He showed early artistic promise, and pursued his father's trade of carpentry.

Palmer married Matilda Alton in 1839 and had a son, but both mother and child died soon after; he remarried, to Mary Jean Seamans, in 1840, and settled in Utica, New York.

[1] In his leisure moments as a carpenter Palmer started by carving portraits in cameo, and earned the encouragement of Thomas R. Walker, a local art patron in Utica, who introduced him to prominent artists in New York City.

[3] His major works include The White Captive (1858) in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Peace in Bondage (1863), Angel at the Sepulchre (1865), in Albany, New York, a bronze statue of Chancellor Robert R. Livingston (1874), in Statuary Hall, Capitol, Washington, D.C., and many portrait busts.

[4][5][6] Palmer admired the work of William Cullen Bryant, Asher B. Durand, and Frederic Edwin Church.