Mordecai Gist (1743-1792) was a Brigadier-General in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, hailing from Maryland.
Biography[]
Mordecai Gist was born in 1743 in Baltimore, Maryland, and he planned to have a career in commerce while being educated in Baltimore. However, the beginning of the American Revolutionary War led to Gist being elected as the captain of the "Baltimore Independent Company" of the Continental Army. He would become the Major of a battalion of regulars in 1776, and Gist took part in a delaying action against the British Army at the Battle of Long Island on 27 August 1776. In January 1779, he was promoted to Brigadier-General, and Gist took fifty prisoners at the battle of Camden in 1780 after a bayonet charge. Gist commanded the light corps of Nathanael Greene's army in 1782, and he took over John Laurens' shattered troops after Laurens was killed at the Battle of the Combahee River on 26 August 1782. Gist became the Grand Master of the Freemasons after the war, and he died on his plantation in 1792.