When the Gladstone government dispatched General Charles Gordon to Khartoum in January of 1884, it assigned him a confusing mission that was the inevitable outgrowth of incoherent policy. Convinced that the Mahdist uprising was not worth the cost of suppressing, the British government seems to have envisioned the impossible: that Gordon, renowned for exceptional powers of “personal influence,” would be able to stage a withdrawal of Europeans and Egyptian troops without needing a costly imperial army to keep the Mahdi at bay during the withdrawal. To be sure, the government took its time in approving the mission, for Gladstone himself ordered it only after the public outcry in Britain, carefully nurtured by W. T. Stead's Pall Mall Gazette, which editorialized that the triumph of the Mahdi would inevitably lead to the reestablishment of slavery in the Sudan, had become too politically powerful to be resisted any longer.