John M. Palmer (politician) - Civil War

Civil War

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 and 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. Taking the field again 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 an important position within the Union lines.

Palmer effectively led his troops during the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863. He commanded the 14th Corps of the Army of the Cumberland during the Chattanooga Campaign (November 23,–November 25, 1863), and served under George Henry Thomas in the Atlanta Campaign. Palmer's corps was a part of William T. Sherman's March to the Sea and the actions to capture Savannah, Georgia, late in the year. In early 1865, he asked to be relieved of command and 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. “o commission, real or forged, shall save ,” he ordered, “all will be driven out or punished accordingly . . . such men 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 in fact needed little convincing, believing “that all that was left of slavery 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 had been asked five or ten years ago what honor I would ask as the highest which could be confered upon me I would have said let me destroy slavery in Kentucky.”) On March 20, at one of Louisville’s Methodist churches, he announced as much.

In the next few months, with an assiduousness that belied the initial impression he gave the legislature that he intended to placate the state’s loyal white populace, Palmer carried out Lincoln’s directive to do as he pleased. 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 in order to override the state’s civil courts and governments because of their obvious 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 fugitive slaves and free blacks alike and deny them the opportunity to find employment, released slaves 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 agent and symbol 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’ dependants—some 72,045 individuals, or by one USCT officer’s estimate, “wo and one half persons freed, for each Colored Soldier enlisted in the State of Kentucky” and two-thirds of the state’s slaves—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 crowed 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 fugitive slaves and a wave of lawsuits from dispossessed Kentucky slaveholders.