AUGUST 4, 1864:
Once again, the Union command structure aided the Confederacy by lengthening the war and raising its cost in blood.
Having by this point reduced C.S. General John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee to a defensive-only force, General William Tecumseh Sherman decided to envelop Atlanta. He issued orders to the commanders of the three armies he controlled to flank around the city in the vicinity of Ezra Church.
It is a simple order, but one of Sherman’s second-level subordinates, a General John Palmer (1817-1900), refused to accept orders from anyone but his official chain-of-command superior, General George Thomas, Commander of The Army of The Cumberland. Palmer’s refusal set off an imbroglio among Sherman’s subordinates. Stepping in, Sherman issued direct orders to Palmer to move his force. Palmer responded by resigning his commission and leaving the war to return to Illinois.
Sherman undoubtedly had some choice words for the departing ex-General’s back. This delay in acting allowed the Confederates to build an additional ring of earthworks, and when the Union finally did move, 300 men lost their lives who otherwise not might have had to.
Palmer’s is the only example of an officer’s resignation in the middle of a military operation during the history of the United States.
Perhaps even more bizarre, the histrionic Palmer was restored to rank and later made the Military Governor of Kentucky, a job he attended to while being conveyed in a gold-plated carriage.
A strident Abolitionist, he ordered the emancipation of Kentucky’s slaves by fiat in early 1865 (Kentucky was not bound by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment was not yet effective).
President Lincoln never had an opportunity to act on Palmer’s fiat, but former slaveowners and the State Legislature sued Palmer for damages due to loss of property, a series of suits Palmer ignored.
In May 1865, he undertook a bloody campaign (with the aid of former slaves now enrolled in the Kentucky State Militia) against remnant rebels in Kentucky, driving most of the survivors to the frontier where they numbered among the gunslingers of the Old West.
Palmer later served as Governor of Illinois, and made a brief, unsuccessful third-party run for the Presidency.
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