A century and a half ago this month, the people of Kendall County, along with most other residents of the states that had remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War, were forced onto an emotional roller coaster. First came the elation generated by news the calamitous war had ended in victory, immediately followed by the grief created by the assassination of the nation’s President.

On April 13, 1865, the Kendall County Record reported the joyous news that after four grinding years of war Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered the rebel Army of Northern Virginia to Union Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at a small crossroads called Appomattox Courthouse. The next week’s paper carried, in black-bordered news columns, the wrenching account of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

In the April 13 Record, John R. Marshall, the paper's editor and publisher- and himself a veteran who had served with the Sturgis Rifles as Gen. George B. McClellan's bodyguard through some of the earliest battles of the Civil War- could hardly contain his glee that the war seemed all but over.
Under the headline "Glory to God!" Marshall wrote: "The great army of the rebels has surrendered to Lieut. Gen. Grant, and Lee, their great captain, is a prisoner and his army confiscated…Lee has surrendered—[Confederate President Jefferson] Davis has fled, and like the dove from Noah's ark, will find no rest for the sole of his foot. Shout! Peace is at hand! Hurrah!"

Jubilation was general, with county residents joining their fellows throughout the North celebrating by firing off cannons and lighting bonfires.

But as quickly as the celebrations spread, they were doused by the further shocking news that the President had been murdered while attending a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. on Good Friday, April 14, 1865. The symbolism of the martyred President and the martyred Christ was not lost on the grief-stricken North.

In the April 20 Record’s black-bordered news columns, Marshall’s reporting left little doubt that he and undoubtedly most other northern Illinois residents blamed not only the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, for the President’s death, but the southern states and their leaders as well.

“On Saturday morning, our community was stunned by the news brought in the Tribune, that our best of presidents had been cowardly murdered in a public assembly,” Marshall wrote. “Everyone felt the terrible blow and a universal sadness pervaded all minds. The great and final act of the accursed slaveholders’ rebellion has culminated in this one outrageous, dastardly, and hellborn murder.

“They have brought war and bloodshed on a once happy country,” Marshall angrily wrote of the Confederacy. “They have murdered our citizens and soldiers in cold blood at Lawrence and Fort Pillow. They have starved our brave boys in prison dens. They have in all things taken the most dishonorable course to accomplish their ends. And finally, they have killed their best friend, the nation’s pride and glory, Abraham Lincoln.”

Kendall County had been Lincoln country for years. Many knew him as the Illinois Central Railroad’s canny corporate attorney, while others had dealt directly with him as the go-to lawyer for cases heard before the Illinois Supreme Court.

Kendall County folks climbed aboard the Lincoln political bandwagon early. Henry Sherrill, a wealthy Lisbon Township lawyer, farmer, local politician, and businessman, was one of them. Sherrill quickly left the old Whig Party for the new Republican Party when it was established. In 1858, he volunteered his carriage and four-horse team to carry the Republican candidate to the first U.S. Senatorial debate between Lincoln and Democratic U.S. Sen. Stephen A. Douglas.

On Aug. 21, 1858, Sherrill was among the delegation that met Lincoln at the Ottawa depot as he arrived from Morris on the Rock Island Railroad. Sherrill rode with Lincoln, first to the mayor’s house and then to the courthouse where the debate was held (Sherrill’s carriage is today on exhibit in the LaSalle County Historical Society Museum, Utica).

Among the estimated 10,000 attending the debate was young Lorenzo Rank, a German immigrant tailor from Oswego, who traveled to Ottawa to see the spectacle. Long after he’d become the Oswego correspondent for the Kendall County Record, Rank recalled that he “…was there, too, heard the speeches, and at the close of them saw some men carry off Mr. Lincoln on their shoulders—not a very dignified proceeding, he having such long legs.”

In an interesting historical sidelight, among the local dignitaries seated on the raised platform on which the debate was held was Shabbona, the Potawatomi chief who had served along with Lincoln during the Black Hawk War of 1832. Shabbona died July 17, 1859 and is buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Morris.

After Lincoln’s 1860 election to the Presidency, the South plunged the nation into a long, costly, deadly civil war that left scarcely a single Kendall County family untouched. Following the southern states’ attack on the U.S. Army at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, hundreds of Kendall County men and boys volunteered to fight, first to preserve the Union and then to eradicate the scourge of human slavery, the defense of which provoked the secession of many Southern states.

By April 1865, nearly 1,300 Kendall County men and boys—some as young as 13—had marched off to war. It was an astonishing 10 percent of the county’s pre-war population. Of those hundreds who left home to fight for their country, 70 would fall in battle, eight would die in Confederate military prisons, and 189 would succumb to wounds or sickness or both.

The county’s 267 Civil War fatalities equaled two percent of its 1860 population. If a similar percentage of modern Kendall County residents were killed, it would equal almost 2,300 fatalities.

Statewide, Illinois contributed 256,297 soldiers to the Union cause, about 15 percent of the state’s total 1860 population, including the wartime President of the United States and the eventual commanding general of the Union armies. Of the Illinoisans marching off to war, 34,834 died, and 100 earned the Medal of Honor.

One of the last group of county residents volunteering to serve was 19 year-old Alfred Lincoln Browne, son of Irish immigrants Michael and Nancy Browne. The Brownes immigrated to the United States, and in 1843 settled on the farm two and a half miles east of Newark where Alfred was born. By the time he enlisted, Browne’s three older brothers had been serving in the Union armies for some years, brother John with the 59th Illinois near Atlanta, Ga., brother James who had been wounded and taken prisoner while fighting with the 36th Illinois near Vicksburg, and brother Andrew, an 1862 graduate of Rush Medical College in Chicago, who was serving as an army surgeon.

In the late summer of 1864, young Alfred, along with a group of his Newark neighbors enlisted in the 146th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment. The regiment was mustered in at Springfield on Sept. 4, 1864, after which its component companies were detached and assigned to a variety of duties throughout Illinois. Browne’s Company D was sent to Quincy to guard recent draftees and recruits who had accepted bounties to serve. Both classes of soldiers-to-be tended to dessert if given a chance, thus Company D’s duty.

In May 1865, Browne’s company had soldiers available when word came down that guards were needed for the President’s funeral at Springfield.

Lincoln’s funeral train had steamed out of Washington, D.C. on Friday morning, April 21, and then headed for Illinois, traveling a long, looping route that took it north through Baltimore, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, and New York City, before heading west to Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, and Indianapolis until it reached Chicago on Monday, May 2.

The Record reported that Kendall County residents were among those paying their respects: “Many of the citizens of Kendall County paid the last duty to the dead President by visiting Chicago on Monday. It will be a day to be remembered, and handed down to their posterity.”

It’s likely many more county residents traveled to watch the funeral train pass as it steamed down the tracks of the Chicago and Alton Rail Road from Chicago southwest through Joliet, Wilmington, Dwight, Pontiac, Chenoa, and Bloomington on its way to Springfield. According to a recent issue of National Geographic magazine, more than one million mourners filed past Lincoln’s coffin as he lay in state during its many stops from Washington to Springfield, and thousands more gathered at every rail crossing and town through which the funeral train passed.

The train arrived in at Springfield on Wednesday, May 3. Later in his life, Browne said that one of his clearest memories of his wartime service was watching Lincoln’s funeral train arrive from Chicago and then standing as one of the honor guards at the Illinois State Capitol as crowds filed past the former President’s coffin.

Although the President had been murdered, there was still a war on. Vice president Andrew Johnson was sworn in as the 17th President of the United States (following his swearing-in, Johnson admitted he felt completely unequal to the task before him; subsequent events would prove him right—he’s generally considered among the nation’s worst Presidents) and the fight continued. Gradually, the other Confederate armies surrendered, and residents started looking towards the return of the young men who’d gone off to fight.

On the Kendall County homefront, as they waited for sons and husbands to return, members of newly formed chapters of the Freedmen’s Aid Society were meeting to try to figure out how to help the hundreds of thousands of freed slaves. Also continuing to meet were local chapters of the Soldiers’ Aid Societies throughout the county who had spent the previous four years raising funds to send packages containing food and clothing to those serving and to local men who were prisoners of war. Now with soldiers returning, and funds still in local chapters’ treasuries, discussions began about what to do with the money.

In an editorial comment, Marshall stated the soldiers’ view of how the money should be used: “It could be disposed of in no better way than to donate it to the indigent families of those brave men who have fallen during the war, who are residing in our midst. It is a solders’ fund and no other means of disposal is just or proper. Let those societies meet and vote the money to some family or families that have lost their provider by the war.”

On May 4, the Record reported that federal troops had finally caught up with John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, and had fatally shot and killed him: “Justice is sure,” Marshall wrote. “Booth, the assassin, has paid the penalty of his crime with his life. After evading pursuit for two weeks past, he was at last traced from Charles county, Maryland and overtaken in company with his accomplice, Harrold, near Bowling Green, Va., about 45 miles north of Richmond. Taking refuge here in a barn, he refused to surrender, when the barn was fired. In the attempt to escape he was shot, receiving fatal wound through the neck, from which he died in two or three hours, uttering imprecations against the government and professing that he died for his country.”

In the following weeks, accounts of the Lincoln assassins’ speedy trial vied with news of returning soldiers as the last Confederate holdouts surrendered. The first large group of discharged soldiers returning to Kendall County were companies of the 127th Illinois Volunteers recruited in Plano and Oswego.

Plano residents gave a rousing welcome home celebration for Companies F and K on June 20, and Oswego residents did the same for members of Company A on June 21. Units from other regiments continued to trickle back home, men from the 20th Illinois next, followed by troops from the 89th Illinois, and finally the 36th Illinois and the 12th Illinois Cavalry.

The war had a profound effect on Kendall County. Not only did so many of its men and boys march off to fight, but the county lost population during the conflict, the 1860 population of 13,074 declining to 12,629 in 1865. The county’s slow, steady population decline continued until it bottomed out at 10,074 in 1920 before beginning to inch up again.

And the whiplash of victory in war followed immediately by the death of the President so beloved by so many also had lifelong effects on those who lived through those events.

Alfred Browne came home to Kendall County after his 10 months’ service with the 146th Illinois, and then headed off to Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. During one of his years at school, he served as principal of a freedman’s school in the South, helping educate former slaves who had been prohibited by law from learning to read and write. After graduating in 1872, Browne spent a year helping freed slaves in Texas before returning to Illinois, where he served as a public school principal at Sheridan, Lisbon, and other area communities.

After his father died in 1878, Browne, who never married, took over the family farm near Newark, where he was an active participant in the community. He even went so far as to learn to read and write

Norwegian to better communicate with his foreign-born neighbors. Alfred Browne died in July 1920, and is buried in the Millington-Newark Cemetery, the last direct Kendall County connection to the victorious, tragic events of April 1865.