← Back to the front page

Weird Foods and Methods People Used to Survive During the Civil War

Khalid Elhassan July 21, 2021 36 min

Confederate Civil War veteran Henry Hopkins Sibley. University of Kentucky

3. Confederate Veterans Fought in Africa After the Civil War

Surreal as it might sound, the second half of the nineteenth century saw Confederates in the thick of combat in Africa. Ten years after they lost the Civil War, some Confederate veterans were back in action when they fought as mercenaries in what was then termed “The Dark Continent”. One of them rose to a high rank in the Egyptian army, and played a key role in an attempt – that ended in disastrous defeat – to forge a colonial empire in eastern Africa.

In 1868, Union Army veteran Thaddeus Mott met the ruler of Egypt, the Khedive Ismail, and regaled him with tales about American military advances during the recent fratricidal war. Ismail was convinced 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 he 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.