Battle of Gloucester Point (1861) Battle of Gloucester Point (1861) The Battle of Gloucester Point, Virginia was an inconclusive exchange of cannon fire between a shore battery on the York River which was manned by Virginia (soon to be Confederate) forces and the Union gunboat USS "Yankee". The action occurred on May 7, 1861, three weeks after the start of the American Civil War (Civil War) at Fort Sumter in the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina on April 14, 1861. The Gloucester Point engagement is notable as the earliest exchange of gunfire between the Union Navy and organized Rebel (Confederate) forces after the U.S. Army
Second Battle of Fort Sumter one of the fort's guns with 320 infantrymen, who repulsed the naval landing party. Gillmore had reduced Fort Sumter to a pile of rubble, but the Confederate flag still waved over the ruins. Union efforts to retake Charleston Harbor began on April 7, 1863, when Rear Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont, commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, led the ironclad frigate "New Ironsides", the tower ironclad "Keokuk", and the monitors "Weehawken", "Pasaic", "Montauk", "Patapsco", "Nantucket", "Catskill", and "Nahant" in an attack on the harbor's defenses (The 1863 Battle of Fort Sumter was the largest deployment of monitors in action