Mordecai Gist
BIRTH
1743
Baltimore, Maryland
DEATH
August 2, 1792
Charleston, South Carolina
FAMILY
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Gist, Mordecai
(1743-1792)
Mordecai Gist was a member of a prominent Maryland family who became a brigadier general in command of the Maryland Line in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War.
GRAVE:
GRAVE
St. Michael's Churchyard
St. Michael's Alley, Charleston, SC, 29401, United States
1
Places | Image | Address | GPS | Site |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Battle of Brooklyn Marker | Belt Parkway, New York, New York, 11209, USA | MARKER |
DIED:
Charleston, South Carolina
Aug 2, 1792
Gist was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the fourth child of Thomas and Susannah (Cockey) Gist. Thomas Gist's father, Captain Richard Gist (1684 – August 28, 1741), was the surveyor of Maryland's Eastern Shore and one of the commissioners who laid out Baltimore Town in 1729. Gist was the nephew of Christopher Gist (1706–1759). This Christopher Gist was a Colonial-era explorer, scout, and frontier settler who was employed by the Ohio Company and had served with 21-year-old Colonel George Washington. Mordecai Gist was educated for commercial pursuits.
In 1776, Gist was appointed major of Smallwood's Maryland Regiment, and was with them in the Battle of Long Island, where they fought a delaying action at the Old Stone House (Brooklyn, New York), allowing the American army to escape encirclement.
In January 1779, the Continental Congress appointed him as a brigadier general in the Continental Army, and he took the command of the 2nd Maryland Brigade. He fought stubbornly at the Battle of Camden in South Carolina in 1780. At one time after a bayonet charge, his force secured fifty prisoners, but the British under Lord Cornwallis rallied, and the Marylanders gave way. Gist escaped, and, a year later, he was present at the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown.
He joined the southern army under Nathanael Greene, and he was given the command of the light corps again when the army was remodeled in 1782. On August 26, 1782, he rallied the broken forces of the Americans under John Laurens after they had been scattered in an ambush set by a British foraging party.