One politician whose career may thrive in an independent Confederacy may be the 'Pater Respublicae', Gen. Henry W. Allen of Louisiana, who, by all accounts, was the most capable and extraordinary of the C.S. Governors who served during the War in comparison to more obstinate and anti-Administration figures such as Brown and Vance. The 'dean of Southern historians', Douglas Southall Freeman, would later write that Allen was the one great administrator produced by the Confederacy, and may have altered the course of American destiny had he been an officer in Richmond. All in all, he had "established order, restored confidence, developed resources, and had demonstrated concern of the state for the welfare of its people." Despite maintaining the office for less than eighteen months, some of his achievements include:
"After his election in November 1863, Allen proposed appropriations for distributing cotton cards to women, a program of cotton exporting through Houston and Galveston that would bring medicine and food into the State, and the establishment of bureaucracies meant to encourage manufacturing and mining, chemical laboratories, and geological exploration."
"His plans called for the purchase and transportation of cotton by contractual agents who would receive 25 percent of their proceeds, with the remaining going to the State. Agents were appointed in each parish to distribute aid, and Allen himself "made gifts amounting to more than eleven thousand dollars from the governor’s contingent fund to wounded soldiers and destitute women."
"Allen also took steps to manufacture cloth within Louisiana, bringing several iron looms out of storage at the State prison and establishing State-owned cloth manufacturing factories as well as a rope-producing plant near Minden. The State chemical laboratory was also established by mid-1864, and a medicinal dispensary at Shreveport turned a profit for the State, paying $793,925.84 into the State treasury. So did State stores set-up by Allen’s administration that were overseen by the Quartermaster-General; the stores’ goods were liquidated at the very end of the War by selling them to those with State money on hand."
These establishments provided complete stock of "clothes, shoes, household articles, kitchen utensils, and groceries." Citizens who could pay did, while the less fortunate were furnished with staples free-of-charge. The Quartermaster-General assigned to these operations could transfer into the State treasury about $400,000 in 1864; in the first half of 1865 a further $1.5 million.
He also attempted to restore the education system, for disruption incurred to public schools was severe throughout the South. English grammar and spelling textbooks for schoolchildren were composed and published in Shreveport. In 1865 appropriations were secured from the legislature authorizing gubernatorial purchase of schoolbooks, with parents who could pay doing so, while others received them for free. The newspapers, meanwhile, were receiving new shipments of paper from Mexico, and Allen himself planned to oversee the implementation of new paper mills to provide domestically, but the War was effectively terminated before he could do so.
"While exploring the possibility of finding sources of iron (for pots and pans rather than munitions) in Louisiana itself, Allen also 'arranged for the state of Louisiana to buy a quarter interest in some iron works in Davis County, Texas,' which became the Sulphur Fork Iron Works."
In his annual message to the legislature in January 1865, Allen could report that the State was now operating "two turpentine distilleries, one castor oil factory, one establishment for making carbonate of soda, two distilleries for pure medicinal alcohol, and two laboratories for indigenous medicines." By Spring the foundry in Shreveport was in full production. The salt mine on Avery Island, apparently inexhaustible, was also being exploited, and would have been of much benefit for the Gulf region if not for blockade, collapsing transportation, and the loss of access to the Lower Mississippi.
"According to Dorsey, however, these enterprises were all arrested by the end of the War: "The sudden stoppage of all the wheels of the industrial machinery had put in motion, by the failure of the Confederate cause, necessarily left affairs in an unfinished and entangled condition."
More ordeals of his remarkable tenure follow:
"When late in the war Kirby-Smith proposed to burn all the cotton stored on the Ouachita in Louisiana, the most statesman-like of Southern governors, Henry W. Allen, was vehemently opposed. He knew that while east of the Mississippi the State was under Union occupation, west of the river the people were starving. With the energy that had marked his life since, as a boy of seventeen, he had run away from his Missouri college to study law, he set to work. He gathered together cotton and sugar, exported them to Mexico, and there exchanged them for the mixed goods that Louisiana needed: machinery, cotton and wool-cards, textiles, medicines, and salt. He barred luxuries, and established State stores for the sale of commodities at fair prices. It was as absurd to burn cotton, he said, as to destroy breadstuffs, meat, livestock, or furniture, and the policy would simply impoverish the people."
"As in Louisiana, where rival forces had swept back and forth across great areas, Governor Henry W. Allen was outraged not only by the corruption attending the traffic across the lines, but by the class discriminations involved. Most of the cotton in western Louisiana that the Confederate Government wished to destroy, he wrote, was the property of small farmers who had nothing else left. The big planters had sold their holdings at high prices to the enemy; a good deal of Confederate government cotton had gone with it. Allen thought it wise of the Confederacy to trade it for army supplies. But were not poor farmers justified in selling for a few bales for food?" These same farmers would often send in letters requesting provisions and supplies.
"Again and again has Governor Allen handed to me the most sorrowful notes of this kind, and would say with tears in his eyes, and unaffected concern on his countenance: 'My God! how shall I meet the absolute necessities of this destitute, starving people?' He kept trains running into Texas continually, bringing out corn, meal, flour, and bacon, which he distributed as far as he could. The people had a trust and reliance upon him that was frequently ludicrous."
His policies appear to some historians to have been a veritable precursor to the New Deal and of Huey Long. He also sought to provide for the refugees of Missouri, whereas in the Eastern Confederacy such unfortunate individuals were often scorned. Indeed, Luther Chandler, in his doctoral thesis, remarked that Allen's system would bring 'joy to the heart of any socialist', despite the fact that the enterprises were making the State quite a significant amount of capital. Even the specter of civil conflict and the fact that the most wealthy parishes/New Orleans were under Federal occupation did not deter him and his administration.
The only true biography that was published of Allen's life was by Sarah Dorsey, in her
Recollections of Henry Watkins Allen (1866), the same year of his death in exile as an editor in Mexico City. Unfortunately, he has been largely forgotten and smothered in the greater nostalgia for Lee, Jackson, etc. This is a damn shame, for he possessed, IMO, the potential to evolve into the 'great man' of an independent South. After all, "the destiny he sought had made him one of the best possible governors of his adopted state at one of the worst possible times," with the War providing a "disastrous but glorious climax to his career."
Although everything is contingent on whether victory is secured in 1862 or 1864, Allen's term would not expire until 1868, and by all consideration would be in a position to run for re-election or for the Confederate Senate. With his talents and laurels, I think he would be a prime presidential candidate in 1873. If Europe and North America are still afflicted with a 'Great Depression' in the 1870s, his providence may come full-circle.
TL;DR: I explore the notion of a nineteenth-century Huey Long ascending in an independent CSA.