ALLEN, John Mills, a Representative from Mississippi; born in Tishomingo County, Miss., July 8, 1846; attended the common schools; during the Civil War enlisted as a private in the Confederate Army and served throughout the war; attended the law school of Cumberland University, Lebanon, Tenn., and was graduated from the law department of the University of Mississippi in 1870; was admitted to the bar the same year and commenced practice in Tupelo, Lee County, Miss.; district attorney for the first judicial district of Mississippi 1875-1879; elected as a Democrat to the Forty-ninth and to the seven succeeding Congresses (March 4, 1885-March 3, 1901); chairman, Committee of Expenditures in the Department of Justice (Fifty-second Congress), Committee on Levees and Improvements of the Mississippi River (Fifty-third Congress); declined to be a candidate for reelection in 1900 to the Fifty-seventh Congress; appointed in March 1901 a United States commissioner to the St. Louis Exposition of 1904; resumed the practice of law in Tupelo, Miss., and died there October 30, 1917; interment in Glenwood Cemetery.
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
[ Top ]Allen, John Mills. Civil service and prosperity. Washington: [Government Printing Office], 1898.
------. Contested election case. Patterson vs. Carmack. Washington: [Government Printing Office], 1898.
------. Patriotism and cheese. Speech of Hon, John M. Allen, of Mississippi in the House of Representatives ... June 29, 1898.
------. Pension appropriation bill. Washington: [Government Printing Office], 1897.
Armstrong, W. P. "Private John Allen: A Lawyer Who Had the Saving Grace." American Bar Association Journal 33 (October 1947): 990-94.
Faries, Clyde J. "Private Allen's Strategy of Reconciliation." Quarterly Journal of Speech 52 (December 1966): 358-63.
------. "Redneck Rhetoric and the Last of the Redeemers: The 1899 McLaurin-Allen Campaign." Journal of Mississippi History 33 (November 1971): 283-98.
------. "The Rhetoric of Private John Allen." Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1965.
Gentry, Claude. Private John Allen: Gentleman, Statesman, Sage, Prophet. Baldwyn, Miss: The author, 1951.
