THE CIVIL WAR’S LONG-TERM IMPACT ON EGYPT COULD be compressed into one word: cotton. Long famous for its production of linen and other fine fabrics—the word “cotton” derives from the Arabic qutn—Egypt in 1820 imported a new Jumel strain of the plant. High-grade and long-staple, the new Egyptian cotton became a favorite among the textile manufacturers of Europe. Sales of the crop multiplied, enriching Muhammad Ali, who contrived to monopolize the market. “Practically every available acre in the Nile Valley was devoted to cotton,” a Western visitor observed. “The fields were covered with white bulbs and every fellah dreamed in terms of cotton.” William B. Hodgson, the first of a long roster of State Department Arabists, visited the country in 1834 and compared it “to a Southern plantation at home,” luxuriantly fertile but worked by wretched peasants. Nevertheless, “this mal-administration does not probably affect the quality of Egyptian produce,” Hodgson assured his superiors, “which alone is of interest to the United States.”
Egypt’s cotton production expanded even further in 1837, with the import of the country’s first cotton gin from the United States. The innovation so impressed Muhammad Ali that in 1846 he hired Dr. James B. Davis, a South Carolina planter, to apply American methods of cotton growing. Davis arrived in Egypt, together with “four Negro field hands,” eager to set to work, only to be frustrated by the infamous Egyptian bureaucracy. Davis returned to his Columbia home two years later, minus an eye lost in a work accident, and with nothing to show for his labors but nine Angora goats, gifts of Egypt’s ruler.1
Still reliant on ancient methods of farming, Egypt could not compete with the massive and thus far cheaper yields of the Southern states, which continued to meet most European needs. The imbalance changed radically, however, with the outbreak of the Civil War. The Union blockade, a self-imposed Southern cotton embargo aimed at pressuring Britain and France to support the Confederacy, and the depredations of battle—all combined to deprive Europe’s mills of their raw materials. The price of cotton quadrupled and so did the acreage Egyptians devoted to its cultivation. Federal leaders were delighted. “The…increase of cotton in Egypt is of…vast importance to our own country,” Secretary of State Seward observed. “The insurrectionary cotton states will be blind to their welfare if they do not see how their prosperity and all their hopes are passing away, when they find Egypt…supplying the world with cotton.” Washington went so far as to send an agent to Cairo to urge the Egyptians to grow even more of the downy crop. Thus, while countless bales rotted on Confederate docks, Egypt’s exports skyrocketed from $7 million in 1861 to $77 million four years later, an elevenfold increase.
Much of this windfall accrued to one man, Muhammad Ali’s grandson, Isma’il. Before ascending to power on the death of his uncle Sa’id, in 1863, the thirty-two-year-old Isma’il had made himself one of the largest private landowners in Egypt, applying the latest in agricultural technology. Shrewd, taciturn, and ambitious, the Saint Cyr–educated Isma’il resolved to use his—and Egypt’s—expanding wealth to Europeanize the country. He adorned his cities with majestic palaces and thoroughfares, created a Western-style consultative assembly of delegates, and scored the desert with irrigation canals, train tracks, and telegraph lines. Lincoln-like, he abolished the corvée system under which nearly a fifth of the peasant population had been coerced into digging the Suez Canal, and helped ensure Egypt’s unity by purchasing a hereditary title—khedive—from the Ottomans. None of these accomplishments were ends in themselves but rather the means to achieving Isma’il’s ultimate goal of independence, not just autonomy, for Egypt. And for that he needed an army.
Accordingly, the khedive determined to acquire the most up-to-date weaponry and equipment for his troops, and a cadre of Western advisers to train them.2 Egyptian rulers had traditionally employed French and British officers as military instructors, but Isma’il had begun to suspect the European powers of plotting to incorporate his country in their empires. The United States, by contrast, had recently acquired a reputation for military prowess equal to that of any state in Europe and yet it had never shown an interest in Egypt.
A Pleasant But Insouciant Past
In contrast to Syria and Palestine, both hubs of missionary activity, Egypt was never a focal point for Americans. Though the United States maintained consulates in Alexandria and Cairo, and American shipbuilders provided vessels for the Egyptian navy, trade between the two countries remained negligible. Missionary activity, too, was limited in the Land of the Nile, where, prior to 1861, not a single school or clinic had been built. The U.S. government, meanwhile, took little interest in Egyptian affairs, not even in the digging of the Suez Canal. When the canal founder Ferdinand de Lesseps invited the United States to take part in the project in 1857, predicting that the channel would “shorten by 2,000 leagues the maritime distance from Bombay to New Orleans, Boston, and New York,” President Buchanan scarcely bothered to respond. Contacts between Cairo and Washington were limited to the occasional exchange of gifts, such as the miniature copy of the Sphinx that Buchanan “cheerfully received” and pronounced a “curious relic.”
Though always cordial, U.S.-Egyptian relations were chilled by the presence of Egyptian troops in Mexico. But whatever annoyance Egypt caused Washington through its collaboration with France was more than outweighed by Egypt’s contribution to the blockade of Southern cotton. Charles Hale, the same consul who threatened Egypt with invasion, welcomed Egypt’s enrichment through cotton sales. “Egypt’s rulers have always been friendly to us,” he wrote. “They have appreciated our position and respected our rights.” A year after the landings at Vera Cruz, in December 1864, Lincoln informed Congress, “Our relations with Egypt…are entirely satisfactory.”3
FOR ISMA’IL, though, merely “satisfactory” ties with the United States would not suffice. While closely monitoring the war, the khedive was amazed by the efficacy of American arms and the might of Northern industry. He noted the swiftness with which the United States had recovered from its rupture and reasserted its international standing. Americans were destined to play a prominent role in world affairs, Isma’il believed, and could assist Egypt in its quest for independence. American military advisers would not only modernize Egypt’s army but also provide a human bridge between Egypt and this increasingly influential power. Fifty years earlier, Isma’il’s great-uncle had hired the adventurer George Bethune English to update his artillery corps, but now the khedive sought to recruit many such officers from a land that was thousands of miles away and lacking any history of cooperation with Egypt. To assist him in this formidable task, Isma’il turned to a most unusual American.
He might have been plucked from an adventure novel—burly and bearded, dashing and extravagant. By the time he met Isma’il in 1868, Thaddeus Mott had already served as an officer in the Italian and the Mexican armies, mined for California gold and sailed the Far East, and commanded Union cavalry in Louisiana. He was also the son of Dr. Valentine Mott, the New York surgeon who had toured Egypt and the Middle East in the 1840s and who had since maintained a close rapport with Ottoman authorities. Following his father to Istanbul, Thaddeus married the daughter of a wealthy Ottoman landowner, learned to speak Turkish fluently, and established his place at court. There, during a royal reception, Mott met Isma’il and managed to impress him immensely. On the spot, the khedive offered him a generalship and a job enlisting former American officers in the Egyptian army.
Mott accepted the position and, returning to the United States, conveyed Isma’il’s request to several former Confederate generals—Beauregard, Johnston, and Pickett—and to the Union brigadier Fitz-John Porter, a nephew of David Porter. None expressed the slightest interest in serving in Egypt or of helping to recruit qualified veterans who would. Porter did, however, introduce Mott to William Tecumseh Sherman, the bristly-bearded commander who was now the chief general of the U.S. Army. Though ruthless in putting down the Confederacy, Sherman was sympathetic to Egypt’s efforts to secede from the Porte. He was also eager to find employment for the many demobilized but experienced officers who had served in the Civil War, both beside him and against him in battle.
One of those comrades, William Wing “Old Blizzards” Loring, would be chosen to lead the advisers. A one-armed survivor of battles against Comanches, Mexicans, and Mormons, a former lawyer and Florida politician renowned for his unshakable integrity, Loring was also a frontiersman who had once led a regiment 2,500 miles to Oregon without losing a single soldier. A plug of a man—short, stocky, and dark—he had stood up to a Yankee charge at Vicksburg, exhorting his troops to “give ’em blizzards, boys!” and later sustained a bullet wound in the chest. Loring was no stranger to the Middle East, having worked with the army’s camel corps at Fort Defiance and then toured the Ottoman Empire shortly before the shelling of Fort Sumter. Now, bored by his employment as an investment consultant in New York, he leapt at Sherman’s invitation.
So, too, did Charles Pomeroy Stone, a charismatic and brilliant West Point graduate and linguist whom history later scorned as a “soldier of misfortune” and “the American Dreyfus.” Volunteering early for the Northern cause, Stone was placed in command of Washington’s defenses, but was soon blamed for the Union defeat at nearby Ball’s Bluff and imprisoned for six months without trial. Though physically and emotionally broken—his wife died during his confinement—he managed to return to active service only to be scapegoated for further Union setbacks. Stone finally secured work managing a Virginia mine, which was where Sherman found him, miserable and desperate for change, in 1869.
Loring would become the inspector general of the American advisory force and Stone its chief of staff. Joining them was an initial complement of eighteen officers, men like Colonel Samuel Lockett, poet, artist, and designer of the Confederate defenses at Vicksburg, and from the Army of Northern Virginia, Brigadier Raleigh E. Colston, and Captain William Briggs Hal, who once freed a slave ship near Africa but who then sailed valiantly for the South. Together with these ex-Confederates came a personal friend of President Lincoln, Major Chancellor Martin, and Colonel Vanderbilt Allen, a member of the parvenu Vanderbilt family, and Captain Eugene Fechet, from Michigan, a participant in every major battle from Shiloh to Atlanta.4 Though visceral enemies only a few years before, these veterans boarded the same boats, suffered the same seasickness, and disembarked in Alexandria in August 1869, disoriented but reunited as Americans in the Middle East.
The Great Civilizers
The Americans’ arrival coincided with an ominous time in Egypt. The economic boom ignited by the Civil War had suddenly, with the onrush of peace, been extinguished. The price of Egyptian cotton plummeted. The years of plenty had left Egypt a stunning architectural heritage exemplified by the Cairo opera house, where Verdi’s Aida was first performed in 1871, and the nearby Ismailiya suburbs, with a sophisticated system of canals and bridges and a European-style spa at Helwan. Most spectacular of all was the hundred-mile Suez Canal, officially opened in 1869 with a three-day extravaganza of balls and banquets for Europe’s royalty—one of the many effusive and incalculably expensive celebrations staged by the khedive. Yet, along with such splendors, Isma’il bequeathed his people a staggering $100 million debt. Now, with cotton no longer acceptable as collateral, the European powers were demanding an increasing say in Egypt’s finances.5
None of this insolvency was evident to the Americans, though, as they transferred from Alexandria to Cairo and indulged in a two-day tour of the city. In addition to the pyramids, they visited the hall where, in 1804, Muhammad Ali supposedly entertained Commodore Barron and the men of the Mediterranean Squadron. The landmark made less of an impression on the latter-day officers, however, than did the teeming, fetid streets and the local bey who complained that too many Americans had arrived and that some would have to go home. James Morris Morgan, a twenty-four-year-old swashbuckler who had once delivered the Confederacy’s seal to Britain and then served as Jefferson Davis’s personal escort, responded by challenging the bey to a duel. “That was about as pretty a call of a bluff as it was ever my good fortune to witness,” Stone approvingly recalled. The bey backed down and guided his guests to the Hotel Oriental, where an Italian tailor outfitted the officers entirely in black—“An exact reproduction of the coat of a Presbyterian parson,” according to Morgan.
From the hotel, the officers were driven over the Nile, through palm-braced boulevards, and into another world—of colonnades, lush carpets, and chandeliers—at the Gezireh Palace. “The East with its luxury and its magnificence and the West with its civilization and taste had here met,” gasped Lieutenant Colonel Charles Iverson Graves, a broad-shouldered Annapolis graduate who had taken the job in Egypt to feed his wife and five children on his failed Georgia farm. “[P]erfect harmony had combined to construct the most exquisite and perfect habitation since the Garden of Eden.” Admitted, finally, to the inner court, struggling to imitate the chief of protocol’s bows and supplications, the Americans at last beheld the khedive. The experience was anticlimactic. Diminutive and pudgy, Isma’il had the habit of closing one eyelid when he spoke—an affect that, together with his swarthiness, lent him a vaguely sinister air. His words, however, delivered in French and translated by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Chaillé-Long, moved the Americans deeply. Recalling their recent war service and the integrity of the United States, Isma’il praised the officers’ “discretion, devotion, and zeal” in helping to establish Egypt’s independence. “When this shall be accomplished, as it will be Inshallah!” he declared. “I will bestow upon you the highest honors.”6
Such accolades would have to be earned, however, and the Americans set to work. Stone established his headquarters in the imposing citadel overlooking Cairo, in a wing once reserved for Muhammad Ali’s harem. There he created the first general staff in Egyptian military history, amassed a library of four thousand books and many more maps, and acquired a press for printing training manuals. Drawing on both American and British models, he drafted the Egyptian army’s first code of conduct. Loring, meanwhile, performed a comprehensive survey of Egypt’s defenses. The results were dismal. The army possessed few cannons, most of them obsolete, and almost no ammunition. The shore batteries were crumbling and all communications between them, by rail or wire, had collapsed. Most pathetic of all, however, was the army itself, described by Loring as “medieval”—forty-thousand ragged and disorganized peasants drilled by equally ill-trained officers, poorly executing tactics from the time of the Napoleonic Wars.
The task of rectifying this situation was gargantuan, and Stone and Loring divided it between them. The one-armed general assumed responsibility for defending the country’s coast. With the help of the engineer and onetime Confederate gunboat commander Colonel Beverly Kennon, Loring designed a series of hidden forts along the strategic shoreline from Alexandria to Rosetta, covering it with large-caliber, precisely enfiladed guns. Stone took it on himself to revamp the army completely. Assisting him were Alexander Reynolds, a brigadier at the Battles of Chickamauga and Atlanta, and his son, Frank, who had graduated second in the West Point class in which George Armstrong Custer finished last—a Philadelphia family that had chosen to serve the South. Another rebel commander, Henry Sibley, the inventor of the single-pole conical tent and a former traveling companion of Ulysses S. Grant, took charge of Egypt’s artillery. Stone and his staff sectioned the army into regiments and divisions, provided it with paymaster and quartermaster corps, and raised factories for the production of arms.
The Americans furnished Egypt with the foundations of a modern army and, through it the potential to one day preserve the country’s independence. Yet, just as Isma’il realized that building parks and convening legislatures could not ensure Egypt’s sovereignty, so, too, the Americans understood that uniforms and tactics alone did not make a united army. Needed were galvanizing ideas like the love of one’s country and a commitment to civil society. Egyptian soldiers might experience difficulty in learning such alien notions, but without the ability to read a book or a newspaper—a skill lacking in 90 percent of the soldiery and a third of the officer corps—the task might prove impossible. To redress this deficiency, the advisers established an Arabic-language school at Abassiyah for some fifteen hundred commissioned and noncommissioned officers. Many of these Egyptians arrived with their sons, asking that they, too, be taught. Stone, upholding “the express right of a soldier to have his son educated,” agreed. Nearly three thousand neatly attired Egyptian children were soon studying in grammar schools created by the former warriors of the Wilderness and Gettysburg. “The army here is the great civilizer,” trumpeted Lockett. “And Generals Stone and Loring have been its teachers.” Within three years, nearly three-quarters of the troops were literate.
The representatives of American power in the Middle East thus became conveyors of America’s civil faith. Fantasy, too, seduced them. In their new dress blues, with golden epaulettes and belts, vermilion trousers and tarboosh—“I looked so much like a streak of lightning that one would have been justified in listening for thunder,” Morgan swaggered—the officers were feted in a succession of galas, soirees, and operas. International parties in honor of Isma’il’s children lasted as long as a week. For Colonel William McEntyre Dye, previously of West Point and the Twentieth Iowa Infantry, the “fantasia” of such spectacles was overwhelming. The “dazzling splendor” of ladies with their varicolored parasols and ambassadors in ribbon-festooned vests sipping sherbet under satin pavilions made him swoon. “The limits of the imagination were reached, everything dancing before the mind like a vision.”7
The brilliance of that image soon dissipated, however. Much like earlier American visitors to the region, initially star-struck but eventually dismayed, the officers eventually wearied of Middle Eastern realities. Loring grew contemptuous of Islam, a religion, he charged, “born of the sword” and “opposed to enlightenment” that “crushes out all independence of thought and action.” He complained that young Muslims were taught “the same barbarous lesson…that led their ancestors to rapine and plunder,” and hoped that “some Arab Luther” would emerge to end the inculcation of hate. Lieutenant Colonel Graves, by contrast, admired the Muslims’ reverence for Jesus—“In this respect they are better than either the Jews or the Unitarians”—but came to deplore the Muslim subjugation of women. “All the efforts of His Highness can make to civilize his people will be useless until he abolishes all the Harems and eunuchs from the Land!” he predicted. William Dye, who once marveled at Oriental grandeur, soon despaired of modernizing the Egyptian who, in contrast to the American’s “imaginative soul…winging…like a fairy scout into the future,” was wedded solely to a cruel and obscurantist past. An officer who had fought against, but had come to admire, the Sioux, Dye found nothing laudable in the Egyptians’ penchant for “lying, baksheesh, blackmail, bribery, forgery, theft and corruption…and murder!”
Such revulsion only reinforced the Americans’ cultural insularity, their reluctance to learn Arabic or live in non-European neighborhoods. The lack of understanding was mutual. Reproached by James Morgan for praying each morning rather than cleaning his rifle, Ahmad ‘Urabi, an officer destined to play a pivotal role in Egypt’s history, responded by denouncing Morgan’s “Christian prejudices.” Morgan, in turn, aroused local indignity by openly flirting with the khedive’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Fatma. When Cairo’s chief of police ordered Morgan to fetch him a glass of water, the son-in-law of the last Confederate treasurer responded by hurling the water testily into the Egyptian’s face.
None of these impediments, however, hindered the officers from carrying out their tasks. By 1873, Egypt had all the appurtenances of a late nineteenth-century Western-style army, including staff and naval colleges, commands for submarines and mines, and a system for conveying orders. “The army, both officers and men, are pretty well up to the standard of that of our country,” Samuel Lockett pronounced.8 So impressively had the officers acquitted themselves that Thaddeus Mott was sent once more to the United States to try to recruit others.
Unfortunately, this new military edifice rested on a rotting economic base, as Egypt’s debts grew fathomless. Unable to count on either cotton or Suez Canal dues to relieve his bankruptcy, Isma’il grasped for his last possible source of income: conquest. Incalculable stores of gold, gum, and ivory lay south of the Sudan, in what is today Uganda, Ethiopia, and the Central African Republic. Many of these lands had been claimed by Muhammad Ali and remained under nominal Egyptian rule, but few had been charted, much less subdued. Establishing Egypt’s control over these defiant regions, and evading French and British designs on them, was an assignment requiring exceptional courage, fortitude, and skill—in Isma’il’s view, the Americans’ qualities precisely.
Hearts of Darkness
Two expeditions were launched. The first, a scouting probe deep into the Sudan, followed much the same route taken by George English over fifty years earlier, along the Nile cataracts from Wadi Halfa. Leading the march was one of the most seasoned and respected of the American advisers, Raleigh Colston, a onetime professor of geology who had served prominently as a Confederate brigadier. Colston planned to travel four hundred miles upriver before turning southwest toward El-Obeid in the Sudanese heartland. There he would meet another party cutting inland from the Red Sea, this one led by a New York native with a handlebar mustache and the singular name of Erastus Sparrow Purdy.
The teams left Egypt in November 1874 and trudged for three months across the blistering provinces of Darfur and Kordofan, through impoverished villages populated, Colston wrote, with “strange and hideous specimens of humanity” and illegal markets for slaves. As many as eight of the Egyptian troopers died each day of exhaustion and disease, as did a far greater number of pack animals. Finally, Colston himself fell ill with an excruciating bladder ailment that paralyzed his lower body. He refused to be evacuated, though, and continued collecting geological and botanical specimens and filing reports. “Although I am prostrate as a result of a grave illness…which appears to be mortal,” he informed Stone, “I nevertheless desire to do my duty until the last moment.” Passing his command to a young New Englander, Major Henry G. Prout, Colson had himself lashed to his horse and driven in the direction of Cairo.
Purdy, meanwhile, succeeded in reaching Berenice, on the Gulf of Suez, before turning west toward Aswan, where, he speculated, a dam might someday be built. The opposite of the soft-spoken Colston, a voluble braggart, Purdy could nevertheless draw on his extensive experience surveying parts of Colorado and Baja California. He could also rely on his formidable assistant, Alexander McComb Mason, a Virginia aristocrat whose credits included mercenary work in Chile, Cuba, and the South China Sea, one of the few Americans to master Arabic. Purdy and Mason succeeded in rendezvousing with Prout and to survey hundred square miles of previously unmapped territory, measuring rainfall and tracing possible routes for railways. The area’s economic potential was not deemed promising, however, because of the limitations of the local tribes. “In the philanthropist, and in the missionary, they may excite an intense interest,” the expedition’s final report surmised. “[B]ut as subjects of the Egyptian Government…they will never add…to the wealth, to the strength, or to the glory of the state!”9
The disappointing findings of the first mission only reinforced the importance of the second, far more ambitious incursion into Africa. As chief of this expedition, though, Isma’il chose an Englishman, Lieutenant Colonel Charles “Chinese” Gordon, as the governor of Egypt’s so-called Equator Provinces. Engineer, evangelist, and suppressor of the Taiping revolt that gave him his moniker, Gordon was a ruddy and boyish-looking fifty-year-old, a complex man with a capacity for immense compassion and fearsome anger. Though ostensibly charged with stemming the slave trade and enforcing Cairo’s monopoly on ivory, Gordon in fact aimed at establishing Egyptian control over the sources of the Nile before any claim could be staked there by Britain or France. To dispel any impression that he favored either of those powers, Gordon selected an international staff of officers and, as his second in command, chose the thirty-two-year-old Marylander Charles Chaillé-Long.
Gordon gave his assistant all of twenty-four hours to prepare and then, on February 21, 1874, departed on a journey that would take them—by train, steam, and almost three hundred miles of marching—to Berber, a trading town abutting the Nile. En route, relations between the two men soured. A frustrated poet and actor prone to embellish his war record, a dandy with a fondness for silken top hats and capes, Chaillé-Long struck many of his acquaintances as fraudulent, “a feeble fellow” who, in Gordon’s view, dwelt “on what he has done, and…that does not help what has to be done now.” Isma’il, however, did not share that opinion and considered the American a natural adventurer capable of penetrating the Ugandan wilderness and procuring a treaty with its king. Thus, while Gordon retired to Khartoum—he would die there a decade later, murdered by Muslim insurgents—Chaillé-Long set out on a two-month trek through “pitiless rain, mud, misery, malaria and the dread fevers of the jungle,” to Rubaga, near today’s Kampala, the capital of King Mutesa.
The American’s reception was surprisingly warm. The turbaned, “copper-colored” Mutesa signaled with his scimitar for respect to be shown to his guest. “Prostrate upon their faces, their noses in the dust, lay ten thousand subjects,” a flattered Chaillé-Long recalled. His gratitude instantly gave way to horror, though, when, in accordance with a macabre custom, a “number of warriors rushed in…[and] lassoed and choked to earth those within reach, and then beat out their brains with clubs.”
Chaillé-Long nevertheless managed to contain his revulsion and to delight Mutesa with a demonstration of a mirror, a music box playing “Dixie,” and an electric battery that literally shocked the king. Gifts were exchanged: from Egypt, precious silks and stones and a horse—the first ever seen in Uganda—and from Mutesa, an albino boy and eight young girls, including his own daughter. Then the treaty was signed. “The entire Nile basin passed under the protectorate of Egypt,” Chaillé-Long congratulated himself, “and the chief object of my mission was accomplished.”
His mission, in fact, was far from over. Eschewing the direct route home, Chaillé-Long detoured in an attempt to prove that the Nile flowed from Lake Victoria in southwestern Uganda to Lake Albert, along the border with what would become the Congolese Republic. The American and his escort of native canoes paddled for six grueling days through dense river overgrowth, only to emerge into open water and the sight of seven hundred hostile Bunyaro warriors. “Give it to them now, and let every shot tell,” Chaillé-Long exhorted his men as he aimed his Number 8 rifle at the chest of the Bunyaro chieftain. With supporting fire from two fellow officers, he managed to repulse the natives, killing eighty-two, but not before a bullet grazed and burned his face. He further survived a visit with cannibalistic Niam-Niam villagers, a poison-arrow barrage from eight thousand Yanbari tribesmen, and a nocturnal attack by a leopard. Three months later a frayed and fever-stricken figure stumbled into Gordon’s headquarters. “My hair hung in great damp locks around my shoulders,” Chaillé-Long recounted. “My beard seemed to render more cadaverous my emaciated face; while the painful wound upon my nose, and one eye closed and blackened, caused him [Gordon] to doubt my identity.” Back in Cairo, his American colleagues mistook him for a beggar.
Though British explorers scoffed at his discoveries, branding him an “American pirate and bush-whacker,” Chaillé-Long had located Lake Kioga, had navigated one hundred miles of a previously unknown stretch of the Nile, and traced the river’s route through Uganda. He had also extended Egypt’s hegemony from the Sudanese deserts to the rainforests of central Africa, a vast and luxuriant empire. “This young officer…has done in a few days more for Egypt, than…an army accomplished in four years, with an expenditure of two and a half million dollars,” the khedive publicly praised him.10 The Egyptian leader no longer had such sums of money, however, nor did he have much time. His European creditors were already repossessing much of his assets and pressuring him to declare bankruptcy. Urgently, he needed the means for exploiting the rich domains secured for him by Gordon and Chaillé-Long, an access to Africa far shorter and less tortuous than the 3,000-mile odyssey from Cairo.
Chaillé-Long, meanwhile, was determined to rest on his newly attained laurels and to recuperate from his travails in his home state of Maryland. He got no farther than Paris, however, where orders reached him to return to Egypt at once. In September 1875, he took command of thirteen hundred troops and sailed five hundred miles to the Gulf of Aden, to what is today the Somali coast. “I need not repeat to you that secrecy be maintained upon the destination of the mission,” Isma’il cabled him. “I rely, Colonel, upon your zeal, upon your activity, and your intelligence.” Without arousing British suspicions of his purpose, Chaillé-Long was to try to find a water route, by way of the Juba River, west into Uganda. Another expedition would land north of there in Abyssinia—today’s Ethiopia—to vanquish the rebellious King John. If successful, these operations would effectively link East and Central Africa and secure them both for Egypt.
While Chaillé-Long conquered a fort belonging to Zanzibar’s sultan and pressed on to the Juba, the Abyssinian campaign quickly floundered. The commander, a Danish colonel named Arrendrup, though warmly regarded by his peers, was totally devoid of battlefield experience. He nevertheless rejected the suggestion of Major James Dennison, his American adjutant, to consolidate his three battalions of troops and not enter a valley where an ambush might be set. Dennison, far younger than Arrendrup but a West Pointer and seasoned Civil War vet, proved to be prescient. In less than an hour, King John’s troops decimated two thousand Egyptians, including the ill-fated Dane.11
To avenge the massacre, Isma’il dispatched a 12,000-man force armed with Remington breechloaders and polished Krupp artillery. Though ten years had passed since he had last led troops in the field, Loring was asked to serve as the chief of staff, and with him went other Americans—Lockett, Graves, and Dye, Army Surgeon James T. Johnson, and Captain David Essex Porter, another grandson of America’s first ambassador to Istanbul. Yet, to quell public murmurings over the massacre of Egyptians under the foreigner Arrendrup, Isma’il thought it best to give overall command of the expedition to his waspish war minister, Ratib Pasha. Like Arrendrup, Ratib had never before led men in battle. He is a man, Dye observed, “as sensitive as his figure is delicate” and “as shriveled with lechery as a mummy is with age.” The minister’s main concern was not excelling in combat but rather assuring the comfort of Isma’il’s effete and feckless son Hassan, who decided to accompany the troops.
Steaming to the Egyptian-owned port of Musawwa in February 1876, the force at once penetrated the Eritrean countryside, a region that reminded Dye of the Texas chaparral. The terrain proved deadly to the pack animals, however, hundreds of which succumbed to disease and thirst and the relentless beatings of their Egyptian drivers. Over two hundred of the surviving mules were burdened with Hassan’s sumptuous camp of tents, furniture, and wine, leaving only a few for carting vital supplies. Ratib, meanwhile, proved himself, in Loring’s view, “morally and physically an arrant coward.” He rejected alliances with friendly tribes and refused to send out scouts or pickets or even agree to a war plan. Rather, following Arrendrup’s misguided footsteps, Ratib hunkered down with six thousand of his soldiers in the Gura valley, dominated by hills on all sides—“a splendid place for King John to creep down on us,” Loring judged it, “as complete a cul-de-sac as any army ever got into.”
Making the best of an eminently hazardous deployment, Loring asked Lockett to construct a blockhouse fort. “Loring has blockhouse on the brain,” Dye complained, but the redoubt would soon save their lives. The work had scarcely been completed when the brawny and handsome King John, accompanied by two pet lions, reached Gura. Also with him was a popular army fifty thousand strong and the mutilated bodies of Arrendrup’s soldiers, displayed as a warning to the Egyptians. Ratib, intimidated, rebuffed Loring’s proposal for preemptive action and, citing his need to defend Hassan, retreated to the safety of the fort.
The attack, when it came on March 7, was devastating. The Egyptian line instantly broke and ran. Dye, badly wounded in the foot, watched helplessly as “surgeons and sheiks, infantry, cavalry and artillery, riderless horses and transport animals” stampeded past him. The soldiers crowded into a ravine where, in a manner reminiscent of the federal debacle at Petersburg, the Abyssinians methodically slaughtered them. “It is impossible to convey the sensation of horror…in witnessing this terrible sight,” Loring, who was watching from the fort, recalled. “The Egyptians not only let themselves be killed by a handful of savages, but slowly…were marching into the enemy’s clutches.” Their only hope lay in the Egyptian field guns, which were under the command of one Osman Pasha and well within the enemy’s range. Osman, though, afraid of drawing fire onto his own position, merely cringed behind the breastworks. The shiny Krupp howitzers stayed silent. Dye had no choice but to limp back to Loring and the other officers barricaded within the fort.
The defenders’ situation was desperate. Loring, who claimed to have survived more battles than any other American—seventy-five by his reckoning—was terrified. He saw the valley suddenly come “alive with the moving mass” of glittering spears and shields, and heard “hideous…howls like the roar of wild beasts,” as the Abyssinian warriors descended. They already had butchered the Egyptian wounded who had been left writhing on the field. Dye could hear their cries for mercy, none of which were heeded. “They escaped the bullet only to feel the scimitar, resisted the club only to be lanced…the frenzied barbarians reveled in blood.” A massacre, similar to the one soon to befall American cavalrymen thousands of miles away, on the banks of Montana’s Little Big Horn River, seemed imminent. Still, Ratib refused to order a counterattack, preferring instead to cower among sacks of cornmeal in the fort’s pantry. The Americans were reduced to threatening to shoot their own troops if they did not stand and fight.
Thus prodded, the Egyptians managed to lay down effective fire from their Remingtons and to save the fort—and themselves—from annihilation. Loring recorded with horror, however, how the defenders then “rushed out of the fort and at once showed their prowess by killing the wounded of the brave Abyssinians, mutilating the dead, cutting off their hands and feet and scattering them about.” In retaliation, King John executed another eight hundred of his Egyptian captives and tortured the remainder, including Dr. Johnson, whose leg had been shattered by a bullet.
The Americans braced themselves for another assault, most likely the last. Peering through one of the fort’s gunports, Dye could see “one unsightly mass of crushed and disfigured forms…naked and bleeding bodies…dismembered trunks, cleaved and gasping heads and quivering flesh, all ghastly in human gore.” The survivors might then have been overwhelmed handily by the tribesmen, but the shrewd King John concluded that he had less to gain from a massacre than from a negotiated cease-fire. Instead of delivering a coup de grâce to the Egyptians, he sent them an emissary of peace.
“No sooner had he entered the camp than a gay and festive scene began,” Loring scornfully wrote. “Splendid repasts were spread at the prince’s table, and all went as merrily as though nothing had happened.” After an exchange of lavish gifts and embraces, Ratib agreed to withdraw. Hassan excused himself from the gathering, ostensibly to go out on a hunt, and hurried back to Musawwa, where his father’s yacht waited to return him posthaste to Cairo. A ragged column of four thousand Egyptian troops, together with their battered American officers, followed several days later.
The ignominy of Loring and his men did not end in Abyssinia, however, but deepened with their return to Cairo. Ratib finagled to have himself declared a hero, while the artillery commander Osman, of whom Loring wrote “if he was in any other army in the world he would be tried by a drum-head court-martial and shot as a worthless coward,” claimed to have personally killed a thousand Abyssinians. The only court-martials were of Americans—of Major Dennison, for his alleged culpability in the Arrendrup fiasco, and Dye, for slapping an Egyptian officer who refused to fight. Not even Chaillé-Long escaped censure. Criticized for his failure to find a route from Juba to Uganda—the river turned south, not west—he was also faulted for showing an “excess of zeal” in attacking the Zanzibar fort. Racked with malaria, the explorer returned home, as unheralded as the other American officers.12
The mistreatment of the khedive’s American advisers was soon forgotten, though, in the crisis surrounding Egypt’s foreign debt, now estimated at an astronomical $500 million. Isma’il was forced to sell Egypt’s shares in the Suez Canal Company to Britain and to place the country’s finances under broadening international control. In June 1878, Egypt’s European overseers recommended far-reaching cutbacks in the budget. The schools for educating Egyptian soldiers and their sons were dismantled, and almost all of the American advisers were dismissed. “It was a crime against humanity which no words can properly stigmatize,” Loring lamented.
So, after nearly a decade of service, they departed—Mott to Istanbul as an adviser to several sultans and Dye as the consultant to Korea’s king. Chaillé-Long also entered the diplomatic service, after graduating from Columbia Law School. Lockett found employment as an engineer, designing Chile’s rail system, and Prout as a railroad executive. Not all of the officers went on to successful careers, however; Sibley and Reynolds Sr., for example, drank themselves to death. Many of the Americans never recovered from the illnesses they contracted in Africa and several, including Colston and Purdy, died from them. All were owed money by the Egyptian government, in some cases for years, though eventually they received their back pay plus a pension of $6,000. The sum enabled Charles Iverson Graves to pay the mortgage on his farm in Georgia and even adorn it with a house. To the end of his life, he kept a pet donkey to remind him of his experiences in Egypt.
“Old Blizzards” Loring was perhaps the most fortunate of the advisers, returning to United States to write his memoirs and tour the western frontier. He died in New York in 1887, with Stone and Chaillé-Long by his bedside, and was buried in his native Florida, with ten thousand people attending. Alone among the officers, only Charles Stone remained in Egypt. Promoted to lieutenant general, he was still at his post in 1879 when Britain and France, fed up with Isma’il’s refusal to relinquish total control over his economy, pressured the Ottomans to install a more amenable monarch in Egypt.
The Americans left, some with fond feelings, others with far less warmth. “Every man who has come out to Egypt has been deceived,” Lockett, looking back, complained. “The whole confounded thing [was a] miserable humbug—all show, all bunk, all make-belief.” Dye concluded that no one could accomplish anything in Egypt “unless he has unlimited power entrusted to him,” adding, “No intelligent foreigner should ever serve under an Egyptian.” Yet Stone begged to differ. “Egypt has been kind to us and generous to us all in our days of plenty,” he affirmed. “And will again when plenty returns to her.” Loring, too, recalled, “During the ten years of my residence in Egypt, in no single instance was I ever refused an interview [with Isma’il], nor was there ever lacking the most perfect courtesy and consideration.”
A total of forty-eight Civil War officers, both blue and gray, worked, explored, and, occasionally, fought for Egypt. They built an army, erected schools, and blazed new trails into Africa. Dye, in his memoirs, lauded them: “They were men of established reputation…educators anxious to assist in the great work of civilizing…the classic land of the Nile, prompted by an earnest desire to acquire knowledge while imparting [it].”13 And while some of their contributions proved transitory, the concepts of patriotism and citizenship introduced to Egypt by these Americans could not be reversed. Indeed, the army they helped create became the leading force for the liberation and modernization of Egypt and remained so for well over a century.
Yet the veterans were not alone in the effort to instill American-style ideas among the peoples of the Middle East. Elsewhere in the region, the missionaries were building similar schools and through them disseminating the same nationalist and civic notions. And no less than the officers who served in Egypt, American evangelists were also influenced by the Civil War, both by the horrors it engendered and by the hopes it improbably produced.