It was the end of January 1847. The USS Lexington, a sloop of war, lay at anchor in Monterey Bay. The small transport had survived a six-month passage around Cape Horn from the East Coast. Its mission was to ferry the men and arms of Company F, 3rd U.S. Artillery, to the capital of California – Monterey. There they relieved the U.S. Navy of responsibility to garrison the town, which Commodore John D. Sloat had seized six months prior as the Mexican American War broke out.
Three young lieutenants among those who departed the USS Lexington that day would leave a mark on the history of California and the United States. These were Henry W. Halleck, William T. Sherman, and Edward O. C. Ord. Halleck and Ord graduated together from West Point in 1839, Sherman in 1840. Already friends, they became much closer on the long voyage with Sherman taking to Halleck as a mentor. Later in life, the two became estranged, but in Monterey they lodged together in an old adobe known today as “Sherman and Halleck’s Headquarters.”
Experience-wise, both Ord and Sherman had participated in the Second Seminole War in Florida while Halleck, less known today than his peers, had already emerged as an able military engineer and leading scholar who was well regarded by senior Army leaders. He saw his first action during the war when he accompanied Commodore William B. Shubrick to seize the port of Mazatlán. A striking fact about Ord and Sherman, on the other hand, is that neither saw combat during the Mexican war, unlike many of their peers later to command troops during the American Civil War. Nevertheless, in that conflict, all three became commanding generals and key contributors to U.S. victory.
Of the three, Halleck gained the highest rank. Indeed, from 1862 to 1864 he even served as general in chief of the Armies of the United States. In California, the Army charged Halleck with designing military fortifications, including a redoubt on the hill overlooking Monterey, a site today known as Fort Mervine. Later, he defended the site from speculative infringements and worked to make it a permanent military reservation. Halleck also served as the secretary of state for the military governor and helped conduct the California Constitutional Convention.
Sherman is the most famous of the trio. Many will know of his famous Civil War exploits as General Ulysses S. Grant’s key lieutenant who seized victory at numerous battles and led his army through the heart of Georgia and the Carolinas in campaigns that practiced total war and demoralized the South even more than they reduced its fighting capacity. In Monterey, Sherman became an aide to Governor Mason. Among other things, he drafted reports sent east announcing the discovery of gold, thus launching the great California Gold Rush.
The discovery of gold unhinged life in California. The lieutenants experienced the turmoil caused when nearly every able-bodied rancher or shop keep abandoned all else for the gold fields. Ord, the lieutenant most eager for martial action, had instead been tasked in late April 1847 to oversee the unglamorous completion of and garrison duty at Fort Mervine. “Tis disagreeable work and makes the men grumble and desert,” he wrote home. The Monterey redoubt was surely a forlorn duty station and became increasingly irrelevant as the Gold Rush proceeded. The Army withdrew Company F in 1852 and closed the post.
Ord was not kidding when he wrote about desertion. By late 1848, the desertion rate almost made the Army’s situation untenable. At least the Navy could quarter its men at sea. Or so it thought. As disorder spread, word came of a brutal massacre of ten civilians by bandits at nearby Mission San Miguel. A mail carrier reported the crime to Sherman who convinced Col. Richard B. Mason, the military governor, of its veracity. Mason ordered Ord to take a detachment from the redoubt and hunt down the murderers, deserters from the USS Warren.
The pursuit became a running gun battle that ended near Santa Barbara. Ord’s men shot one suspect and captured the others, who were tried and executed. Although not what he had envisioned, Ord bravely and competently led his men against a dangerous foe. Such experience formed his later accomplishments, including his command of the Army of the James. As a major general, it was Ord who cornered General Robert E. Lee near Appomattox by successfully blocking the escape of Lee’s army from Grant’s pursuing force. Ord thereby precipitated Lee’s surrender, ending the Civil War.
Halleck’s foresight in setting aside the land around Fort Mervine made it possible for the Army to return to Monterey in 1902 and to build a modern base around the old redoubt. On July 13, 1903, General Order 102 designated the new cantonment under construction as Ord Barracks to recognize the importance of Ord during the Civil War and his work in California. However, local citizens besieged the War Department to rename the post “the Presidio of Monterey” to perpetuate the name of the original fort built by Spain in 1770.
The War Department made that request official on August 30, 1904, but persisted in efforts to remember General Ord in California. In the 1930’s the Army named a camp after him on a training reservation near Seaside. After that reservation expanded during 1940, the Army designated the entire installation as Fort Ord. Today, the Ord Military Community, an annex of the Presidio of Monterey retained from the closure of Fort Ord in 1994, continues to remember the young lieutenant from the USS Lexington.
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