John McAuley Palmer (13 September 1817-25 September 1900) was the Republican Governor of Illinois from 11 January 1869 to 13 January 1873 (interrupting Richard J. Oglesby's terms) and a Democratic US Senator from 4 March 1891 to 3 March 1897 (succeeding Charles B. Farwell and preceding William E. Mason). He served as the Gold Democrats' 1896 presidential candidate.
Biography[]
John McAuley Palmer was born in Eagle Creek, Scott County, Kentucky on 13 September 1817, and, in 1831, the family relocated to Alton, Illinois. He became a lawyer in 1839, was a member of the Free Soil Party from 1848 to 1852, served as a Democratic state senator from 1852 to 1855 (before joining the nascent Republican Party), served as a Republican presidential elector in 1860, served as a Union Army Major-General during the American Civil War (commanding XIV Corps of the Army of the Cumberland during the Chattanooga Campaign and the Atlanta Campaign in 1864, as well as military governor of Kentucky), as Governor of Illinois from 1869 to 1873 (defecting to the Liberal Republican Party from 1870 to 1872), and as a Democratic US Senator from 1891 to 1897. Palmer was a staunch defender of the gold standard, and he split from the Democratic Party to serve as the conservative Gold Democrats' presidential nominee in 1896 with Simon Bolivar Buckner as his running mate. Few voters were willing to support the 79-year-old Palmer and the 73-year-old Buckner in their bid for the White House, even though they had run on an image of cross-sectional unity as a former Union and Confederate general working together as a team. They received just over 1% of the vote, and Palmer left office in 1897 and died in Springfield, Illinois in 1900 at the age of 83.