Civil War Service
Allen joined the Confederate Army as a lieutenant colonel on August 15, 1861, and was promoted to colonel on March 1, 1862. He was wounded at Shiloh and Baton Rouge.
Sarah Morgan met Colonel Allen on November 2, 1862, when he was still unable to walk due to his wounds in both legs at the Battle of Baton Rouge. She described him as a "wee little man" with a "pasty face".
Allen became a brigadier general on August 19, 1863, and was elected Governor of Louisiana in 1864, losing office when the Confederacy collapsed in 1865.
As governor, Allen secured legislative passage of a law to prevent illegal impressment by Confederate agents. Another law allowed Allen to purchase medicine and to distribute it to the needy. Disabled soldiers were provided with $11 per month. Allen procured the establishment of new hospitals both with public funds and private contributions. Recognizing the lack of manufacturing industry in Louisiana he established a system of state stores, foundries, and factories with the goal this new works would be put to civilian production after the war. Because the lack of medicine was acute in the Confederacy he devoted extensive time and resources toward establishing a large intelligence and covert action service which could secretly procure vital supplies especially medicine such as quinine from behind Union lines in New Orleans or from Mexico. Having established the state's military-industrial complex in a short twelve months, state laboratories were soon manufacturing turpentine, castor oil, medicinal alcohol, and carbonate of soda. Allen made arrangement with General Edmund Kirby-Smith to transfer to the state large amounts of cotton and sugar collected by Confederate agents as tax in-kind until the Confederate debt could be retired. He tried to make the state self-sufficient and also guarded the civil liberties of the citizens from infringement by military authorities.
Read more about this topic: Henry Watkins Allen
Famous quotes containing the words civil war, civil, war and/or service:
“At Hayes’ General Store, west of the cemetery, hangs an old army rifle, used by a discouraged Civil War veteran to end his earthly troubles. The grocer took the rifle as payment ‘on account.’”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Since the Civil War its six states have produced fewer political ideas, as political ideas run in the Republic, than any average county in Kansas or Nebraska.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“... near a war it is always not very near.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“We could not help being struck by the seeming, though innocent, indifference of Nature to these men’s necessities, while elsewhere she was equally serving others. Like a true benefactress, the secret of her service is unchangeableness. Thus is the busiest merchant, though within sight of his Lowell, put to pilgrim’s shifts, and soon comes to staff and scrip and scallop-shell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)