Mordecai Gist and Hyam Salomon to name just two. Most people have never heard of them.
Haym Salomon was portrayed by Claude Rains in the 1939 film Sons of Liberty.
Mordecai Gist and Hyam Salomon to name just two. Most people have never heard of them.
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Perfect, this is what I hoped. No, I never heard of and I consider myself a history buff. Well, I did ... off to research.
Revolutionary war service
In 1776, Gist was appointed major of a battalion of regulars, 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. (Gist appears (back row, right side) 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,[3] 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.
Haym Salomon (also Solomon; April 7, 1740 – January 6, 1785) was a Polish-born American Jewish businessman and political financial broker who immigrated to New York City from Poland during the period of the American Revolution. He helped convert the French loans into ready cash by selling bills of exchange for Robert Morris, the Superintendent of Finance. In this way he aided the Continental Army and was possibly, along with Morris, the prime financier of the American side during the American Revolutionary War against Great Britain
Sympathizing with the Patriot cause, Salomon joined the New York branch of the Sons of Liberty. In September 1776, he was arrested as a spy. The British pardoned him, but only after requiring him to spend 18 months on a British boat as an interpreter for Hessian soldiers – German troops employed by the British. Salomon used his position to help prisoners of the British escape and encouraged the Hessians to desert the war effort. In 1778 Salomon was arrested again and sentenced to death. Again, he managed to escape, making his way with his family to the rebel capital in Philadelphia.