12. The Defeated Southern Mercenaries
Confederates such as William Wing Loring (1818 – 1886) had fought in the US Civil War, in part, to preserve a system based on the enslavement of Africans and their descendants. A decade later, Loring was back at war, this time in Africa. He sought to realize the Khedive Ismail’s dream to create an Egyptian empire in Africa that stretched from the Mediterranean to Lake Victoria, and from the Sahara to Somalia. In 1874, Ismail decided to get a start on the realization of his dreams and ordered an invasion of Ethiopia, Egypt’s chief rival in northeast Africa.
In the resultant Egyptian-Ethiopian War (1874 – 1876), Egyptian columns twice set out to conquer Ethiopia. Once from Egyptian-controlled Sudan, and again from the Egyptian-controlled Red Sea coast of what is now Eritrea. Each time, the Egyptian forces, equipped with modern weapons and led by Western officers such as Loring, were crushed by poorly equipped but numerically superior Ethiopians. Loring played a significant role in the second failed attempt, which ended in a major defeat at the Battle of Gura in 1876.
