and in its defense.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) was the deadliest conflict in American history, killing an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians. The Confederate States of America, formed by eleven seceding Southern states, faced the Union in four years of warfare across 23 states and territories. Major engagements included First and Second Bull Run, Antietam (the bloodiest single day in American history, September 17, 1862), Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), Vicksburg (surrendered July 4, 1863), and Sherman's March through Georgia and the Carolinas (1864–1865). President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, transforming the war's stated purpose to include the abolition of slavery and enabling the enlistment of approximately 180,000 Black men in the United States Colored Troops. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. The war resolved the question of secession and ended American slavery, though Reconstruction would face sustained resistance in its attempt to secure civil rights for formerly enslaved people.
This page covers Battle of Gloucester Point. A full Aubrey report for the area pulls together this battle alongside historic sites, land records, and everything else the record holds within a few miles:
Every location is different. Not every section appears for every place, only what the historical record actually holds turns up in a report.
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Wikipedia source.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.