John LaRue Helm, who had been Kentucky governor once previously between 1850 and 1851 and who had had a son killed as a Confederate flag officer at Chickamauga, easily defeated Republican S. M. Barnes and a Union Democrat named W.B. Kinkead in the August state elections. Helm only served a few days as the state's twenty fourth governor, hovever. Too ill to travel to the capital, he had been sworn in at home in Elizabethtown on September 3, 1867 but died there five days later. Lieutenant Governor John W. Stevenson succeeded him, continuing a Democratic hold on the office that would continue to 1895. (By John Osborne)
Z. F. Smith, The History of Kentucky: From Its Earliest Discovery and Settlement to the Present Date ... (Louisville, KY: The Prentice Press, 1896), 759-761.
