Thomas Elliott Bramlette (3 January 1817-12 January 1875) was the Democratic Governor of Kentucky from 1 September 1863 to 3 September 1867, succeeding James Fisher Robinson and preceding John L. Helm.
Biography[]
Thomas Elliott Bramlette was born in Cumberland County, Kentucky in 1817, and he became a lawyer in Louisville in 1837 and was elected to the General Assembly in 1841 as a Whig. He relocated to Columbia in 1852 and failed to win election to the State House in 1853, but he served as a judge from 1856 to 1861. He raised and commanded the Union 3rd Kentucky Infantry Regiment at the start of the American Civil War, and he was appointed district attorney for Kentucky in 1862 and served as its Unionist Democratic governor from 1863 to 1867. However, President Abraham Lincoln's enlistment of Black soldiers into the Union Army and his suspension of habeas corpus led to Bramlette splitting with Lincoln, and he pardoned Confederate sympathizers on the war's end and resisted Reconstruction. He died in 1875.