Charles George Gordon
| Charles George Gordon | |
|---|---|
 Major General Charles Gordon | |
| Nickname(s) | Chinese Gordon, Gordon Pasha, Gordon of Khartoum |
| Born |
28 January 1833 London, England |
| Died |
26 January 1885 (aged 51) Khartoum, Sudan |
| Allegiance |
 United Kingdom |
| Service/branch |
 British Army |
| Years of service | 1852–1885 |
| Rank | Major General |
| Commands held | Governor-General of the Sudan |
| Battles/wars | |
| Awards |
Companion of the Order of the Bath Order of the Osmanieh, Fourth Class (Ottoman Empire) Order of the Medjidie, Fourth Class (Ottoman Empire) Chevalier of the Legion of Honour (France) Order of the Double Dragon (China) |
Major General Charles George Gordon CB (28 January 1833 – 26 January 1885), also known as Chinese Gordon, Gordon Pasha, and Gordon of Khartoum, was a British Army officer and administrator.
He saw action in the Crimean War as an officer in the British Army. But he made his military reputation in China, where he was placed in command of the "Ever Victorious Army," a force of Chinese soldiers led by European officers. In the early 1860s, Gordon and his men were instrumental in putting down the Taiping Rebellion, regularly defeating much larger forces. For these accomplishments, he was given the nickname "Chinese" Gordon and honours from both the Emperor of China and the British.
He entered the service of the Khedive in 1873 (with British government approval) and later became the Governor-General of the Sudan, where he did much to suppress revolts and the slave trade. Exhausted, he resigned and returned to Europe in 1880.
A serious revolt then broke out in the Sudan, led by a Muslim religious leader and self-proclaimed Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad. Gordon had been sent to Khartoum with instructions to secure the evacuation of loyal soldiers and civilians and to depart with them. However, after evacuating about 2,500 British civilians, in defiance of those instructions, he retained a smaller group of soldiers and non-military men. In the buildup to battle, the two leaders corresponded, each attempting to convert the other to his faith, but neither would accede. Besieged by the Mahdi's forces, Gordon organized a city-wide defence lasting almost a year that gained him the admiration of the British public, but not of the government, which had wished him not to become entrenched. Only when public pressure to act had become irresistible did the government, with reluctance, send a relief force. It arrived two days after the city had fallen and Gordon had been killed.
Gordon was and remains into the 21st century the subject of intense interest. He was the center as well of political debate regarding who was guilty for his death. At first he was portrayed as a Christian martyr sent to Africa by uncaring politicians who bungled their duty to save his life. "The reading public wanted heroes, it wanted to read about one lone Englishmen sacrificing himself for glory, honour, God, and the Empire." The debunkers in the 20th century accused him of being primarily responsible for his own death, and he was attacked as a heavy drinker with possible homosexual tendencies.
Early life
Gordon was born in Woolwich, London, a son of Major General Henry William Gordon (1786–1865) and Elizabeth (Enderby) Gordon (1792–1873). He was educated at Fullands School in Taunton, Taunton School, and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.[1] He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers on 23 June 1852,[2] completing his training at Chatham, and he was promoted to full lieutenant on 17 February 1854.[3]
Gordon was first assigned to construct fortifications at Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, Wales. When the Crimean War began, he was sent to the Russian Empire, arriving at Balaklava in January 1855. He was put to work in the Siege of Sevastopol and took part in the assault of the Redan from 18 June to 8 September. Gordon took part in the expedition to Kinburn, and returned to Sevastopol at the war's end. For his services in the Crimea, he received the Crimean war medal and clasp.[1] For the same services he was appointed a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour by the Government of France on 16 July 1856.[4]
Following the peace, he was attached to an international commission to mark the new border between the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire in Bessarabia. He continued surveying, marking off the boundary into Asia Minor. Gordon returned to Britain in late 1858, and was appointed as an instructor at Chatham. He was promoted to captain on 1 April 1859.[5]
China
In 1860 General Gordon volunteered to serve in China.[6] He arrived at Tianjin in September 1859. He was present at the occupation of Beijing and at the destruction of the Summer Palace. The British forces occupied northern China until April 1862, then under General Charles William Dunbar Staveley, withdrew to Shanghai to protect the European settlement from the rebel Taiping army.[7]
Following the successes in the 1850s in the provinces of Guangxi, Hunan and Hubei, and the capture of Nanjing in 1853 the rebel advance had slowed. For some years, the Taipings gradually advanced eastwards, but eventually they came close enough to Shanghai to alarm the European inhabitants. A militia of Europeans and Asians was raised for the defence of the city and placed under the command of an American, Frederick Townsend Ward, and occupied the country to the west of Shanghai.[8]
The British arrived at a crucial time. Staveley decided to clear the rebels within 30 miles (48 km) of Shanghai in cooperation with Ward and a small French force.[8] Gordon was attached to his staff as engineer officer. Jiading, northwest suburb of present Shanghai, Qingpu and other towns were occupied, and the area was fairly cleared of rebels by the end of 1862.[8]
Ward was killed in the Battle of Cixi and his successor H. A. Burgevine, an American was disliked by the Imperial Chinese authorities.[9] Li Hongzhang, the governor of the Jiangsu province, requested Staveley to appoint a British officer to command the contingent. Staveley selected Gordon, who had been made a brevet major in December 1862 and the nomination was approved by the British government.[9] Li was impressed with Gordon, writing:
"It is a direct blessing from Heaven, the coming of this British Gordon. ... He is superior in manner and bearing to any of the foreigners whom I have come into contact with, and does not show outwardly that conceit which makes most of them repugnant in my sight...What an elixir for a heavy heart-to see this splendid Englishman fight! ... If there is anything that I admire nearly as much as the superb scholarship of Zeng Guofan, it is the military qualities of this fine officer. He is a glorious fellow!...With his many faults, his pride, his temper, and his never-ending demand for money – but he is a noble man, and in spite of all I have said to him or about him, I will ever think most highly of him. ... He is an honest man, but difficult to get on with."[10]
Gordon was honest and incorruptible, and unlike many Chinese officers, did not steal the money that was meant to pay his men, but rather insisted on paying the Ever Victorious Army on time and in full.[10] Gordon's insistence on paying his men meant that he always pressing the Imperial government for money, something which often irritated the mandarins who did not understand why Gordon did not just let his men loot and plunder as a compensation for wages.[10]
In March 1863 Gordon took command of the force at Songjiang, which had received the name of "Ever Victorious Army."[9] Without waiting to reorganize his troops, Gordon led them at once to the relief of Chansu, a town 40 miles northwest of Shanghai. The relief was successfully accomplished and Gordon quickly won the respect of his troops. His task was made easier by innovative military ideas Ward had implemented in the Ever Victorious Army. Gordon was quite critical of the way Chinese generals fought the war, observing that the Chinese were willing to inflict and accept gargantuan losses in battle, an approach Gordon disapproved of.[11] Gordon wrote: "The great thing...is to cut off their retreat, and the chances are they will go without trouble; but attack them in the front, and leave their rear open, and they fight most desperately".[11] Gordon always preferred to outflank the Taiping lines rather to take them on frontally, an approach that caused much tension with his counterparts in the Chinese Imperial Army who did not share Gordon's horror at the huge numbers of dead caused by frontal assaults.[11]
On the morning of 30 May 1863, the Taiping forces guarding the town of Quinsan were astonished to see an armored paddle streamer the Hyson armored with a 32-pounder cannon at the front sailing up a canal, at whose prow stood Gordon; following the Hyson was a fleet of 80 junks converted to gunboats.[12] Abroad the Hyson were 350 men from the elite 4th Regiment of the Ever Victorious Army.[11] Under fire from the Taiping forces, Gordon's men chopped up the wooden stakes the Taipings had placed in the canal, thereby allowing Gordon to outflank the main Taiping defense line and to enter the main canal connecting Quinsan to Suzhou.[11] Gordon's breakthrough caused panic in the Taiping ranks, leading to thousands of the enemy to flee.[11] Gordon disembarked the 4th Regiment with orders to take Quinsan where he sailed up and down the main canal in the Hyson, using the 32-pounder gun to blast apart the Taiping positions on the canal.[11] At times, Gordon feared that assaults by the Taiping would take the Hyson, but all the attacks were repulsed.[13] The next day, Quinsan fell to the 4th Regiment, which led to a proud Gordon to write: "The rebels did not know its importance until they lost it".[14] In its last years, the Taiping movement had oppressed the Chinese peasantry and as the Taipings retreated in the face of fire from the Hyson, Chinese peasants emerged from their homes to cut down and hack to death the fleeing Taipings.[14] After the battle, Gordon was hailed as a liberator from the Taipings by the ordinary Chinese people.[14] One British officer serving with the Ever Victorious Army described Gordon at this time as: "a light-built, wiry, middle-sized man, of about thirty two years of age, in the undress uniform of the Royal Engineers. The countenance bore a pleasant frank appearance, eyes light blue with a fearless look in them, hair crisp and inclined to curl, conversation short and decided".[15]
The Ever Victorious Army was entirely a mercenary force whose only loyalty was to money and whose men were only interested in fighting in order to gain the chance to plunder.[15] Gordon felt very uncomfortable commanding this force and at one point had to order the summary execution one of his officers when the latter tried to take the Ever-Victorious Army over to the Taipings, whom had offered a generous bribe for switching sides.[15] Gordon had to impose strict discipline on the Ever Victorious Army and worked hard to prevent the Army from engaging in its tendency to loot and mistreat civilians.[10] The mercenaries of the Ever Victorious Army, comprising some of the worse social elements of China, Britain and the United States were notorious for their practice whenever they marched into a new district of stealing everything while raping all of the women, which led Gordon to impose harsh discipline with those soldiers accused of looting and/or rape being taken out and shot. As Gordon traveled up and down the Yangtze river valley, he was appalled by the scenes of poverty and suffering he saw, writing in a letter to his sister: "The horrible furtive looks of the wretched inhabitants hovering around one's boats haunts me, and the knowledge of their want of nourishment would sicken anyone; they are like wolves. The dead lie where they fall, and are, in some cases, trodden quite flat by passers by".[15] The suffering of the Chinese people straightened Gordon's faith as he argued that there had to be a just, loving God who would one day redeem humanity from all this wretchedness and misery. During his time in China, Gordon was well known and respected by friend and foe alike for leading from the front and only going into combat armored with his rattan cane (Gordon always refused to carry a gun or a sword), a choice of a weapon that almost cost Gordon his life several times.[10] Gordon's bravery in battle, his string of victories, apparent immunity to bullets and his intense, blazing blue eyes led many Chinese to believe that Gordon had supernatural powers and had harnessed the Qi (the mystical life-force traditionally believed in China to govern everything) in some extraordinary way.[11]
Gordon then reorganized his force and advanced against Kunshan, which was captured at considerable loss. Gordon then took his force through the country, seizing towns until, with the aid of Imperial troops, the city of Suzhou was captured in November.[9] After its surrender, Gordon personally guaranteed that any Taiping rebel whose laid their arms would be humanely treated.[16] The Ever-Victorious Army – which was inclined to looting – had been ordered not to enter Suzhou and only Imperial forces entered the city.[15] Gordon was thus powerless when the Imperial forces executed all of the Taiping POWs, an act which enraged Gordon.[17] A furious Gordon wrote that executing POWs was "stupid", writing "if faith had been kept, there would have been no more fighting as every town would have given in".[17] In China, the penalty for rebellion was death, and under the Chinese system of familial responsibility all family members of a rebel were all equally guilty even if they had nothing with the individual's acts. The mandarins were thus much inclined to not only execute Taipings, but also their spouses, children, parents and siblings as being all equally guilty of treason. Gordon believed this approach was militarily counterproductive as it encouraged the Taipings to fight to the death, which Gordon felt to very unwise as the Taiping leader Hong Xiuquan had become murderously paranoid, conducing bloody purges of his followers and many Taipings were willing to surrender if only the Imperial government would spare the lives of themselves and their families. Even more importantly, Gordon given his word of honour that all of the Taipings who surrendered would be well treated, and regarded the massacre as a strain on his honour.[17]
On 1 January 1864, Gordon was informed that a messenger from the Tongzhi Emperor coming to see him and to put on his finest uniform.[17] When the Emperor's messenger arrived, he had with him servants carrying boxes of silver taels (coins) that numbered 10, 000 in total together with banners written in the most eloquent calligraphy celebrating Gordon as a great general and a letter from the Emperor himself written in the best calligraphy on yellow silk thanking Gordon for taking Suzhou and offering all these presents as rewards.[17] Gordon refused all these gifts and wrote on the Emperor's silk message: "Major Gordon receives the approbation of His Majesty the Emperor with every gratification, but regrets most sincerely that owing to the circumstances which occurred since the capture of Soochow, he is unable to receive any mark of His Majesty the Emperor's recognition".[17] The Emperor was much offended when he received Gordon's message at the Forbidden City, and effectively Gordon's military career in China was over for a time.[17] A Scotsman who knew Gordon in China wrote: "he shows the Chinese that if even an able and reliable man, such as he is, is unmanageable".[17] Following a dispute with Li over the execution of rebel leaders, Gordon withdrew his force from Suzhou and remained inactive at Kunshan until February 1864.[9] Gordon then made a rapprochement with Li and visited him in order to arrange for further operations. The "Ever-Victorious Army" resumed its high tempo advance, leading to the Battle of Changzhou, and culminating in the capture of Changzhou Fu, the principal military base of the Taipings in the region. Gordon then returned to Kunshan and disbanded his army in June 1864.[17] During his time with the Ever Victorious Army, Gordon had won thirty-three battles in succession.[17]
The Emperor promoted Gordon to the rank of tidu (提督: "Chief commander of Jiangsu province" – a title equal to field marshal), decorated him with the imperial yellow jacket, and raised him to Qing's Viscount first class but Gordon declined an additional gift of 10,000 taels of silver from the imperial treasury.[18][19] Only forty men were allowed to wear the Yellow Jacket, which was the Emperor's ceremonial bodyguard and it was thus a signal honor for Gordon to be allowed to wear the Yellow Jacket.[20] The British Army promoted Gordon to lieutenant-colonel on 16 February 1864[21] and he was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath on 9 December 1864.[22] The traders of Shanghai offered Gordon huge sums of money to thank for his work commanding the Ever Victorious Army, but Gordon declined all honors of financial grain, writing: "I know I shall leave China as poor as I entered it, but with the knowledge that, through my weak instrumentality, upwards of eighty to one thousand lives have been spared. I want no further satisfaction than this".[20] The British journalist Mark Urban wrote: "To those looking at Gordon's actions now, the thanks of companies trading in opium or of a government that killed millions in its suppression of rebellion might seem like the most poisonous endorsements. But at the time people saw a brave man who acted with humanity in an otherwise ghastly conflict, standing out from the other mercenaries, adventurers and cut-throats in wanting almost nothing for himself".[20] In a leader (editorial) in August 1884, The Times wrote about Gordon: "the part of the solider of fortune is in these days very difficult to play with honour...but if ever the actions of a solider fighting in foreign service ought to be viewed with indulgence, and even with admiration, this exceptional tribute is due to Colonel Gordon".[20] The savage Taiping Rebellion – which was the bloodiest war of the entire 19th century taking somewhere between 20 and 30 million lives – is largely forgotten in the West today, but at the time the civil war in China attracted much media attention in the West, and Gordon's command of the Ever Victorious Army received much coverage from British newspapers.[20] Gordon also gained the popular nickname "Chinese" Gordon.[20]
Service with the Khedive
Gordon returned to Britain and commanded the Royal Engineers' efforts around Gravesend, Kent to erect forts for the defence of the River Thames. Following the death of his father he undertook extensive social work in the town including teaching at the local ragged school.[23] The council subsequently acquired the gardens of his official residence, Fort House (now a museum), for the town.[24]
Sexuality
During his time at Gravesend, Gordon was much involved in charity work, trying to ensure that homeless boys he found begging on the street did not go hungry while attempting to find them homes and jobs.[25] Gordon's charitable work for the boys of Gravesend led to later accusations in the 20th century that he was a homosexual.[26] Urban wrote:
- It is possible that he had sexual feelings for these urchins, but there is no evidence that he ever acted upon them. We can only speculate that his increasing religious devotion may have been an outward manifestation of an internal struggle against sexual temptation".[25]
Gordon never married and is not known to had a relationship with anyone of the opposite sex (or of the same sex), claiming that his Army service and frequent travels to dangerous places made it impossible for him to marry as he was a "dead man walking" who could only hurt a potential wife as it was inevitable that he would die in battle.[27] Urban wrote that the best evidence suggests that Gordon was asexual, through he later wrote that Gordon seemed to have been a latent homosexual whose sexual repression led him to funnelling his aggression into a military career with a special energy.[28] The British historian Denis Judd wrote about Gordon's sexuality:
- Like two other great Imperial heroes of his time, Kitchener and Cecil Rhodes, Gordon was a celibate. What this almost certainly meant was that Gordon had unresolved homosexual inclinations which, like Kitchener, but unlike Rhodes, he kept savagely repressed. The repression of Gordon's sexual instincts helped to release a flood of celibate energy which drove him into weird beliefs, eccentric activities, and a sometimes misplaced confidence in his own judgement.[29]
Gordon often said that he wished he been born a eunuch, which would suggest that he wanted to annihilate all of his sexual desires, indeed his sexuality altogether.[30] "Chinese Gordon" did not enjoy his celebrity status and though Gordon was extremely charismatic, he only kept a limited circle of friends and found dealing with strangers difficult.[20]
1870s
In October 1871, he was appointed British representative on the international commission to maintain the navigation of the mouth of the River Danube, with headquarters at Galatz. He was promoted to colonel on 16 February 1872.[31] In 1872, Gordon was sent to inspect the British military cemeteries in the Crimea, and when passing through Constantinople he made the acquaintance of the Prime Minister of Egypt Raghib Pasha, who opened negotiations for Gordon to serve under the Khedive, Isma'il Pasha. In 1873, Gordon received a definite offer from the Khedive, which he accepted with the consent of the British government, and proceeded to Egypt early in 1874. After meeting Gordon in 1874, the Khedive Ismail had said: "What an extraordinary Englishman! He doesn't want money!".[32] Gordon was made a colonel in the Egyptian army. Isma'il Pasha greatly admired Europe as the model for excellence in everything, being an especially passionate Italophile and Francophile. The Khedive's great dream was to make Egypt culturally a part of Europe, and he spent huge sums of money attempting to modernize and Westernize Egypt, in the process going very deeply into debt. As part of his Westernization programme, Isma'il often hired Europeans to work in his government both in Egypt and in the Sudan. Urban wrote that most of the Europeans in Egyptian pay were "misfits" who took up Egyptian service because they were unable to get ahead in their own nations.[33] Typical of the men that Khedive Isma'il Pasha hired was Valentine Baker, a British Army officer dishonorably discharged after being convicted of raping a young woman he been asked to chaperon; after he was released from prison, Isma'il hired Baker to work for him in the Sudan.[34]
Egypt
The Egyptian authorities had been extending their control southwards since the 1820s. Right up to 1914, Egypt was officially a vilayet (province) of the Ottoman Empire, but after Mohammed Ali become the vali (governor) of Egypt in 1805, Egypt was a de facto independent state where the authority of the Ottoman Sultan was more nominal than real. An expedition was sent up the White Nile, under Sir Samuel Baker, which reached Khartoum in February 1870 and Gondokoro in June 1871. Baker met with great difficulties and managed little beyond establishing a few posts along the Nile. The Khedive asked for Gordon to succeed Baker as governor of Equatoria province that comprised much of what is today South Sudan and northern Uganda.[35] After a short stay in Cairo, Gordon proceeded to Khartoum via Suakin and Berber. From Khartoum, he proceeded up the White Nile to Gondokoro. During his time in Sudan, Gordon was much involved in attempting to suppress the slave trade while struggling against a corrupt and inefficient Egyptian bureaucracy that had no interest in suppressing the slave trade.[36] Gordon, despite his position as an official in the Ottoman Empire found the Ottoman-Egyptian system of rule inherently oppressive and cruel, coming into increasing conflict with the very system he was supposed to uphold, later stating about his time in the Sudan: "I taught the natives they had a right to exist".[32] In the Ottoman Empire, power was exercised via a system of institutionalised corruption where officials looted their provinces via heavy taxes and by demanding kickbacks known as baksheesh; some of the money went to Constantinople with the rest pocketed by the officials.[36] Gordon established a close rapport with the African peoples of Equatoria such as the Nuer and Dinka, who had long suffered from the activity of Arab slave traders, and who naturally supported Gordon's efforts to stamp out the slave trade.[35] The peoples of Equatoria had traditionally worshipped spirits present in nature, but were steadily being converted to Christianity by missionaries from Europe and the United States, which further encouraged Gordon in his efforts as governor of Equatoria, who notwithstanding his position working for the Egyptian government saw himself as doing God's work in Equatoria.[35] Gordon was not impressed with the forces of the Egyptian state. The soldiers of the Egyptian Army were fallāḥīn (peasant) conscripts who were both ill-paid and ill-trained.[35] The other force for law-and-order were the much feared bashi-bazouks, irregulars who not paid a salary, but were expected to support themselves by looting. The bashi-bazouks were extremely susceptible to corruption and were notorious for their brutality, especially to non-Muslims.[33]
Gordon remained in the Gondokoro provinces until October 1876. He had succeeded in establishing a line of way stations from the Sobat confluence on the White Nile to the frontier of Uganda, where he proposed to open a route from Mombasa. In 1874 he built the station at Dufile on the Albert Nile to reassemble steamers carried there past rapids for the exploration of Lake Albert. Moreover, considerable progress was made in the suppression of the slave trade.[37] During this period Gordon grew close to the Anti-Slavery Society, an evangelical Christian group based in London dedicated to ending slavery all over the world, and who regularly celebrated Gordon's efforts to end slavery in the Sudan.[32] Urban wrote that: "Newspaper readers in Bolton or Beaminister had become enraged by stories about chained black children, cruelly abducted, being sold into slave markets...", and Gordon's anti-slavery efforts contributed to his image as a saintly man.[32] Gordon had come into conflict with the Egyptian governor of Khartoum and Sudan over his efforts to ban slavery. The clash led to Gordon informing the Khedive that he did not wish to return to the Sudan, and he left for London. Ismail Pasha wrote to him saying that he had promised to return, and that he expected him to keep his word. Gordon agreed to return to Cairo, and was asked to take the position of Governor-General of the entire Sudan, which he accepted. He thereafter received the honorific rank and title of a pasha in the Ottoman aristocracy.[38]
Governor-General of the Sudan
As governor, Gordon faced a variety of challenges. Besides for working to end slavery, Gordon carried a series of reforms such as abolishing torture and public floggings where those opposed to the Egyptian state were flogged with a whip known as the kourbash made of buffalo hide.[39] Gordon was well known for being utterly obstinate, joking that: "The Gordons and the camels are of the same race. Let them take an idea into their heads and nothing will take it out. I have a splendid camel-none like it; it flies along and quite astonishes the Arabs".[39] However, the real reforms that Gordon wanted that would change the basic nature of Ottoman-Egyptian rule by replacing a system based on exploitation of the people by the state with one where the state would work for the betterment of the people eluded him.[33][39] Gordon himself was honest and incorruptible, but he was almost alone in possessing these qualities, and the venal and corrupt Egyptian bureaucrats usually ignored his orders when they conflicted with the chance to make money.[33] The Europeans whom the Egyptians had hired to work as civil servants in the Sudan were no better and proved to be just as corrupt as the Egyptians.[33] The bribes that the slave traders offered for bureaucrats to turn a blind eye to the slave trade had far more effect on the bureaucrats than did any of Gordon's orders to suppress the slave trade, which were simply ignored.[33] Licurgo Santoni, an Italian hired by the Egyptian state to run the Sudanese post office wrote about Gordon's time as Governor-General that:
"as his exertions were not supported by his subordinates his efforts remained fruitless. This man's activity with the scientific knowledge which he possesses is doubtless able to achieve much, but unfortunately no one backs him up and his orders are badly carried out or altered in such a way as to render them without effect. All the Europeans, with some rare exceptions, whom he has honoured with his confidence have cheated him".[33]
Reflecting these realities, Gordon had to undertake much of the administrative work himself, travelling ceaselessly and constantly all over the Sudan via camel in attempts to make the bureaucracy actually obey his orders; something that occurred when he was present, but stopped as soon as he left.[32] Gordon's reforming zeal made him popular with the ordinary people of the Sudan as one observer noted that whenever he left and entered the Governor's Palace in Khartoum: "Government officials, consular agents and native people awaited him in large numbers. They celebrated H.E's [His Excellency] arrival with an indescribable uproar".[33]
During the 1870s, European initiatives against the slave trade caused an economic crisis in northern Sudan, precipitating increasing unrest. Relations between Egypt and Abyssinia (later renamed Ethiopia) had become strained due to a dispute over the district of Bogos, and war broke out in 1875. An Egyptian expedition was completely defeated near Gundet. A second and larger expedition under Prince Hassan was sent the following year and was routed at Gura. Matters then remained quiet until March 1877, when Gordon proceeded to Massawa, hoping to make peace with the Abyssinians. He went up to Bogos and wrote to the king proposing terms. However, he received no reply as the king had gone southwards to fight with the Shoa. Gordon, seeing that the Abyssinian difficulty could wait, proceeded to Khartoum.[40]
In 1876, Egypt went bankrupt. A group of European financial commissioners led by Evelyn Baring took charge of the Egyptian finances in an attempt to pay off the European banks who had lent so much money to Egypt. With Egypt bankrupt, the money to carry out the reforms Gordon wanted was not there.[32]
Slavery was the basis of the Sudanese economy, and Gordon's attempts to end the slave trade meant taking on very powerful vested interests, most notably Rahama Zobeir, the most powerful and richest of all the slave traders in the entire Sudan. An insurrection had broken out in Darfur province led by associates of Rahama Zobeir, the "King of the Slavers" and Gordon went to deal with it. The insurgents were numerous, and he saw that diplomacy had a better chance of success. On 2 September 1877, Gordon clad in the full gold-braided ceremonial uniform of the Governor-General of the Sudan and wearing the tarboush (the type of fez reserved for a pasha), accompanied by an interpreter and a few bashi-bazouks, rode unannounced into the enemy camp to discuss the situation.[41] Gordon carried no weapons except for his rattan cane (through the bashi-bazouks were armed with rifles and swords), but Gordon showed utterly no fear while his interpreter and the bashi-bazouks were visibly nervous as the rebels numbered about 3, 000.[42] Gordon was met by Suleiman Zobeir, the son of Rahama Zobeir and demanded in the name of the Khedive of Egypt that the rebels end their rebellion and accept the authority of their lord and master, telling Zobeir that he would "disarm and break them" if the rebellion did not end at once.[42] Gordon also promised that those rebels who laid down their arms would not be punished and would all be given jobs in the administration.[35] A tense stand-off ensured, and through the rebels could had easily killed Gordon and his party, as Gordon wrote in a letter to his sister that the rebels were all "...dumbfounded at my coming among them".[35] This bold move proved successful, as one chief then another pledged his loyalty to the Khedive including Suleiman Zobeir himself, though the remainder retreated to the south.[35] Gordon visited the provinces of Berber and Dongola, and then returned to the Abyssinian frontier, before ending up back in Khartoum in January 1878. Gordon was summoned to Cairo, and arrived in March to be appointed president of a commission. The Khedive Ismail was deposed in 1879 in favor of his son Tewfik by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid II following heavy diplomatic pressure from the British, French and Italian governments after Ismail had quarrelled with Baring.[43]
Gordon returned south and proceeded to Harrar, south of Abyssinia, and, finding the administration in poor standing, dismissed the governor. He then returned to Khartoum, and went again into Darfur to suppress the slave traders. His subordinate, Gessi Pasha, fought with great success in the Bahr-el-Ghazal district in putting an end to the revolt there. Gordon then tried another peace mission to Abyssinia. The matter ended with Gordon's imprisonment and transfer to Massawa. Thence he returned to Cairo and resigned his Sudan appointment. He was exhausted by years of incessant work. Gordon had gone to the Sudan with high hopes that via his iron will and Christian faith he would defeat the Ottoman-Egyptian system of rule, that he would act as a reformer who would change the system from within to make was unjust just and that he would make things better for the ordinary people of the Sudan.[32] Instead, the Ottoman-Egyptian system had defeated him with almost all of Gordon's reforms having failed owing to the venality of the bureaucracy who shared absolutely none of Gordon's moral outrage at slavery and injustice and Gordon's dreams of making things better for the ordinary people were dissolved in the face of greed and self-interest of others; the system remained the same creaking slow, utterly corrupt and oppressive apparatus trampling down ordinary people that it always been.[32] At end of his Governor-Generalship of the Sudan, Gordon had to admit that he been a failure, an experience of defeat that so shattered him that he had a nervous breakdown.[32] As Gordon travelled via Egypt to take the streamer back to Britain, a man who met him in Cairo described Gordon as a broken man who was "rather off his head".[32] Before Gordon boarded the ship at Alexandria that was to take him home, he sent off a series of long telegrams to various ministers in London full of Biblical verse and quotations that he claimed offered the solution to all of the problems of modern life.[32]
In March 1880, he recovered for a couple of weeks in the Hotel du Faucon in Lausanne, 3 Rue St Pierre, famous for its views on Lake Geneva and because several celebrities had stayed there, such as Giuseppe Garibaldi, one of Gordon's heroes,[44] and possibly one of the reasons Gordon had chosen this hotel. In the hotel's restaurant, now a pub called Happy Days, he met another guest from England, the reverend R.H. Barnes, vicar of Heavitree near Exeter, who became a good friend. After Gordon's death Barnes co-authored Charles George Gordon: A Sketch (1885), which begins with the meeting at the hotel in Lausanne. Gordon never married. The Reverend Reginald Barnes, who knew him well, describes him as "of the middle height, very strongly built."[45] The intensely religious Gordon had been born into the Church of England, but he never quite trusted the Anglian Church, instead preferring his own personal brand of Protestantism.[39] In his worn out state, Gordon had some sort of religious rebirth, leading him to write to his sister Augusta: "Through the workings of Christ in my body by His Body and Blood, the medicine worked. Ever since the realization of the sacrament, I have been turned upside down".[46] The eccentric Gordon was very religious, but he departed from Christian orthodoxy on a number of points. Gordon believed in reincarnation. In 1877, he wrote in a letter: "This life is only one of a series of lives which our incarnated part has lived. I have little doubt of our having pre-existed; and that also in the time of our pre-existence we were actively employed. So, therefore, I believe in our active employment in a future life, and I like the thought."[47] Gordon was an ardent Christian cosmologist, who also believed that the Garden of Eden was on the island of Praslin in the Seychelles.[48] Gordon believed that God's throne from which He governed the universe rested upon the earth, which was further surrounded by the firmament.[29] Gordon's very strong religious feelings led him to devote much time and money to charity both at home and abroad and he was well known for sticking Christian tracts onto city walls and to throw them out of a train window.[29]
Other offers
On 2 March 1880, on his way from London to Switzerland, Gordon had visited King Leopold II of Belgium in Brussels and was invited to take charge of the Congo Free State. In April, the government of the Cape Colony offered him the position of commandant of the Cape local forces. In May, the Marquess of Ripon, who had been given the post of Governor-General of India, asked Gordon to go with him as private secretary. Gordon accepted the offer, but shortly after arriving in India, he resigned. In the words of the American historian Immanuel C. Y. Hsu, Gordon was a "man of action" unsuitable for a bureaucratic job.[49] Gordon found the life of a private secretary to be a "living crucifixion" that was unbearably boring, leading him to resign with intention of going to East Africa to suppress slave trade.[49] Hardly had he resigned when he was invited by Sir Robert Hart, inspector-general of customs in China, to Beijing saying his services were urgently needed in China as Russia and China on the verge of war. Gordon was nostalgic for China, and knowing of the Sino-Russian crisis, he saw a chance to do something significant.[50] The British diplomat Thomas Francis Wade reported "The Chinese government still holds Gordon Pasha in high regard", and were anxious to have him back to fight against Russia if war should break out.[51] After an exchange of telegrams between the War Office in London and Gordon in Bombay about just what exactly was he planning on doing in China with Gordon replying that he would find out when he got there, Gordon was ordered to stay.[29] However, Gordon disobeyed orders and left on the first ship to China, an action that very much angered the Army's commander, the Duke of Cambridge.[52] Gordon arrived in Shanghai in July and met Li Hongzhang, and learned that there was risk of war with Russia. After meeting his old friend, Gordon assured Li that if Russia should attack he would resign his commission in the British Army to take up a commission in the Chinese Army, an action that if taken risked prosecution under the Foreign Enlistments Act.[53] Gordon informed the Foreign Office that he willing to renounce his British citizenship and take Chinese citizenship as he would not abandon Li and his other Chinese friends should a Sino-Russian war begin.[54] Gordon's willingness to renounce his British citizenship in order to fight with China in the event of war did much to raise his prestige in China.[55]
Gordon proceeded to Beijing and used all his influence to ensure peace. Gordon clashed repeatedly with Prince Chun, the leader of the war party in Beijing who rejected Gordon's advice to seek a compromise solution as Gordon warned that the powerful Russian naval squadron in the Yellow Sea would allow the Russians to land at Tianjin and advance on Beijing.[56] At one point during a meeting with the Council of Ministers, an enraged Gordon picked up a Chinese-English dictionary, looked up the word idiocy, and then pointed at the equivalent Chinese word 白痴 with one hand while pointing at the ministers with the other.[56] Gordon further advised the Qing court that it was unwise for the Manchu elite to live apart from and treat the Han majority as something less than human, warning that this not only weakened China in the present, but would cause a revolution in the future.[57] After speaking so bluntly, Gordon was ordered out of the court and Beijing, but was allowed to stay at Tianjin.[58] After meeting with him in Tianjin, Hart described Gordon as "very eccentric" and "spending hours in prayer", writing that: "As much I like and respect him, I must say he is 'not all there'. Whether religion or vanity, or the softening of the brain-I don't know, but he seems to be alternatively arrogant and slavish, vain and humble, in his senses and out of them. It's a great pity!".[58] Wade echoed Hart, writing that Gordon had changed since his last time in China, and was now "unbalanced", being utterly convinced that all of his ideas came from God, making him dangerously unreasonable since Gordon now believed that everything he did was the will of God.[58] Gordon was ordered home by London as the Foreign Office was not comfortable with the idea of him commanding the Chinese Army against Russia if war should break out, believing that this would cause an Anglo-Russian war and Gordon was told that he would be dishonorably discharged if he remained in China.[59] Through the Qing court rejected Gordon's advice to seek a compromise with Russia in the summer of 1880, but Gordon's assessment of China's military backwardness and his stark warnings that the Russians would win if a war did break played an important role in ultimately strengthening the peace party at the court and preventing war.[60]
Gordon returned to Britain and rented an apartment on 8 Victoria Grove in London. But in April 1881 he left for Mauritius as Commander, Royal Engineers. He remained in Mauritius until March 1882. Promoted to major-general on 23 March 1882,[61] he was sent to the Cape to aid in settling affairs in Basutoland, but he returned to the United Kingdom after only a few months.[62]
Being unemployed, Gordon decided to go to Palestine which at the time was part of the Ottoman vilayet of Syria,[63] a region he had long desired to visit, where he would remain for a year (1882–83). During his "career break" in the Holy Land, the very religious Gordon sought to explore his faith and biblical sites.[64] After his visit, Gordon suggested in his book Reflections in Palestine a different location for Golgotha, the site of Christ's crucifixion. The site lies north of the traditional site at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and is now known as "The Garden Tomb," or sometimes as "Gordon's Calvary." Gordon's interest was prompted by his religious beliefs, as he had become an evangelical Christian in 1854.[65]
King Leopold II then asked Gordon again to take charge of the Congo Free State.[66] He accepted and returned to London to make preparations, but soon after his arrival the British requested that he proceed immediately to the Sudan, where the situation had deteriorated badly after his departure—another revolt had arisen, led by the self-proclaimed Mahdi, Mohammed Ahmed. The Mahdi is a messianic figure in Sunni Islam which tradition holds will appear at the dawn of every new (Islamic) century to strike down the enemies of Islam. The year 1881 was the Islamic year 1299, and to mark the coming of the new century, Ahmed announced that he was the Mahdi, and proclaimed a jihad against the Egyptian state. The long exploitation of the Sudan by Egypt led many Sudanese to rally to the Mahdi's black banner as he promised to expel the Egyptians, whom Ahmed denounced as apostates and he announced he would establish an Islamic fundamentalist state that mark a return to the "pure Islam" said to have been practiced in the days of the Prophet Mohammed in Arabia.[67] In 1882, nationalist rage in Egypt against Baring's economic policies led to the revolt by Colonel Urabi Pasha, which was put down by British troops. From September 1882 onwards, Egypt was a de facto British protectorate effectively ruled by Baring, through in theory Egypt remained an Ottoman province with a very wide degree of autonomy until 1914. With Egypt under British rule, the British also inherited the problems of Egypt's colony, the Sudan, which the Egyptians were losing control of to the Mahdi.[68]
Mahdist uprising
The Egyptian forces in the Sudan were insufficient to cope with the rebels, and the northern government was occupied in the suppression of the Urabi Revolt. By September 1882, the Egyptian position in the Sudan had grown perilous. In September 1883, an Egyptian Army force under Colonel William Hicks set out to destroy the Mahdi. The Egyptian soldiers were miserable fallāḥīn conscripts who had no interest in being in the Sudan, much less in fighting the Mahdi and morale was so poor that Hicks had to chain his men together to prevent them from deserting.[69] On 3–5 November 1883, the Ansar (whom the British called "Dervishes") as the Mahdi's followers were known had destroyed an Egyptian Army of 8, 000 at El Obeid under Colonel Hicks with only about 250 Egyptians surviving and Hicks being one of the slain.[69] At El Odeid, the Ansar captured from the Egyptians a huge number of Remington rifles and ammunition cases together with a large number of Krupp artillery guns and their shells.[64] After the Battle of El Obeid, Egyptian morale, never high to begin with simply collapsed, and the black flag of the Mahdi soon started to fly over many a town in the Sudan.[69] By the end of 1883 the Egyptians held only the ports on the Red Sea and a narrow belt land around the Nile in northern Sudan; in both cases naval power was the key factor as gunboats in the Red Sea and the Nile provided a degree of firepower that the Ansar could not cope with.[70] Following the destruction of Hicks's army, the Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone decided that the Sudan was not worth the trouble it would take to hang onto, and as such, the Sudan was to be abandoned to the Mahdi. In December 1883, the British government ordered Egypt to abandon the Sudan, but that was difficult to carry out, as it involved the withdrawal of thousands of Egyptian soldiers, civilian employees, and their families.[71]
At the beginning of 1884, Gordon had no interest in the Sudan and had just being hired to work as an officer with the newly established Congo Free State.[70] Gordon – despite or rather because of his war hero status – disliked publicity and tried to avoid the press when he was in Britain.[70] While staying with his sister in Southampton, Gordon received an unexpected visitor, namely William Thomas Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, whom Gordon reluctantly agreed to do an interview with.[72] Gordon wanted to talk about the Congo, but Stead kept on pressing him to talk about the Sudan; finally after much promoting on Stead's part Gordon opened up and attacked Gladstone's Sudan policy, coming out for an intervention to crush the Mahdi.[73] Gordon offered up a 19th-century version of the domino theory, claiming:
"The danger arises from the influence which the spectacle of a conquering Mahometan [Muslim] Power established close to your frontiers will exercise upon the population which you govern. In all the cities of Egypt it will be felt that what the Mahdi has done they may do; and, as he has driven out the intruder, they may do the same".[74]
Stead published his interview on 9 January 1884 on the front page of the Pall Mall Gazette alongside the leader (editorial) he had written entitled "Chinese Gordon for the Sudan".[74] Urban wrote: "With this leader, William Stead's real motive in going to Southampton revealed itself at last. As to who him tipped off that the general would staying here for just a couple of nights, we can only speculate".[75]
Stead's interview caused a media sensation and led to a popular clamour for Gordon to be sent to the Sudan.[76] Urban wrote: "The Pall Mall Gazette articles, in short, began a new chapter in international relations; powerful men using media manipulation of public opinion to trigger war. It is often suggested that that campaign by William Randolph Hearst's paper that led to the US invasion of Cuba in 1898 was the world's first episode of this kind, but the British press deserves these dubious laurels for its actions a full fourteen years earlier".[76] The man behind the campaign was the Adjutant General, Sir Garnet Wolseley – a skilled media manipulator who often leaked information to the press to effect changes in policy – and was who was strongly opposed to Gladstone's policy of pulling out of the Sudan.[77] In 1880, the Liberals had won the general election on a platform of imperial retrenchment, and Gladstone had put his principles into practice by withdrawing from the Transvaal and Afghanistan in 1881. There was an imperialist "ultra" faction in the War Office led by Wolseley that felt that the Liberal government were too inclined to withdraw from various places all over the globe at the first sign of trouble, and who were determined to sabotage the withdrawal from the Sudan.[78] Gordon and Wolseley were good friends (Wolseley was one of the people Gordon prayed for every night), and after a meeting with Wolseley at the War Office to discuss the crisis in the Sudan, Gordon left convinced that he had to go to the Sudan to "carry out the work of God".[69]
With public opinion demanding that Gordon be sent to the Sudan, on 16 January 1884 the Gladstone government decided to send Gordon to the Sudan, albeit with the very limited mandate to report on the situation and advised on the best means of carrying out the evacuation.[79] Gladstone felt that this was a deft political move; public opinion would be satisfied with "Chinese Gordon" going to the Sudan, but at the same time, Gordon was given such a limited mandate that the evacuation would proceed as planned. The Cabinet felt very uncomfortable with the appointment as they had pressured by the press to send a man who was opposed to their Sudan policy to take command in the Sudan with the Foreign Secretary Lord Grenville wondering if they had just committed a "gigantic folly".[80]
The British government asked Gordon to proceed to Khartoum to report on the best method of carrying out the evacuation. Gordon started for Cairo in January 1884, accompanied by Lt. Col. J. D. H. Stewart. At Cairo, he received further instructions from Sir Evelyn Baring, and was appointed governor-general with executive powers by the Khedive Tewfik Pasha, who also gave Gordon a fireman (edict) ordering him to establish a government in the Sudan, which Gordon was later to use as a reason for staying in Khartoum.[81] Baring disapproved of sending Gordon to the Sudan, writing in a report to London that: "A man who habitually consults the Prophet Isaiah when he is in a difficulty is not apt to obey the orders of anyone".[82] Gordon immediately confirmed Baring's fears as he started to issue press statements attacking the rebels as "a feeble lot of stinking Dervishes" and demanded he be allowed to "smash up the Mahdi".[83] Urban wrote that Gordon's "most stupid mistake" occurred when he revealed his secret orders at a meeting of tribal leaders on 12 February at Berber that the Egyptians were pulling out, leading to almost all of the Arab tribes of northern Sudan declaring their loyalty to the Mahdi.[83] Given that Gordon himself in his interview with Stead had stated: "The moment it is known that we have given up the game, every man will go over to the Mahdi", his decision to reveal that the Egyptians were pulling out remains a mystery.[83] Shortly afterwards, Gordon wrote what Urban called a "bizarre" letter to the Mahdi telling him to accept the authority of the Khedive of Egypt and offering him the chance to work as one of Gordon's provincial governors; the Mahdi contemptuously rejected Gordon's offer and sent back a letter demanding Gordon convert to Islam.[83] Even Wolsely had cause to regret sending Gordon as Gordon revealed himself to be "loose cannon" whose press statements attacking the Liberal government were "obstructing rather than furthering his plans to take over the Sudan".[83] Traveling through Korosko and Berber, he arrived at Khartoum on 18 February, where he offered his earlier foe, the slaver-king Rahama Zobeir, release from prison in exchange for leading troops against Ahmed.[84] Gordon's abrupt mood swings and contradictory advice confirmed the Cabinet's view of him as mercurial and unstable.[29]
After arriving in Khartoum, Gordon announced that on the grounds of honor he would not evacuate Khartoum, but would rather he would hold the city against the Mahdi.[81] Gordon had a garrison of about 8, 000 soldiers armed with Remington rifles together with a colossal ammunition dump containing millions of rounds of bullets.[85] Gordon commenced the task of sending the women and children and the sick and wounded to Egypt, and about 2,500 had been removed before the Mahdi's forces closed in. Gordon hoped to have the influential local leader Sebehr Rahma appointed to take control of Sudan, but the British government refused to support a former slaver. During this time, Gordon befriended an Irish journalist Frank Power who was The Times correspondent in the Sudan who was delighted that the charismatic Gordon had no anti-Catholic prejudices and treated him as an equal.[86] The hero-worshiping Power wrote about Gordon: "He is indeed I believe the greatest man of this century".[86] Gordon granted Power privileged access and in return Power started to write a series of popular articles for The Times depicting Gordon as the solitary hero taking on a vast horde of fanatical Muslims.[86] Gordon made all of his personal dispatches to London public (there was no Official Secrets Act at the time) in attempts to win public opinion over to his policy, writing on one dispatch: "Not secret as far as I am concerned".[87]
The advance of the rebels against Khartoum was combined with a revolt in the eastern Sudan. Colonel Valentine Baker led an Egyptian force out of Suakin and was badly defeated by 1, 000 Haddendowa warriors who declared their loyalty to the Mahdi under Osman Digna at Al-Teb with 2, 225 Egyptian soldiers and 96 officers killed.[34] Because the Egyptian troops at Suakin were repeatedly defeated, a British force was sent to Suakin under General Sir Gerald Graham, which drove the rebels away in several hard-fought actions. At Tamai on 13 March 1884, Graham was attacked by the Haddendowa (whom the British disparagingly called "Fuzzy Wuzzies") whom he defeated, but in the course of the battle, the Haddendowa broke the Black Watch square, an action later celebrated in the Kipling poem "Fuzzy-Wuzzy".[88] The ferocity of the Haddendowa attacks astonished the British, and Graham argued that he needed more troops if he were to advance deeper into the Sudan while one newspaper correspondent reported that the average British soldiers did not understand why they were in the Sudan killing "such brave fellows" for "the sake of the wretched Egyptians".[87] Gordon urged that the road from Suakin to Berber be opened, but his request was refused by the government in London, and in April Graham and his forces were withdrawn and Gordon and the Sudan were abandoned. The garrison at Berber surrendered in May, and Khartoum was completely isolated.[89]
Gordon decided to stay and hold Khartoum despite the orders of the Gladstone government to merely report about the best means of supervising the evacuation of the Sudan.[81] Power who acted as Gordon's unofficial press attaché wrote in The Times: "We are daily expecting British troops. We cannot bring ourselves to believe that we to be abandoned".[90] In his diary, Gordon wrote: "I own to having been very insubordinate to Her Majesty's Government and its officials, but it is my nature, and I cannot help it. I fear I have not even tried to play battledore and shuttlecock with them. I know if I was chief I would never employ myself for I am incorrigible".[81] Because of public opinion, the government dared not sack Gordon, but the Cabinet was extremely angry about Gordon's insubordination with many privately saying Gordon if wanted to defy orders by holding Khartoum, then he only deserved what he was going to get.[90] Gladstone himself took Gordon's attacks on his Sudan policy very personally.[90] One Cabinet minister wrote: "The London newspapers and the Tories clamor for an expedition to Khartoum, the former from ignorance, the latter because it is the best model of embarrassing us...Of course it is not an impossible undertaking, but it is melancholy to think of the waste of lives and the treasure which it must involve".[90] The Cabinet itself was divided and confused about just what to do about the Sudan crisis, leading to a highly dysfunctional style of decision-making.[29]
.jpg)
Gordon had a strong death wish, and clearly wanted to die fighting at Khartoum, writing in a letter to his sister: "I feel so very much inclined to wish it His will might be my release. Earth's joys grow very dim, its glories have faded".[81] In his biography of Gordon, Anthony Nutting wrote Gordon was obsessed with "the ever-present, constantly repeated desire for martyrdom and for that glorious immortality in union with God and away from the wretchedness of life on this earth".[81] Because his Turkish, Egyptian and many of his Sudanese troops were Muslim, Gordon refrained in public from describing his battle with the Mahdi as a religious war, but Gordon's diary showed he viewed himself as a Christian champion fighting against the Mahdi just as much for God as for Queen and country. The Mahdi and his followers had been fighting a jihad since 1881 and looked forward to taking on the famous General Gordon as a chance to win glory for Allah.[92]
Gordon energetically organized the defence of Khartoum right from the moment he arrived in Khartoum, using his training as a military engineer to turn the city into a fortress.[85] Additionally, Gordon had guns and armored plating attached to the paddle wheel streamers stationed at Khartoum to create his own private riverine navy that served as an effective force against the Ansar.[93] The Turkish troops at Khartoum were not part of the Ottoman Army, but rather bashi-bazouks, irregulars whom Gordon commented were good for raids, but useless for battle.[93] The Shaggyeh (one of the few Arab tribes who did not rally to the Mahdi) drove Gordon to distraction with Gordon writing in his diary about them: "Dreadful lot! How I look forward to their disbandment".[94] Gordon had a low opinion of the Egyptian, Turkish and Arab Sudanese troops under his command-whom he constantly disparaged as a mutinous, badly disciplined and ill-trained rabble good only for looting – but had a much higher opinion of his black Sudanese soldiers, most of them former slaves who would rather die fighting as free men than live as slaves again; it was well known that the Mahdi's forces were going to enslave the blacks of Khartoum once they took the city.[94] The black Sudanese troops, many from what is now South Sudan, proved to be Gordon's best troops at Khartoum and numbered about twenty-three hundred.[34]
A siege by the Mahdist forces commanded by the Mahdi himself started on 18 March 1884. Initially, the siege of Khartoum was more in nature a blockade rather than a true siege as the Mahdi's forces lacked the strength to wage a proper siege, for example only cutting the telegraphy lines in April 1884.[90] The British had decided to abandon the Sudan, but it was clear that Gordon had other plans, and the public increasingly called for a relief expedition. Gordon's last telegrams were clearly meant for the British public with one message addressed to Baring reading: "You state your intention of not sending any relief force up here to Berber...I shall hold on here as long as I can, and if I can suppress the rebellion, I shall do so. If I cannot, I shall retire to the Equator and leave you with the indelible disgrace of abandoning the garrisons".[95] Gladstone was opposed to hanging onto the Sudan, saying in a speech in the House of Commons that sending a relief force to Khartoum would be "a war of conquest against a people struggling to be free. Yes, these are people struggling to be free and rightly struggling to be free".[96] Khartoum was surrounded by the Ansar in March 1884, but was not cut off from the outside world for a considerable time afterwards.[97] Gordon's armored streamers continued to sail in and out of Khartoum with little difficulty for the first six months of the siege, and it was not September 1884 that the armored streamers first had trouble accessing the city.[97] Gordon himself had a low opinion of his enemy, writing that the Ansar besieging him were "some 500 determined men and some 2, 000 rag-tag Arabs".[97] Nutting wrote that Gordon "could have withdrawn at almost any moment between March and May" if only he been willing.[97] The American historian James Perry wrote: "But instead of following instructions, he stayed put, longing for martyrdom. It wasn't exactly fair to the Egyptian garrisons he been sent to evacuate; they had no death wish".[97] On 25 July 1884, the Cabinet over the objections of the Prime Minister voted to send a relief expedition to Khartoum.[97] On 5 August 1884, the House of Commons voted to send the relief force with a budget of £300, 000.[97]
During this time, Gordon when not organising with incredible energy the besieged garrison spent his time writing a somewhat rambling diary containing his reflections on the siege, life, fate, and his own intense, idiosyncratic version of Protestantism.[98] Gordon waged a very vigorous defense, sending out his armored streamers to shoot up the Ansar camps along the Blue Nile while he regularly made raids on the besiegers that often gave the Madhi's forces a bloody nose.[98] Elated by these successes, Gordon wrote in his diary: "We are going to hold out here forever".[98] It was not until August that the government decided to take steps to relieve Gordon, and only by November was the British relief force, called the Nile Expedition, or, more popularly, the Khartoum Relief Expedition or Gordon Relief Expedition (a title that Gordon strongly deprecated), under the command of Field Marshal Garnet Wolseley, ready. Wolseley had earlier served in Canada where he had commanded the Red River expedition of 1870, during which time he gained considerable respect for the skills of French-Canadian voyageurs, and now insisted he could not travel up the Nile without the voyageurs to assist his men as river pilots and boatmen.[99] It took considerable time to hire the voyageurs in Canada and bring them to Egypt, which delayed the expedition.[99] Some of the "voyageurs" who arrived in Egypt turned out to be lawyers led by an alderman from Toronto who wanted to see "the fun" and were useless as boatmen.[99]
On 4 September 1884, Gordon's fortunes took a turn for the worse when the most able of his subordinates Mohammed Aly together with about 1, 000 of Gordon's best troops when making a raid walked into a trap and were all killed.[98] On 9 September 1884, an armored streamer, the Abbas on its way to Cairo was captured by the Ansar for the first time and all abroad were killed.[92] Amongst the dead were Gordon's unofficial spokesman, the passionate wordsmith Power, Gordon's Chief of Staff Colonel Stewart and the French consul in Khartoum Herbin, all of whom Gordon was sending to Cairo to pled for relief.[92][100] Amongst the papers captured on the Abbas was the cipher key Gordon used to code his messages in and out of Khartoum, which he meant he could not longer read the messages he received, leading him to write his diary: "I think cipher-messages are in some countries, like this a mistake".[98] During this period, Gordon was lionized by the British press, which portrayed him as a latter-day Christian "knight", a "crusader" and a "saint", a man of pure good heroically battling the Mahdi, who was depicted as a man of pure evil.[101] The Pall Mall Gazette in a front page leader wrote that Gordon stood "out in clear relief against the Eastern sky. Alone in a black continent, dauntless and unfaltering, he discharges his great trust, holding the capital of the Sudan against the beleaguering hordes".[102] The defenses Gordon had built with lines of earthwork, mines, and barbed wire presented the Ansar with much difficulty and their attempts to storm Khartoum failed, but the Ansar made good use of their Krupp artillery to gradually batter down the defenses.[92] To counter Gordon's armored streamers, the Mahdi built a series of forts along the Nile equipped with Krupp guns that over time proceeded to make it almost impossible for Gordon's navy to operate anymore.[92]
_Major-General_Charles_George_Gordon_greeting_reinforcements_at_Khartoum_in_1885-_TIMEA.jpg)
By the end of 1884, both the garrison and the population of Khartoum were starving to death; there were no horses, donkeys, cats, or dogs left in Khartoum as the people had eaten all of them.[103] Gordon told the civilians of Khartoum that anyone who wished to leave, even to join the Mahdi's army were free to do so.[103] About half of the population took up his offer to promptly leave the city.[103] A note written by Gordon and dated December 14 was sent out by a messenger from Khartoum who reached Wolseley's army on 30 December 1884.[104] The note read "Khartoum all right. C.G. Gordon", but the messenger (who knew very little English) had memorised another more darker message from Gordon, namely: "We want you to come quickly".[104] In the same month, Gordon received a letter from the Mahdi offering safe passage out of Khartoum: "We have written to you to go back to your country...I repeat to you the words of Allah, Do not destroy yourself. Allah Himself is merciful to you".[103] Gordon and the Mahdi never met, but the two men, both charismatic and intensely religiously soldiers who saw themselves as fighting for God had developed a grudging mutual respect.[103]
During November–December 1884, Gordon's diary showed the effect of the strain on the siege as he was in state of mental exhaustion, a man on the brink of madness.[92] In his final months Gordon oscillated between a longing for martyrdom and death vs. an intense horror at the prospect of his own demise as the hour of his destruction rapidly approached.[92] Even if the relief force had reached him, it is not clear if he would had left Khartoum as Gordon wrote in his diary: "If any emissary or letter comes up here ordering me to come down I WILL NOT OBEY IT, BUT WILL STAY HERE, AND FALL WITH THE TOWN!".[92] At an another point, a death-obsessed Gordon wrote in his diary: "Better a bullet to the brain than to flicker out unheeded".[92] On 14 December 1884, Gordon wrote the last entry in his diary, which read: "Now MARK THIS, if the Expeditionary Force and I ask for no more than two hundred men, does not come in ten days, the town may fall; and I have done my best for the honour of our country. Goodbye, C. G. Gordon".[105] Gordon constantly paced the roof of his palace during the day, looking vainly for smoke on the Nile, indicating that the streamers were coming while spending the much of the rest of his time in prayer.[103]
On 5 January 1885, the Ansar took the fort at Omdurman, which allowed them to use their Krupp artillery to bring down enfilading fire on the defense.[92] In one of the last letters Gordon had smuggled out, he wrote: "I expect Her Majesty's Government are in a precious rage with me for holding out, and so forcing their hands".[92] In his last weeks, those who knew Gordon described him as a chain-smoking, rage-filled, desperate man wearing a shabby uniform who spent hours talking to a mouse that he shared his office with when he was not attacking his Sudanese servants with his rattan cane during one of his rages.[106] A particular aspect of Gordon's personality that stood out was his death wish as everyone who knew him were convinced that he wanted to die.[92] When a Lebanese merchant visited Gordon in the evening, the Ansar began an artillery bombardment, leading to the frightened merchant to suggest that perhaps Gordon ought to dim the lights to avoid drawing enemy fire down on the palace.[92] The merchant recalled that Gordon's response was: "He called up the guard and gave the orders to shoot me if I moved" and ordered all of the lamps in the palace to be lit up as brightly as possible.[107] Gordon defiantly told the merchant: "Go tell all the people of Khartoum that Gordon fears nothing, for God has created him without fear!".[107]
The relief force consisted of two groups, a "flying column" of camel-borne troops from Wadi Halfa. The troops reached Korti towards the end of December, and arrived at Metemma on 20 January 1885. There they found four gunboats which had been sent north by Gordon four months earlier, and prepared them for the trip back up the Nile. On 24 January two of the steamers, carrying 20 soldiers of the Sussex Regiment wearing red tunics to clearly identify them as British, were sent on a reconnaissance mission to Khartoum, with orders from Wolseley not to attempt to rescue Gordon or bring him ammunition or food.[108] On the evening of 24 January 1884, the Mahdi met with his generals, who told him with the Nile low and the Wolseley close that it was time to either storm Khartoum or retreat.[109] On the morning of 26 January 1885, the Ansar began their final attack by storming the city and after an hour's fighting, the staving defenders had abandoned the fight and the city was theirs.[109] On arriving at Khartoum on 28 January, the relief force found that the city had been captured and Gordon had been killed just two days before, coincidentally, two days before his 52nd birthday. Under heavy fire from Ansar warriors on the bank, the two steamers turned back up river.[110]
The British press criticized the relief force for arriving two days late, but it was later argued that the Mahdi's forces had good intelligence, and if the camel corps had advanced earlier, the final attack on Khartoum would also have come earlier. Finally, the boats sent were not there to relieve Gordon, who was not expected to agree to abandon the city, and the small force and limited supplies on board could have offered scant military support for the besieged in any case.[108]
Death
The manner of his death is uncertain, but it was romanticized in a popular painting by George William Joy – General Gordon's Last Stand (1885, currently in the Leeds City Art Gallery), and again in the film Khartoum (1966) with Charlton Heston as Gordon. The most popular account of Gordon's death was that he put on his ceremonial gold-braided blue uniform of the Governor-General and the Pasha's red fez and that he went out unarmed to be cut down by the Ansar.[29] This account was very popular with the British public as it contained much Christian imagery with Gordon as a Christ-like figure dying passively for the sins of all humanity.[29]
Gordon was apparently killed at the Governor-General's palace about an hour before dawn. As recounted in Bernard M. Allen’s article "How Khartoum Fell" (1941), the Mahdi had given strict orders to his three Khalifas not to kill Gordon.[111] However, the orders were not obeyed. Gordon's Sudanese servants later stated that Gordon for once did not go out armed only with his rattan cane, but also took with him a loaded revolver and his sword, and died in mortal combat fighting the Ansar.[112] Gordon died on the steps of a stairway in the northwestern corner of the palace, where he and his personal bodyguard, Agha Khalil Orphali, had been firing at the enemy. Orphali was knocked unconscious and did not see Gordon die. When he woke up again that afternoon, he found Gordon's body covered with flies and the head cut off.[113] A merchant, Bordeini Bey, glimpsed Gordon standing on the palace steps in a white uniform looking into the darkness. The best evidence suggests that Gordon went out to confront the enemy, gunned down several of the Ansar with his revolver and after running out of bullets, drew his sword only to be shot down.[29] Reference is made to an 1889 account of the General surrendering his sword to a senior Mahdist officer, then being struck and subsequently speared in the side as he rolled down the staircase.[114] Rudolf Slatin, an Austrian in Egyptian service who had been taken prisoner by the Ansar stated that he saw the head of Gordon being presented to the Mahdi.[105] When Gordon's head was unwrapped at the Mahdi's feet, he ordered the head transfixed between the branches of a tree ". . . where all who passed it could look in disdain, children could throw stones at it and the hawks of the desert could sweep and circle above."[115] His body was desecrated and thrown down a well.[115]
In the hours following Gordon's death an estimated 10,000 civilians and members of the garrison were killed in Khartoum.[115] The massacre was finally halted by orders of the Mahdi. Many of Gordon's papers were saved and collected by two of his sisters, Helen Clark Gordon, who married Gordon's medical colleague in China, Dr. Moffit, and Mary, who married Gerald Henry Blunt. Gordon's papers, as well as some of his grandfather's (Samuel Enderby III), were accepted by the British Library around 1937.[116]
The failure to rescue General Gordon's force in Sudan was a major blow to Prime Minister Gladstone's popularity. Queen Victoria sent him a telegram of rebuke which found its way into the press.[117] Victoria's telegram was not coded as usual which suggests she wanted it to appear in the press. Critics said Gladstone had neglected military affairs and had not acted promptly enough to save the besieged Gordon. Critics inverted his acronym, "G.O.M." (for "Grand Old Man"), to "M.O.G." (for "Murderer of Gordon"). Gladstone told the Cabinet that the public cared much about Gordon and nothing about the Sudan, so ordered Wolseley home after learning of Gordon's death.[118] Wolseley who been hoping that the expedition he was leading would mark the beginning of the British conquest of the Sudan was furious, and in a telegram to Queen Victoria contemptuously called Gladstone "...the tradesman who has become a politician".[118]
In 1885, Gordon achieved the martyrdom he been seeking at Khartoum as the British press portrayed him as a saintly Christian hero and martyr who had died nobly resisting the Islamic onslaught of the Mahdi.[119] As late as 1901 on the anniversary of Gordon's death, The Times wrote in a letter that Gordon was "that solitary figure holding aloft the flag of England in the face of the dark hordes of Islam".[101] Gordon's death caused a huge wave of national grief all over Britain with 13 March 1885 being set aside as a day of mourning for the "fallen hero of Khartoum".[117] In a sermon, the Bishop of Chichester stated: "Nations who envied our greatness rejoiced now at our weakness and our inability to protect our trusted servant. Scorn and reproach were cast upon us, and would we plead that it was undeserved? No; the conscience of the nation felt that a strain rested upon it".[117] Baring – who deeply disliked Gordon – wrote that because of the "national hysteria" caused by Gordon's death, that saying critical about him at present would be equal to questioning Christianity.[117] Stones were thrown at the windows at 10 Downing Street as Gladstone was denounced as the "Murderer of Gordon", the Judas figure who betrayed the Christ figure Gordon.[29] The wave of mourning was not just confined to Britain. In New York, Paris and Berlin pictures appeared in shop windows of Gordon with black lining as all over the West the fallen general was seen as a Christ-like man who sacrificed himself resisting the advance of Islam.[29]
Despite the popular demand to "avenge Gordon", the new Conservative government that come into office after the 1885 election did nothing of the sort as the Sudan was judged to be not worth the huge financial costs it would have taken to conquer it, the same conclusion that the Liberals had reached.[29] After Khartoum, the Mahdi established his Islamic state which restored slavery and imposed a very harsh rule that according to one estimate caused the deaths of 8 million people between 1885–1898.[120] Egypt had been in the French sphere of influence until 1882 when the British had occupied Egypt. In March 1896 a French force under the command of Jean-Baptiste Marchand left Dakar with the intention of marching across the Sahara with the aim of destroying the Mahdiyah state. The French hoped that conquering the Sudan would allow them to lever the British out of Egypt, and thus restore Egypt to the French sphere of influence. To block the French, a British force under Herbert Kitchener was sent to destroy the Mahdiyah state and annihilated the Ansar at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. It was thus imperial rivalry with the French, not a desire to "avenge Gordon" that led the British to end the Mahdiyah state in 1898.[29] However the British public and Kitchener himself saw the expedition as one to "avenge Gordon". As the Mahdi was long dead, Kitchener had to contended himself with blowing up the Mahdi's tomb as revenge for Gordon.[121] After Omdurman, Kitchener opened a letter from the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury and for the first time learned that the real purpose of the expedition to keep the French out of the Sudan and that "avenging Gordon" was merely a pretext.[122]
Memorials
News of Gordon's death led to an "unprecedented wave of public grief across Britain." A memorial service, conducted by the Bishop of Newcastle, was held at St. Paul's Cathedral on 14 March. The Lord Mayor of London opened a public subscription to raise funds for a permanent memorial to Gordon; this eventually materialized as the Gordon Boys Home, now Gordon's School, in West End, Woking.[123][124]
Statues were erected in Trafalgar Square, London, in Chatham, Gravesend, Melbourne (Australia), and Khartoum. Southampton, where Gordon had stayed with his sister, Augusta, in Rockstone Place before his departure to the Sudan, erected a memorial in Porter's Mead, now Queen's Park, near the town's docks.[123] On 16 October 1885, the "light and elegant structure" was unveiled; it comprises a stone base on which there are four polished red Aberdeen granite columns, about twenty feet high. The columns are surmounted by carved capitals supporting a cross. The pedestal bears the arms of the Gordon clan and of the borough of Southampton, and also Gordon’s name in Chinese. Around the base is an inscription referring to Gordon as a soldier, philanthropist and administrator and mentions those parts of the world in which he served, closing with a quotation from his last letter to his sisters: "I am quite happy, thank God! and, like Lawrence, I have tried to do my duty."[125] The memorial is a Grade II listed building.[126]
Gordon's memory, as well as his work in supervising the town's riverside fortifications, is commemorated in Gravesend; the embankment of the Riverside Leisure Area is known as the Gordon Promenade, while Khartoum Place lies just to the south. Located in the town centre of his birthplace of Woolwich is General Gordon Square, formerly known as General Gordon Place until a major urban landscaped area was developed and the road name changed. In addition, one of the first Woolwich Free Ferry vessels was named Gordon in his memory.[127]
In 1888 a statue of Gordon by Hamo Thornycroft was erected in Trafalgar Square, London, exactly halfway between the two fountains. It was removed in 1943. In a House of Commons speech on 5 May 1948, then opposition leader Winston Churchill spoke out in favour of the statue's return to its original location: "Is the right honorable Gentleman [the Minister of Works] aware that General Gordon was not only a military commander, who gave his life for his country, but, in addition, was considered very widely throughout this country as a model of a Christian hero, and that very many cherished ideals are associated with his name? Would not the right honorable Gentleman consider whether this statue [...] might not receive special consideration [...]? General Gordon was a figure outside and above the ranks of military and naval commanders." However, in 1953 the statue minus a large slice of its pedestal was reinstalled on the Victoria Embankment, in front of the newly built Ministry of Defence main buildings.[128]
An identical statue by Thornycroft—but with the pedestal intact—is located in a small park called Gordon Reserve, near Parliament House in Melbourne, Australia.[129]
The Corps of Royal Engineers, Gordon's own Corps, commissioned a statue of Gordon on a camel. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1890 and then erected in Brompton Barracks, Chatham, the home of the Royal School of Military Engineering, where it still stands.[130] Much later a second casting was made. In 1902 it was placed at the junction of St Martin's Lane and Charing Cross Road in London. In 1904 it was moved to Khartoum, where it stood at the intersection of Gordon Avenue and Victoria Avenue, 200 meters south of the new palace that had been built in 1899. It was removed in 1958, shortly after the Sudan became independent. This is the figure which, since 1960, stands at the Gordon's School in Woking.[131]
Gordon's Tomb, which was carved by Frederick William Pomeroy, lies in St Paul's Cathedral, London.[132]
The Church Missionary Society (CMS) work in Sudan was undertaken under the name of the Gordon Memorial Mission. This was a very evangelical branch of CMS and was able to start work in Sudan in 1900 as soon as the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium took control after the fall of Khartoum in 1899. In 1885 at a meeting in London, £3,000 were allocated to a Gordon Memorial Mission in Sudan.[133]
In the Presidential Palace in Khartoum (built in 1899), in the west wing on the ground floor, there is (or once was) a stone slab against the wall on the left side of the main corridor when coming from the main entrance with the text: "Charles George Gordon died—26 Jan 1885," on the spot where Gordon was killed, at the foot of the stairs in the old Governor-General's Palace (built around 1850).[134]
Media portrayals and legacy
Charlton Heston played Gordon in the 1966 epic film Khartoum, which deals with the siege of Khartoum. Laurence Olivier played Muhammad Ahmad.[135]
For the six months after the British public learned of Gordon's death, newspapers and journals published hundreds of articles celebrating Gordon as a "saint".[101] The American historian Cynthia Behrman wrote the articles all commented upon "...Gordon's religious faith, his skill with native peoples, his fearlessness in the face of danger (a recurrent motif is Gordon's habit of leading his troops into battle armed with no more than a rattan cane), his honor, his resourcefulness, his graciousness to subordinates, his impatience with cant and hypocrisy, his hatred of glory and honors, his dislike of lionization and social rewards, and on and on. One begins to wonder whatever the man had any faults at all".[101] "The reading public wanted heroes, it wanted to read about one lone Englishmen sacrificing himself for glory, honour, God, and the Empire."[136]
Such was the popularity of Gordon that the first critical book by a British author was not published until 1908, when Baring – by this time had raised to the peerage as Viscount Cromer – published his autobiography, which was notable as the first British book to portray Gordon in an unflattering manner, through Lord Cromer also tried to be fair and emphasised what he felt were Gordon's positive traits as well as his negative traits.[137] About the charge that if only Gladstone had listened to Gordon the disaster would have been avoided, Cromer wrote that in the course of one month, he received five telegrams from Gordon offering his advice, each one of which completely contradicted the previous telegram, leading Cromer to charge that Gordon was too mercurial a figure to hold command.[138] As a young man, Winston Churchill shared in the national consensus that Gordon was one of Britain's greatest heroes.[118] During a meeting in 1898 in Cairo where Churchill interviewed Baring to gather material for his 1899 book The River War, Baring challenged Churchill about his belief that Gordon was a hero. After his conversation with Baring, Churchill wrote: "Of course there is no doubt that Gordon as a political figure was absolutely hopeless. He was so erratic, capricious, utterly unreliable, his mood changed so often, his temper was abominable, he was frequently drunk, and yet with all that he had a tremendous sense of honour and great abilities".[118]
Many biographies have been written of Gordon, most of them of a highly hagiographic nature. The British Sinologist Demetrius Charles Boulger published a biography of Gordon in 1896 which depicted him as a staunch patriot and a Christian of immense virtue who displayed superhuman courage in the face of danger.[139] By contrast, Gordon is one of the four subjects discussed critically in Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey, one of the first texts about Gordon that portrays some of his characteristics which Strachey regards as weaknesses. Notably, Strachey emphasizes the claims of Charles Chaillé-Long that Gordon was an alcoholic, an accusation dismissed by later writers like Alan Moorehead[140] and Charles Chenevix Trench.[141] Strachey depicted Gordon as a ludicrous figure, a bad-tempered, deranged egomaniac with a nasty habit of punching out Arabs whenever he was unhappy who led himself into disaster.[142] Even more devastatingly, Strachey depicted Gordon as a monumental hypocrite, noting the contrast between Gordon's lofty Christian ideas of love, compassion, charity, grace and hope vs. a career full of hate, war, carnage, death and destruction.[142] Strachey ended his essay on Gordon on a cynical note: "At any rate, it all ended very happily-in a glorious slaughter of twenty thousand Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring".[137] Long after his death and despite the popularity of Strachey's essay in Eminent Victorians, the appeal of the Gordon legend lived on. As late as 1933, the French historian Pierre Crabitès wrote in his book Gordon, le Soudan et l'esclavage (Gordon, the Sudan and Slavery) that as a Frenchman the Gordon legend had meant nothing to him when he began researching his book, but after examining all of the historical evidence, he could not help but admire Gordon who "died as he lived, a Christian, a gentleman and a soldier".[137]
In the 20th century, many British military leaders came to have a critical view of Gordon with Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery writing that Gordon was "unfit for independent command, mentally unbalanced, a fanatic, self-imposed martyr", adding that he should never been sent to the Sudan and the Gladstone-Gordon relationship was a case study in dysfunctional civil-military relations.[143] In 1953, the British novelist Charles Beatty published a Gordon biography His Country was the World, A Study of Gordon of Khartoum, which focused on Gordon's religious faith, but for the first time noted what a tormented figure Gordon was; a man of deeply felt Christian convictions, full of guilt and self-loathing over his own sinfulness and inability to live up to his own impossibly high standards over what a Christian should be and desperately longing to do something to expiate his sinfulness.[144] Like Strachey, Beatty found Gordon a ridiculous figure, but unlike Strachey who had nothing but contempt for Gordon, Beatty's approach was a compassionate one, arguing that Gordon's many acts of charity and self-sacrifice were attempts to love others since he was unable to love himself.[144]
Another attempt to debunk Gordon was Anthony Nutting's Gordon, Martyr & Misfit (1966). Nutting's book was noteworthy as the first book to argue that Gordon had a death wish.[145] Nutting noted that Gordon had often recklessly exposed himself to Russian fire while fighting in the Crimea and stated he hoped to die in battle against the Russians before leaving for the Crimea.[145] On the basis of such statements and actions, Nutting argued that Gordon's suicidal courage of going into battle armed only with his rattan cane, which so impressed the Victorian public reflected darker desires. Nutting made the controversial claim that the basis of Gordon's death wish was that he was gay, noting that Gordon never married, is not known to had a relationship with any women, and often wished that he been born a eunuch, which strongly suggested that Gordon wished to have no sexual desires at all.[145] Nutting contended that the conflict between Gordon's devoutly held Christian ideals and his sexuality made Gordon deeply ashamed of himself and he attempted to expiate his wretched, sinful nature by seeking a glorious death in battle.[145] Behrman wrote that the first part of Nutting's thesis, that Gordon had a death wish is generally accepted by historians, but the second part, that Gordon was a homosexual is still the subject of much debate.[145] In his Mission to Khartum—The Apotheosis of General Gordon (1969) John Marlowe portrays Gordon as "a colourful eccentric—a soldier of fortune, a skilled guerrilla leader, a religious crank, a minor philanthropist, a gadfly buzzing about on the outskirts of public life" who would have been no more than a footnote in today's history books, had it not been for "his mission to Khartoum and the manner of his death," which were elevated by the media "into a kind of contemporary Passion Play."[146]
More balanced biographies are Charley Gordon—An Eminent Victorian Reassessed (1978) by Charles Chenevix Trench and Gordon—the Man Behind the Legend (1988) by John Pollock. In Khartoum—The Ultimate Imperial Adventure (2005), Michael Asher puts Gordon's works in the Sudan in a broad context. Asher concludes: "He did not save the country from invasion or disaster, but among the British heroes of all ages, there is perhaps no other who stands out so prominently as an individualist, a man ready to die for his principles. Here was one man among men who did not do what he was told, but what he believed to be right. In a world moving inexorably towards conformity, it would be well to remember Gordon of Khartoum."[147]
In the People's Republic of China, the entire period between 1839 and 1949 is depicted as the "Century of Humiliation" – a time when racist, greedy and evil foreigners humiliated and rapaciously exploited the Chinese people. Because many aspects of the Taiping ideology resembled Communism, the Taipings are treated sympathetically by Chinese historians who portrayed as them as prototypical Communists with Hong Xiuquan being depicted as anticipating Mao (that both Hong and Mao were megalomaniacs who attached no value to human life may also explain the favorable historical treatment of the Taipings). In this context, Gordon is vilified in China today as just another foreigner oppressing the Chinese people by crushing the Taiping rebellion.[10] Furthermore, Gordon worked for the Qing dynasty, who were Manchus, which has led many Han to see the entire Qing period between 1644 and 1912 as a long foreign occupation of China. No monuments to Gordon exist in China today, through the British journalist Rob Stallard noted that the modest Gordon would have no doubt wanted it that way.[10] Stallard in a 2008 article argued that Gordon deserves a better reputation in China, arguing that he was largely immune to the racist views so common to Westerners in the 19th century and he always treated the Chinese with respect, maintaining that the memory of "Chinese Gordon" could be a bridge to better Anglo-Chinese understanding.[10]
See also
References
- 1 2 "Gordon, Charles George". Dictionary of national biography 22: 169–176. 1890.
- ↑ The London Gazette: no. 21336. p. 1890. 6 July 1852.
- ↑ The London Gazette: no. 21522. p. 469. 17 February 1854.
- ↑ The London Gazette: no. 21909. p. 2705. 4 August 1856.
- ↑ The London Gazette: no. 22246. p. 1414. 5 April 1859.
- ↑ Ch'ing China: The Taiping Rebellion Archived 11 December 2007 at the Wayback Machine.
- ↑ "Charles Staveley". Worcester Regiment. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
- 1 2 3 Platt, Part II "Order Rising"
- 1 2 3 4 5 Platt, Ch. 15
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Stallard, Robert (Summer 2008). "Chinese Gordon". China Eye. Retrieved 2016-02-23.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Urban, 2005 p. 154.
- ↑ Urban, 2005 p. 153.
- ↑ Urban, 2005 p. 154-155.
- 1 2 3 Urban, 2005 p. 155.
- 1 2 3 4 5 Urban, 2005 p. 156.
- ↑ Urban, 2005 p. 156-157.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Urban, 2005 p. 157.
- ↑ Urban, 2005 p. 157-158.
- ↑ Pollock, 1993 p. 84–85
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Urban, 2005 p. 158.
- ↑ The London Gazette: no. 22820. p. 724. 16 February 1864.
- ↑ The London Gazette: no. 22919. p. 6483. 9 December 1864.
- ↑ "Charles George Gordon (1833–1885): A Brief Biography". Victorianweb.org. 2010-06-09. Retrieved 2013-01-27.
- ↑ "General Gordon". Discover Gravesham. Retrieved 13 March 2016.
- 1 2 Urban, 2005 p. 159.
- ↑ Max Jones, "‘National Hero and Very Queer Fish’: Empire, Sexuality and the British Remembrance of General Gordon, 1918–72." Twentieth Century British History (2015) 26#2 pp 175–202
- ↑ Urban, 2005 p. 158-159.
- ↑ Urban, 2005 p. 158 & 308.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Judd, Denis. "General Charles George Gordon". The British Empire. Retrieved 2016-02-29.
- ↑ Nutting, 1967 p. 319.
- ↑ The London Gazette: no. 23851. p. 2022. 23 April 1872.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Urban, 2005 p. 163.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Urban, 2005 p. 164.
- 1 2 3 Perry, 2005 p. 178.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Urban, 2005 p. 162.
- 1 2 Urban, 2005 p. 162-163.
- ↑ Slave trade in the Sudan in the nineteenth century and its suppression in the years 1877–80. Archived 3 February 2008 at the Wayback Machine.
- ↑ "Sudan". World Statesmen. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
- 1 2 3 4 Perry, 2005 p. 172.
- ↑ Flint, 1977, p. 96-98
- ↑ Urban, 2005 p. 161.
- 1 2 Urban, 2005 p. 161-162.
- ↑ "Egypt". World Statesmen. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
- ↑ MacGregor Hastie, 1985 p. 26
- ↑ Barnes, 1885 p. 1
- ↑ Perry, 2005 p. 172-173.
- ↑ Chenevix Trench, 1978 p. 128
- ↑ Linda Colley, Ghosts of Empire by Kwasi Kwarteng – review, The Guardian, 2 September 2011. Accessed 3 September 2011.
- 1 2 Hsu, 1964 p. 147.
- ↑ Hsu, 1964 p. 148.
- ↑ Hsu, 1964 p. 150.
- ↑ Hsu, 1964 p. 153-154.
- ↑ Hsu, 1964 p. 156-157.
- ↑ Hsu, 1964 p. 157.
- ↑ Hsu, 1964 p. 158.
- 1 2 Hsu, 1964 p. 159.
- ↑ Hsu, 1964 p. 160.
- 1 2 3 Hsu, 1964 p. 161.
- ↑ Hsu, 1964 p. 165.
- ↑ Hsu, 1964 p. 166.
- ↑ The London Gazette: no. 25097. p. 1787. 21 April 1882.
- ↑ "Military History Journal: The Political Martyr: General Gordon and the Fall of Kartum". The South African Military History Society. December 1985. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
- ↑ "General Charles "Chinese" Gordon Reveals He is Going to Palestine". SMF Primary Source Documents. Shapell Manuscript Foundation.
- 1 2 Urban, 2005 p. 165.
- ↑ Mersh, Paul. "Charles Gordon's Charitable Works: An Appreciation".
- ↑ Ewans, 2002, p. 45
- ↑ "Murder in the Sudan". First Things. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
- ↑ "The Battle of Tel-el-Kebir". National Archices. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
- 1 2 3 4 Perry, 2005 p. 174.
- 1 2 3 Urban, 2005 p. 166.
- ↑ Butler, 2007, p. 91
- ↑ Urban, 2005 p. 165-166.
- ↑ Urban, 2005 p. 166-167.
- 1 2 Urban, 2005 p. 167.
- ↑ Urban, 2005 p. 167-168.
- 1 2 Urban, 2005 p. 168.
- ↑ Urban, 2005 p. 168-169.
- ↑ Urban, 2005 p. 167-169.
- ↑ Urban, 2005 p. 169-170.
- ↑ Urban, 2005 p. 170.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 Perry, 2005 p. 176.
- ↑ Perry, 2005 p. 175.
- 1 2 3 4 5 Urban, 2005 p. 172.
- ↑ Beresford, p 102–103
- 1 2 Perry, 2005 p. 176-177.
- 1 2 3 Urban, 2005 p. 173.
- 1 2 Urban, 2005 p. 174.
- ↑ Perry, 2005 p. 179.
- ↑ "Intended burning of Berber and surrender of Soudan". The Mercury, Hobart. 23 September 1884. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
- 1 2 3 4 5 Urban, 2005 p. 175.
- ↑ Cuhaj, 2009 p. 1069–70
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Urban, 2005 p. 178.
- 1 2 Perry, 2005 p. 177.
- 1 2 Perry, 2005 p. 177-178.
- ↑ Urban, 2005 p. 176.
- ↑ Perry, 2005 p. 179-180.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Perry, 2005 p. 180.
- 1 2 3 4 5 Perry, 2005 p. 181.
- 1 2 3 Perry, 2005 p. 182.
- ↑ Perry, 2005 p. 180-181.
- 1 2 3 4 Behrman, 1971 p. 50.
- ↑ Behrman, 1971 p. 49.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 Perry, 2005 p. 189.
- 1 2 Perry, 2005 p. 184.
- 1 2 Perry, 2005 p. 193.
- ↑ Urban, 2005 p. 178-179.
- 1 2 Urban, 2005 p. 179.
- 1 2 Pakenham, 1991 p. 268
- 1 2 Perry, 2005 p. 191.
- ↑ Pakenham, 1991 p. 268.
- ↑ Allen, 1941, p. 327–334
- ↑ Perry, 2005 p. 192-193.
- ↑ Neufeld 1899, Appendix II, p. 332-337
- ↑ Latimer 1903
- 1 2 3 Pakenham, 1991 p. 272
- ↑ "Gordon, Charles George (1833–1885) Major General". National Archives. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
- 1 2 3 4 Urban, 2005 p. 180.
- 1 2 3 4 Urban, 2005 p. 181.
- ↑ Perry, 2005 p. 264.
- ↑ Urban, 2005 p. 196.
- ↑ Urban, 2005 p. 195.
- ↑ Urban, 2005 p. 194.
- 1 2 Taylor, 2007 p. 83–92
- ↑ "Gordon's School". Gordons.surrey.sch.uk. Retrieved 2013-01-27.
- ↑ Grant, 1885 p. 146
- ↑ "Monument to General Gordon". The National Heritage List. English Heritage. Retrieved 13 May 2012.
- ↑ Rogers, Robert. "Woolwich Ferry". The Newham Story. Retrieved 27 August 2012.
- ↑ "Statue of General Gordon, Victoria Embankment Gardens". National Archives. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
- ↑ "General Charles Gordon Memorial". E-Melbourne. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
- ↑ "Memorial to General Gordon, Brompton Barracks, Gillingham". British listed buildings. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
- ↑ "The Statue". Gordon's School. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
- ↑ "Tomb of General Gordon by Frederick William Pomeroy (1857–1924)". The Victorian Web. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
- ↑ The Sudan under Wingate: administration in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1899–1916 by Gabriel Warburg
- ↑ "Sudan. Khartoum. A cornor [i.e., corner] in palace hall. Tablet indicates where General Gordon was killed, Jan. 25, 1885". Library of Congress. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
- ↑ Khartoum at the Internet Movie Database
- ↑ Messenger, 2001 p. 195.
- 1 2 3 Behrman, 1971 p. 55.
- ↑ Behrman, 1971 p. 53.
- ↑ Behrman, 1971 p. 51.
- ↑ Moorehead, 1960 p. 179.
- ↑ Chenevix Trench, 1978 p. 95
- 1 2 Urban, 2005 p. 183.
- ↑ Urban, 2005 p. 182.
- 1 2 Behrman, 1971 p. 56.
- 1 2 3 4 5 Behrman, 1971 p. 57.
- ↑ Marlowe, 1969, p. 1-134
- ↑ Asher (2005), p. 413
Sources
- Allen, Bernard M. (October 1941). How Khartoum Fell. Journal of the Royal African Society 40. pp. 327–334.
- Asher, Michael (2005). Khartoum: The Ultimate Imperial Adventure. Penguin. ISBN 978-0140258554.
- Barnes, Reginald (1885). Charles George Gordon—A Sketch. London: Macmillan & Co.
- Behrman, Cynthia (1971). "The After-Life of General Gordon". Albion 3 (2): 47–61.
- Beresford, John (1936). Storm and Peace. London: Cobden-Sanderson.
- Butler, Daniel Allen (2007). First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam. Casemate. ISBN 978-1932033540.
- Chenevix Trench, Charles (1978). Charley Gordon, An Eminent Victorian Reassessed. London: Allan Lane. ISBN 0-7139-0895-5.
- Cuhaj, George S., ed. (2009). Standard Catalog of World Paper Money Specialized Issues (11 ed.). Krause. ISBN 978-1-4402-0450-0.
- Ewans, Martin (2002). European Atrocity, African Catastrophe: Leopold II, the Congo Free State and its Aftermath. Routledge. ISBN 978-0700715893.
- Flint, John (1978). The Cambridge History of Africa 5. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521207010.
- Grant, James (1885). Cassell's history of the war in the Soudan. Cassell.
- Hsu, Immanuel (May 1964). Gordon in China, 1880. Pacific Historical Review 33. pp. 147–166.
- Latimer, E.W. (1895). Gordon and the Mahdi. Europe in Africa in the Nineteenth Century, 4th Edition, A.C. McClurg (Chicago).
- MacGregor-Hastie, Roy (1985). Never to be Taken Alive—A Biography of General Gordon. Sidgwick & Jackson. ISBN 0-283-99184-4.
- Marlowe, John (1968). Mission to Khartum: Apotheosis of General Gordon. Littlehampton. ISBN 978-0575002470.
- Messenger, Charles (2001). Reader's Guide to Military History. Routledge. ISBN 978-1579582418.
- Moorehead, Alan (1960). The White Nile. London: Hamish Hamilton.
- Neufeld, Charles (1899). A Prisoner of the Khaleefa. London: Chapman & Hall.
- Nutting, Anthony (1967). Gordon: Martyr and Misfit. Reprint Society.
- Pakenham, T. (1991). The Scramble for Africa 1876–1912. Random House. ISBN 978-0349104492.
- Perry, James (2005). Arrogant Armies: Great Military Disasters and the Generals Behind Them. Edison: Castle Books. ISBN 978-0785820239.
- Platt, Stephen R. (2012). Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-307-95759-7.
- Pollock, John. (1993). Gordon : the Man Behind the Legend. London: Constable. ISBN 0-09-468560-6.
- Urban, Mark (2005). Generals: Ten British Commanders Who Shaped The Modern World. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0571224876.
- Strachey, G. Lytton (1988). Eminent Victorians, Illustrated Ed. London: Bloomsbury [1918]. ISBN 0-7475-0218-8.
- Taylor, Miles (October 2007). Southampton: Gateway to the British Empire. I.B.Tauris. ISBN 1845110323.
Further reading
- Gordon, Charles George (1884). Reflections in Palestine. London: Macmillan & Co.
- Churchill, Winston, Sir (1899). The River War. New York: Carroll & Graf. ISBN 0-7867-0751-8.
- Faught, C. Brad (2008). Gordon: Victorian Hero. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books. ISBN 978-1-59797-144-7.
- Gillmeister, Heiner (1996). The Maloja Mystery, or the Case of the Living Pictures in ACD-The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society 7. pp. 53–69.
- Hill, George Birkbeck (1881). Colonel Gordon in Central Africa, 1874–1879. London: Thomas De La Rue and Co.
- Jones, Max. "‘National Hero and Very Queer Fish’: Empire, Sexuality and the British Remembrance of General Gordon, 1918–72." Twentieth Century British History (2014)
- Smith, George Barnett (1896). General Gordon The Christian Soldier and Hero. London: S.W. Partridge & Co.
- Wortham, Hugh Evelyn (1933). Gordon : An Intimate Portrait. London: Harrap.
- White, Adam (1991). Hamo Thornycroft & the Martyr General. Leeds: The Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture. ISBN 978-0901981479.
External links
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Charles George Gordon. |
- Original Letters Written by Charles Gordon from the Near East Shapell Manuscript Foundation
- Chinese Gordon on the Soudan Gordon's famous interview to the Pall Mall Gazette, 1884
- Gordon's tactics: an alternative view analysis of Gordon's war strategy by Gary Brecher (the War Nerd)
- Charles G. Gordon Photograph part of the Nineteenth Century Notables Digital Collection at Gettysburg College
- The Journals of Major-Gen. C. G. Gordon, C.B., at Kartoum Project Gutenberg
| Government offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Abdallahi ibn Muhammad as Mahdi of Sudan |
Interim Governor-General of the Sudan 1880–1885 |
Succeeded by Mahdist State |
|