John McAuley Palmer (September 13, 1817 – September 25, 1900) was an American politician. He was an Illinois resident, a general who fought for the Union during the American Civil War, the 15th governor of Illinois, and presidential candidate of the National Democratic Party in the 1896 election on a platform to defend the gold standard, free trade, and limited government.
Palmer switched political parties throughout his life, starting a Democrat. He became in turn an anti-Nebraska Democrat (an anti-slavery opponent of the Kansas-Nebraska Act), a Republican, a Liberal Republican, returned to being a Democrat, then ended as a Bourbon Democrat. He said, "I had my own views. I was not a slave of any party," and added, "I thought for myself and [have] spoken my own words on all occasions."
Born at Eagle Creek in Scott County, Kentucky, Palmer's family moved to Alton, Illinois, in 1831. They were very poor, but he later worked his way through college. In 1839, he was admitted to the bar in that state. Palmer married Malinda Ann Neely in 1842 and had ten children with her. His early careers included being a lawyer, school teacher, coopering, and selling clocks.
Palmer was a member of the state constitutional convention of 1848. Between 1852 and 1855, he was a Democratic member of the Illinois Senate, but joined the Republican party upon its organization and became one of its leaders in Illinois.
He presided over the 1856 Illinois Republican Convention in Bloomington that founded the party in his home state. In 1859, he was the Republican candidate in a special election for a vacancy in the 36th Congress caused by the death of Thomas L. Harris, but he was defeated by John A. McClernand. He later became a Republican presidential elector in 1860 and was one of the leading people who got his friend Abraham Lincoln nominated for the presidency at the national convention in Chicago.
In 1861, President Lincoln appointed Palmer to be a delegate to a Peace Conference in Washington. It failed when no compromise could be reached.
During the American Civil War, Palmer served in the Union army, rising from the rank of colonel to that of major general in the volunteer service. He enlisted in 1861. He was commissioned Colonel of the 14th Illinois Infantry, serving under his friend John C. Fremont in an expedition to Springfield, Missouri, to put down the rebellion in that state. On December 20, 1861, he was promoted to brigadier general and assigned command of a brigade under John Pope.
Palmer took part in the capture of New Madrid and Island No. 10, commanding a division in the latter campaign. Taken ill in the field, he returned home to recuperate and raised a new regiment, the 122nd Illinois Infantry. Retaking the field in September, he was assigned by William S. Rosecrans to command the first division of the Army of the Mississippi in Alabama and Tennessee. On November 29, 1862, he was promoted to major general of volunteers and was conspicuous in the Battle of Stones River, where his division held a vital position within the Union lines.
Palmer effectively led his troops during the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863. He commanded the XIV Corps of the Army of the Cumberland during the Chattanooga Campaign (November 23–November 25, 1863). He served under George Henry Thomas in the Atlanta campaign. Palmer's corps was a part of William T. Sherman's movement at the Railroads at East Point in early August 1864. His corps was placed under the command of Major General John M. Schofield and ordered to cross North Utoy Creek. He questioned his orders as he outranked Schofield as a Major General. A delay ensued while Sherman researched the question of rank, and he ruled in favor of the 33-year-old Schofield, commander of the Army of Ohio. After the main assault by the XIV and XXIII Corps in which one of his Soldiers, PVT Samual Grimshaw, received the Medal of Honor, Palmer resigned in protest on the evening of August 6, 1864, and Brigadier General Johnson assumed command of the XIV Corps. Later, Major General Jefferson C. Davis assumed command of the Corps. This is the only example of a resignation in the middle of an operation during the history of the United States. He returned home and awaited orders from the War Department. In early 1865, he was reassigned to command all Federal forces in Kentucky, helping to assert Federal control over the state for the next three years.
As Kentucky's military governor, Palmer established such control by two methods: waging a hard war against guerrillas and achieving the end of slavery in a state not bound by the Emancipation Proclamation. As late as May 1865, Palmer made clear his position on hard war after Kentucky irregulars still in the field had threatened him about summary punishment for captured partisans—"if you treat them as prisoners of war we will respect the same towards your soldiers if not we never can." Palmer ordered that guerrillas would not be allowed to surrender. "[N]o commission, real or forged, shall save [them]," he ordered, "all will be driven out or punished accordingly ... such men [will] be exterminated." Palmer, one of the organizers of the Republican Party in Illinois, was an avowed abolitionist who had received his assignment from his friend, the president, specifically to implement military policies to end slavery in the state. (When Lincoln offered the assignment in Kentucky to Palmer, then without a command, the general claimed the president directed him firmly: "Go to Kentucky, keep your temper, do as you please, and I will sustain you.") Palmer needed little convincing, believing "that all that was left of slavery [in Kentucky] was its mischiefs" and, as he related, he was "determined to 'drive the last nail in the coffin' of the 'institution' even if it cost me the command of the department." (Indeed, to his wife, he opined in 1865 that "if [I] had been asked five or ten years ago what honor I would ask as the highest which could be confer[r]ed upon me I would have said let me destroy slavery in Kentucky.") He announced as much on March 20 at one of Louisville's Methodist churches.
In the next few months, Palmer carried out Lincoln's directive with persistence, which belied the initial impression he gave the legislature that he intended to appease the state's loyal white populace. Not only did he actively enlist all able-bodied black men at an unprecedented rate—often with the assistance of all-black recruiting squads, and despite the legislature's strident objection to the continued presence of black troops in the state—he sustained martial law in the state to override the state's civil courts and governments because of their evident unwillingness to assume "their clear and positive duty to protect the people from forcible wrongs, whether inflicted under the forms of law or otherwise." He legitimated slave marriages to protect the wives and children of enlisted men (in part a response to the Camp Nelson embarrassment), established refugee camps, fended off efforts by various municipal governments to expel freedom seekers and free blacks alike and deny them the opportunity to find employment, released enslaved people from jails and workhouses, ordered that no bondman should be forced into service as substitutes, and issued tens of thousands of travel passes enabling African Americans to move freely within and without the state in search of employment. Called by African Americans "free passes" (and by white Kentuckians "Palmer passes"), they were both agents and symbols of the delayed yet inevitable death of slavery in the state. At an African American Fourth of July celebration at Louisville's camp—one that followed a parade through the city streets, including some fifteen hundred armed black and white soldiers and band—Palmer, arriving in a gilded circus chariot, told an estimated twenty thousand attendees, most of whom he had already been assured believed the general was there to declare them free (and who he claimed later he set out to inform otherwise), "My countrymen, you are free, and while I command in this department the military forces of the United States will defend your right to freedom." That one of its circuit courts was soon to strike down Congress's act of March 3, 1865, liberating black soldiers' dependents—some 72,045 individuals, or by one USCT officer's estimate, "[t]wo and one half persons freed, for each Colored Soldier enlisted in the State of Kentucky" and two-thirds of the enslaved people in the state—only fueled the general's intent to cure the state's white residents of "Negrophobia in its worst form." "Slavery is dead in Kentucky," he said to his wife in October 1865, "and my Mission is accomplished." He was soon met with an indictment by Louisville's grand jury for aiding freedom seekers and a wave of lawsuits from dispossessed Kentucky enslavers.