2. The Confederate Leaders of the Egyptian-Ethiopian Wars
William Wing Loring (1818 – 1886) and fellow Confederates had fought in America’s Civil War 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 Khedive Ismail’s dreams of an Egyptian empire in Africa, that stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to Lake Victoria, and from the Sahara to Somalia. In 1874, Ismail took the first steps to realize his dreams when he ordered an invasion of Ethiopia, Egypt’s chief rival in northeast Africa.
That kicked off the Egyptian-Ethiopian War (1874 – 1876), in which Egyptian columns set out on two occasions to conquer that landlocked kingdom. The first marched from Egyptian-controlled Sudan, and the second one began its invasion 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 crushing defeat at the Battle of Gura in 1876.
