Mordecai Gist Mordecai Gist ( 1743 – 1792 ) was a member of a prominent Maryland family who became a general in command of the Maryland Line in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War . Life . Gist was born in Baltimore , Maryland ( one source says Reisterstown , 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 Western Shore and one of the commissioners who laid out Baltimore Town in 1729 . Richard Gist ' s father , Christopher Richard Gist ( 1655 or 1659 - Feb . 1690 ) , was an English emigrant who came to the Province of Maryland before 1682 and settled in " South Canton " on the south bank of the Patapsco River . Christopher Richard Gist married Edith Cromwell ( 1660 – 1694 ) , who is believed to have been a relative of England ' s Lord Protector . Mordecai Gist ' s great - great - grandfather was Lawrence Washington ( 1602 - 1655 ) who was also the great - great - grandfather of George Washington . Thus , he and Washington were third cousins . Gist was also the nephew of Christopher Gist ( 1706 – 1759 ) , a son of Richard Gist . 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 . ( Christopher Gist is credited with twice saving Washington ' s life when they were surveying land in the Ohio country in 1753 . ) Mordecai Gist was also distantly related John Eager Howard . Mordecai Gist was educated for commercial pursuits . At the beginning of the American Revolution , the young men of Baltimore associated under the title of the " Baltimore Independent Company " and elected Gist as their captain . It was the first company raised in Maryland for the defense of popular liberty . Revolutionary war service . In 1776 , Gist was appointed major of a battalion of regulars , and was with them in the battle near Brooklyn , 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 . ( Gist appears in John Trumbull ' s painting Surrender of Lord Cornwallis , which hangs in the rotunda of the United States Capitol in Washington , D . C . ) He joined the southern army under Nathanael Greene , and he was given the command of the light corps again when the army was remodelled in 1782 . On August 26 , 1782 , he rallied the broken forces of the Americans under John Laurens after they had been defeated by a small British foraging party . After war . After the war , Gist relocated to plantation near Charleston , South Carolina . He was admitted as an original member of the Society of the Cincinnati in both Maryland and South Carolina . He had two children , both sons , one of whom he named " Independent " and the other " States . " He died on September 12 , 1792 , at the age of 50 , in Charleston and is buried in St . Michael ' s Churchyard , next to his son , States Gist , and daughter Susannah Gist . Mordecai Gist was distantly related to States Rights Gist , a brigadier general in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War who died of wounds received while leading his brigade in a charge against Federal fortifications at the Battle of Franklin in November 1864 . States Rights Gist was the great - grandson of William Gist ( b . 1710 ) , the third child of Richard and Susan Cockey Gist . His papers are held at the Maryland Historical Society .