[5][6][7] He later attended Harvard Law School from 1851 to 1852,[8] completing two six-month semesters but leaving with one remaining before attaining an official degree.

[5][11][12] The wedding was a brief, rushed ceremony between Gist's coastal defense duties and his deployment to Vicksburg in May, allowing the couple only 48 hours together.

[5][18][19] In January 1861, following South Carolina's secession from the Union on December 20, 1860, Governor Francis Pickens appointed Gist as State Adjutant and Inspector General.

[5][21] Gist accompanied Pickens and Beauregard for the raising of state and Confederate flags over Fort Sumter following its surrender on April 14, 1861.

[5] After the Battle of First Manassas, Gist returned to Columbia to prepare state forces to defend Port Royal in the fall of 1861 and to be absorbed into the Confederate Army in winter 1862.

[25] Gist was third in command of Confederate forces at the Battle of Secessionville in June 1862, commanded troops sent to oppose a landing by Union forces at Pocotaligo, South Carolina in October 1862, led a small division of reinforcements in North Carolina between December 1862 and January 1863, and was present at the Union naval attack on Charleston on April 7, 1863.

Walker led two brigades of South Carolina troops to reinforce Confederate forces under Gen. Joseph E. Johnston in Mississippi.

They were trying to relieve Confederate forces under attack at Vicksburg by the Union Army, then commanded by Major General Ulysses S. Grant in a push to take the fortress city to gain control of the Mississippi River.

[5][27] Johnston's efforts in the Vicksburg Campaign were unsuccessful and the fortress city fell to the Union Army under General Grant on July 4, 1863.

[5] Sources conflict on his death: some state he died soon after at a field hospital in Franklin, Tennessee, while others claim he was killed instantly on the battlefield.

[36][37][38] Gist was initially buried in a cedar box near the Franklin battlefield on the property of a sympathetic local family.

[37][39] A monument at this location (35°53′19.62″N 86°52′41.94″W / 35.8887833°N 86.8783167°W / 35.8887833; -86.8783167) reads:[40] The Tragedy of Franklin quite possibly may have been averted had this scholarly South Carolina Blue Blood been given the promotion to division command that his service record warranted.

As the Brigade assembled in front of Franklin on November 30, 1864, it was still smarting (the 24th SC in particular) from the lack of initiative that had deprived it of victory the night before at Spring Hill.

He was buried, first in a private cemetery in Franklin, then and finally, at Trinity Episcopal Church in Columbia, South Carolina.As noted in the inscription, in 1866, his widow, Jane Gist, retrieved his body.

Believing he belonged to all of South Carolina, she had him buried in the Trinity Episcopal churchyard in Columbia, the state capital.

[41][42][43] His grave is marked by a broken column, adorned with a stone garland at the top and a relief of a palmetto tree at the base.