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Outlandish and Extravagant Facts from the Gilded Age

Khalid Elhassan May 31, 2022 37 min

13. The Gilded Age Confederates Who Took Their Show to Africa

Grant accepting Lee’s surrender of his Confederate army at Appomattox. Pinterest

Confederates in Africa sounds like the start of a joke, along the lines of the one defining chutzpah as a Ku Klux Klan chapter in the Congo. While the KKK (probably) never established a chapter in Africa, beaten Confederates in the Gilded Age actually did head to and fought in Africa. To be sure, by the time that happened the Confederate States of America had been defeated and consigned to the trash heap of history, and the Confederates in question were veterans of the defunct state. Still, it was a fascinating tale.

Gilded Age - William Wing Loring — William Wing Loring. Find a Grave

It began in 1868, when Union Army veteran Thaddeus Mott met the Khedive Ismail, Egypt’s ruler, and regaled him with tales about American military advances in the recently-concluded US Civil War. Ismail was impressed, and decided to hire veterans of that conflict to help modernize the Egyptian army. The first of them, Confederate veterans William Wing Loring and Henry Hopkins Sibley, arrived in 1870. Loring became the Egyptian army’s Inspector-General, and in 1875 was appointed chief of staff of an army that was sent to fight Ethiopia.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.