Gurney Genealogy Library Updated 6 June 2026 by Allen Gurney

Brig. General William Gurney (1821–1879)

Wholesale merchant, founder of Continental Lodge No. 287, colonel of the 127th New York, brevet brigadier general, and commandant of Charleston in 1865.

Born
21 August 1821, Flushing, Queens County, Long Island, New York. Eldest child of Willis Gurney (G7), a tailor, and Elizabeth "Eliza" A. Lawrence. 1
Died
2 February 1879, New York City, age 57, at 163 West 48th Street — less than two blocks from today's Times Square. Cause given as Bright's disease, the nineteenth-century term for serious kidney disease. 2
Occupation
Wholesale provision merchant — clerk, then head of Gurney & Underhill on Dey Street, Manhattan. Colonel of the 127th New York Volunteer Infantry and, by war's end, brevet (honorary) brigadier general. Afterward a cotton and rice factor at Charleston and Charleston County Treasurer. 3
Buried
Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York (Section 75, Lot 12459), following a funeral conducted with full Masonic honors. 4
Marriages
Caroline (maiden name unestablished) — married about 1840; mother of his first two sons; she died or left the household about 1844–1845, most probably by death. 5
Mary Jane Fisk (1831–1900) — married 23 September 1847, when she was sixteen; mother of his later children, and his widow for more than two decades. 5

Highlights

  • A Flushing tailor's son who ended the Civil War governing the city where it began. The arc from a Quaker woolen mill on the edge of Long Island to military command of Charleston is among the most improbable in the family record. 6
  • He raised and led the 127th New York — "the Monitors" — and was wounded at its head. Two of his own sons served in the regiment. A shot through the arm at Deveaux's Neck in December 1864 ended his field command, and an official report singled out "the good conduct of the 127th New York, Colonel Gurney" at the regiment's bloodiest day, the Battle of Honey Hill. 7
  • On a South Carolina barrier island he wrote a hymn for his soldiers. When the men built a regimental chapel from rafted pine logs in December 1863, the merchant-colonel composed a hymn for its dedication — a quiet detail no battle report could supply. 8
  • As commandant of Charleston he stood on the platform when the flag returned to Fort Sumter. On 14 April 1865, the fourth anniversary of the fort's surrender, Gurney governed the city as the original garrison flag was raised again — and days later draped it in mourning for Lincoln. 9
  • His record at Charleston holds a genuine moral tension. It was Gurney's hand that signed the order stripping Sergeant Stephen A. Swails of an officer's uniform under a War Department refusal — yet within weeks Gurney issued a proclamation to Charleston's freedmen, and Swails went on to become the first Black line officer mustered in the United States Army. 10
  • He was the founding "Father" of a Masonic lodge that still meets today. Gurney organized Continental Lodge No. 287 in 1853 and rose to District Deputy Grand Master of New York; the Masonic thread he began runs forward through five generations of the family to G2. 11

Children

Name Dates Mother Notes
James William Gurneyb. 1841CarolineCaptain, Company E, 127th New York Infantry. 12
Amos Willis Gurneyb. 1842CarolineCorporal, later Sergeant, 127th New York Infantry; named his firstborn daughter Caroline — likely a tribute to the mother he barely knew. 12
Robert F. Gurneyb. 1852Mary Jane FiskBorn as the family moved steadily northward through Manhattan. 13
Mary E. Gurneyb. early 1850sMary Jane FiskExact birth year unrecorded; confirmed by later family sources. 13
Lester Sawyer Gurney1857–1899Mary Jane FiskDirect line (G5); New York Actors' Fund official and, like his father, master of Continental Lodge No. 287. 13

Narrative

William Gurney grew up in the oldest and most historically significant Quaker community in America. Flushing's Friends Meeting House, built in 1694, stood a block from his childhood home, and although his father — a tailor who "attended not Church" — kept the family at the edge of that world rather than inside it, its moral temper marked William all the same. At about fourteen he left home to apprentice with a Quaker miller, John Bird, who ran a woolen mill at "the Alley" on Little Neck Bay, a quiet, navigable corridor that local Friends used to move escaping slaves northward. Whether the mill itself was a station cannot be proven, but a boy learning the cloth trade there in the mid-1830s absorbed a reformer's conscience that would surface again and again across his life. The full setting — the mill, the Underground Railroad network, and the family's Massachusetts and English origins — is told in the opening section of his biography. 14

About 1837 Gurney moved to Manhattan and entered the wholesale provisions trade in the Washington Market district near Dey and Duane Streets, rising from clerk to head of his own firm, Gurney & Underhill. Around that commercial spine he built three overlapping networks that would define him: the volunteer militia, where he drilled with the Washington Grays and then rose to First Lieutenant in the elite Seventh Regiment; Freemasonry, where he organized Continental Lodge No. 287 and became one of the most senior Masonic officers in the state; and early Republican ward politics, alongside men like Stewart L. Woodford who would later serve under him. He was also a man of civic conscience: a founder of the Five Points Mission in 1848, which carried schooling and relief into one of the worst slums in the country, and a public voice in 1854 against the destruction of old Manhattan burial grounds. In a strange family coincidence, the surviving portrait of Colonel Gurney was almost certainly made at the studio of his cousin Jeremiah Gurney, the most celebrated photographer in New York — the man later summoned to make the only known photograph of Lincoln in death. These interlocking worlds are traced in the biography's account of the 1850s. 15

By April 1861 the merchant was also a trained officer of two decades' standing, and he marched south with the Seventh Regiment in the war's first days. In the summer of 1862 he was given authority to raise a new regiment, the 127th New York Volunteer Infantry, nicknamed "the Monitors." Its officer corps grew straight out of the trust networks of his civilian life — militia comrades, lodge brothers, and business associates — and its ranks united the two worlds that had shaped him, drawing companies from Manhattan and from the Long Island towns. The 127th spent almost its entire war in the Department of the South, a theater of tidal marsh, sea islands, and railroads rather than famous battlefields, where disease was as deadly as combat. Its campaigns, from the coastal expeditions to the hard fighting at Honey Hill and his own wounding, are covered in the biography's Civil War chapter. 16

The wound that ended his field command did not end his war. When Confederate forces abandoned Charleston in February 1865, Gurney became commandant of the city where secession had begun — issuing a proclamation urging the formerly enslaved toward land and wages, and governing through dozens of workaday orders on everything from stray dogs to street traffic to public health. Contemporaries remembered his administration for fairness and a deliberate avoidance of vengeance toward former Confederates. Rather than return north for good, he chose to stay: by October 1865 he was back at 102 East Bay as a civilian merchant, rising from wholesale grocer to cotton and rice factor — a merchant-agent who financed planters and shipped their crops to market. He went on to serve about six years as Charleston County Treasurer, sat as a presidential elector in 1872, ran for Congress that same year (losing by a wide margin), and was appointed a Centennial Commissioner in 1874. His decade in Reconstruction Charleston is the subject of the biography's final chapter. 17

Failing health — the kidney disease that would kill him — drove Gurney out of Charleston by 1877, and he died in New York City on 2 February 1879 at fifty-seven. Roughly fifteen hundred mourners attended his Masonic funeral, gathering the separate communities that had made up his life: the merchant and fraternal society of antebellum New York, the soldiers of the Civil War, and the civic-commercial world of Reconstruction Charleston. He was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. The grave went unmarked for a time, but the life beneath it was, in its way, a compressed history of the American nineteenth century. 18

Citations

  1. Birth at Flushing, 21 August 1821, and parentage as eldest child of Willis Gurney (G7) and Elizabeth "Eliza" A. Lawrence: Brigadier General William Gurney, Gurney Genealogy Library; Jean Gurney Rigler, The Gurney Family from Aaron to Zuinglius (rev. ed., 1994); FamilySearch, William Gurney (ID KZH9-VYW). Source ID: rigler-gurney-family-aaron-zuinglius-1994. ↩
  2. Death 2 February 1879 in New York City at 163 West 48th Street, cause recorded "of the heart" with obituary references to Bright's (kidney) disease: Brigadier General William Gurney, Gurney Genealogy Library; FamilySearch, William Gurney (ID KZH9-VYW). ↩
  3. Commercial, military, and public offices across his life: Brigadier General William Gurney, Gurney Genealogy Library; for the regiment's organization and service see New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center, "127th Infantry Regiment: Civil War." Source ID: ny-state-military-museum-127th-infantry. ↩
  4. Burial at Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn (Section 75, Lot 12459); funeral with Masonic honors at the Masonic Temple, 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue: Brigadier General William Gurney, Gurney Genealogy Library; Green-Wood Cemetery lot-owners map. ↩
  5. First marriage to Caroline (maiden name unestablished from any surviving primary source) about 1840, ending about 1844–1845; the biography weighs the competing death-or-divorce explanations and favors death. Second marriage to Mary Jane Fisk (1831–1900) on 23 September 1847. Brigadier General William Gurney, Gurney Genealogy Library; Rigler, Gurney Family from Aaron to Zuinglius (1994). Source ID: rigler-gurney-family-aaron-zuinglius-1994. ↩
  6. The Flushing-to-Charleston arc is the organizing thread of Brigadier General William Gurney, Gurney Genealogy Library. ↩
  7. Service of sons James W. and Amos W. Gurney in the 127th; Gurney's wounding (shot through the arm) at Deveaux's Neck, 6 December 1864; General Potter's official report citing "the good conduct of the 127th New York, Colonel Gurney" at Honey Hill, 30 November 1864: Brigadier General William Gurney, Gurney Genealogy Library; New York State Military Museum, "127th Infantry Regiment: Civil War." Source ID: ny-state-military-museum-127th-infantry. ↩
  8. Construction of the regimental chapel from rafted pine logs and salvaged materials and its dedication on 20 December 1863, at which Gurney addressed the congregation and the men sang a hymn he had composed: Brigadier General William Gurney, Gurney Genealogy Library, citing the regimental history. ↩
  9. Gurney as Post Commander of Charleston during the 14 April 1865 flag-raising at Fort Sumter, and his order opening Hibernian Hall for a Lincoln memorial after the assassination: Brigadier General William Gurney, Gurney Genealogy Library. ↩
  10. The Swails affair — Gurney, as post commander on Morris Island, executing the War Department's refusal to muster Stephen A. Swails as an officer, and Swails's eventual commission (17 January 1865) as the first Black line officer mustered in the U.S. Army: Brigadier General William Gurney, Gurney Genealogy Library. ↩
  11. Gurney as principal organizer and "Father" of Continental Lodge No. 287 (Dispensation 22 April 1853; Warrant 10 May 1853) and District Deputy Grand Master of New York, 1858–1859: Brigadier General William Gurney, Gurney Genealogy Library. For the five-generation Masonic continuity through to G2, see the Gurney ancestor records. ↩
  12. James William Gurney (Captain, Company E) and Amos Willis Gurney (Corporal, later Sergeant), both sons of Caroline, and Amos's naming of his daughter Caroline: Brigadier General William Gurney, Gurney Genealogy Library; New York State Military Museum, "127th Infantry Regiment: Civil War." Source ID: ny-state-military-museum-127th-infantry. ↩
  13. Children of Mary Jane Fisk — Robert F. (b. 1852), Mary E. (b. early 1850s), and Lester Sawyer Gurney (1857–1899, G5): Brigadier General William Gurney, Gurney Genealogy Library; for Lester's later life see the Lester Sawyer Gurney fact sheet. ↩
  14. Flushing's Quaker setting, the apprenticeship to the Quaker miller John Bird at the Alley on Little Neck Bay, and the local Underground Railroad network: Brigadier General William Gurney, Gurney Genealogy Library; W. W. Munsell & Co., History of Queens County, New York (1882); National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, The Little Neck Bay Watershed (2008). Source IDs: munsell-history-queens-flushing-1882; nfwf-little-neck-bay-history-ecology-2008. ↩
  15. Gurney's provisions career and his militia, Masonic, Republican, and reform networks; the Five Points Mission (1848) and 1854 cemetery advocacy; and the kinship with photographer Jeremiah Gurney (1812–1895): Brigadier General William Gurney, Gurney Genealogy Library; on Jeremiah Gurney's photograph of Lincoln in death, Lincoln Group of New York. ↩
  16. Mobilization with the Seventh Regiment in April 1861, the raising of the 127th New York ("the Monitors") in 1862, and its service in the Department of the South: Brigadier General William Gurney, Gurney Genealogy Library; New York State Military Museum, "127th Infantry Regiment: Civil War." Source ID: ny-state-military-museum-127th-infantry. ↩
  17. Commandant of Charleston, the proclamation to the freedmen, the civil-administration orders, the postwar shift from wholesale grocer to cotton and rice factor at 102 East Bay, and the offices of county treasurer, presidential elector, congressional candidate (1872), and Centennial Commissioner (1874): Brigadier General William Gurney, Gurney Genealogy Library. ↩
  18. Failing health and departure from Charleston by 1877; death in New York City 2 February 1879; funeral attended by roughly 1,500 mourners; burial at Green-Wood Cemetery: Brigadier General William Gurney, Gurney Genealogy Library. ↩