Abram J. Dittenhoefer of City Lodge No. 408: Lincoln's Elector, the Stage's Lawyer and a Charter Brother

Notable Members
Written by Brete Murphy

One Lodge, Six Charters / City Lodge No. 408

A charter member and past master of City Lodge No. 408, Judge Abram J. Dittenhoefer cast an electoral vote for Lincoln, rewrote the law of the American stage and once sentenced Mark Twain at sea.

On an October evening in 1898, City Lodge No. 408 conferred the second degree in full form, and among the past masters who stepped in to assist with the work was a sixty-two-year-old lawyer whose name most New Yorkers knew from the newspapers. Judge Abram J. Dittenhoefer had cast an electoral vote for Abraham Lincoln, beaten Gilbert and Sullivan’s lawyers in court and written the law that made stage piracy a crime. In City Lodge he was something older and more particular: one of the brothers who had organized it in 1856, the Master who had led it through its twenty-fifth anniversary year, and, in the end, the last of its charter members still living. More than forty years after the lodge’s founding, he was still taking a part in the degree work.

A Southerner With Northern Principles

He was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on March 17, 1836, to German-Jewish parents, Isaac Dittenhoefer and Babette Englehart. When he was four, the family settled in New York, where Isaac prospered as a merchant and became well liked among the city’s German residents; it was said that many young men owed their start in life to his kindness. Isaac also knew the uses of a lodge. In 1843, at Sinsheimer’s café on the Lower East Side, he joined the small band of immigrants who founded B’nai B’rith, the Jewish fraternal order organized along lodge lines, and he was chosen its first president. His son grew up in a household where fraternity was a working idea.

Abram went through the public schools and Columbia College, where he took the first prizes in Latin and Greek so regularly that Professor Charles Anthon called him the “Ultima Thule” of his class. After graduating he read law in the office of Benedict & Boardman, and he was admitted to the bar at twenty-one.

A Republican Against the Family’s Wishes

His politics set him apart early. He later wrote that he was born of Democratic, pro-slavery parents and came north still carrying the sympathies of his Southern surroundings, and friends urged the young lawyer toward the Democrats. Instead he was won over by the antislavery cause, and by one exchange in particular: Senator Benjamin Wade’s rebuke of Judah Benjamin of Louisiana, a Jew who defended slavery, as “an Israelite with Egyptian principles.” Dittenhoefer joined the new Republican Party and became known, in his own phrase, as “a Southerner with Northern principles.” He even won over his father, who cast his vote for Lincoln and Hamlin and remained a Republican for the rest of his life. The son ran for a city judgeship at twenty-two and lost in a heavily Democratic city, and went on to chair the German Republican Central Committee of New York for twelve consecutive years.

He met Lincoln in New York on February 27, 1860, the day of the Cooper Union address, campaigned for him that year and came to know him personally over the next four years. In 1864 he served as one of New York’s presidential electors for Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. Lincoln offered to nominate him as a federal judge for the District of South Carolina, his native state, but Dittenhoefer declined so that he could keep his New York practice. During the draft riots of 1863, when mobs went hunting for Republicans and Black New Yorkers, rioters told him to leave the city. He refused.

Governor Reuben Fenton later appointed him to the City Court to fill the vacancy left by the death of Judge Florence McCarthy. Dittenhoefer gave his entire judicial salary to McCarthy’s widow, who had been left with little, and when his term ran out he declined renomination and returned to practice. He kept the title “Judge” for the rest of his life.

In the East of City Lodge

City Lodge No. 408 was organized in 1856, when Dittenhoefer was just starting out in the law, and he was among its charter members. In its early decades it was a lively Manhattan lodge on the move. It met in the Corinthian room of Odd Fellows’ Hall at Grand and Centre Streets, then in rooms on Broadway, in the Bleecker Building and on Union Square, before settling into the Ionic Room of the new Masonic Temple on Twenty-third Street in the mid-1870s. Its notices record members lost far from home: a young brother dead of fever at Santiago de Cuba in 1858, and in 1863 a summons to honor a brother who had fallen at Gettysburg. Its ties to Cuba ran deep enough that in February 1870 the lodge staged a grand ball at the Academy of Music for distressed Master Masons on the island, with “City Lodge No. 408, F. and A. M.” spelled out in gas jets across the stage. A driving rain kept the crowd down, but about a hundred couples took the floor.

By the early 1880s Dittenhoefer sat in the East. The lodge had planned a grand celebration of its twenty-fifth anniversary for September 26, 1881, but President Garfield had just died, and the brethren held a lodge of sorrow instead, in an Ionic Room heavily draped in mourning. Worshipful Master Dittenhoefer conducted the service, assisted by Deputy Grand Master William H. Corsa and Grand Marshal Edward M. L. Ehlers. He delivered a eulogy for the President and gave notice that he would propose a fund, raised among the Masons of the whole country, for a Garfield monument at Lake View Cemetery. The following spring he conferred the Master Mason degree himself, on an evening when J. Edward Simmons, a future Grand Master, gave the historical lecture.

In 1883 Grand Master J. Edward Simmons, who had lectured in City Lodge the year before, and the Grand Lodge made him a Commissioner of Appeals for three years. In Masonic practice, a brother tried and disciplined by his lodge may appeal to the Grand Lodge, and the office put a trial lawyer’s judgment at the service of those appeals. City Lodge marked the honor on the evening of June 25, 1883. Grand Secretary Ehlers was received in the lodge and, after remarks on the great services the Worshipful Master had rendered it, presented him with a jewel and a large white satin apron with a broad gold border. The jewel hung from a broad black silk ribbon and bore his name, a laurel wreath, a compass with a large diamond at its rivet, and the words “Grand Lodge, New York.” On the back, the members engraved it as a token of their appreciation and esteem, dated June 25, 1883. The brethren then adjourned to a banquet at Bade’s on Sixth Avenue.

Rank never kept him from the floor of the lodge. In October 1898 the lodge report shows him among the past masters helping to confer a degree, alongside Henry J. Muller, who served as Senior Deacon for the evening, and Past Masters Frederick Hartenstein and Miller.

Counsel for a Poor Mate

Some of his most important work was done for no fee at all. A federal court assigned him to defend William Rauscher, the mate of an American ship and a poor man, who had been extradited from Britain on a charge of murder on the high seas and then tried in the United States for a different crime, cruel and unusual punishment of a seaman. Dittenhoefer argued that a man could be tried only for the offense for which he had been extradited. He lost in the lower court, carried the case to the Supreme Court of the United States without pay, and in December 1886 won. United States v. Rauscher settled a dispute between the United States and Britain that had run for nearly fifty years, and its principle was written into the extradition treaties that followed. He had been before the high court before, arguing Ex parte Jackson in 1878 over Congress’s power to bar lottery circulars from the mails, and he later defended the newspapermen and bankers indicted for refusing to answer a Senate committee investigating the sugar trust, work later credited with helping establish that reporters could protect their confidential sources.

The Stage’s Lawyer

No branch of law was closer to his heart than the theater’s. In 1885 he represented the Duff company in the famous fight over an unauthorized American production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, defeating the injunction sought by Joseph H. Choate. He argued the law as it then stood: an American copyright protected the right to print copies, not the right to perform. The court agreed.

He also believed the law ought to be better. When the playwright Bronson Howard, president of the American Dramatists Club, asked him to draft a federal bill against play piracy, Dittenhoefer wrote it. Introduced in 1894 by Representative Amos J. Cummings and Senator David B. Hill, the bill made pirating a copyrighted play a misdemeanor and allowed an injunction won in one federal court to be enforced across the country. He explained its legal side to the House Committee on Patents for two hours, later appeared as the only witness before the Senate committee, and urged its supporters to accept late amendments rather than lose the bill. It became law in 1897. At the celebration dinner at Delmonico’s that March, Judge Dittenhoefer rose to toast the judiciary.

With the manager A. M. Palmer, he drew up the charter and bylaws of the Actors’ Fund and served for many years as its counsel without pay. He led the fight to repeal a law that had sent New York’s theatrical license fees to the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents for a quarter century, and much of that money afterward went to the Fund. In 1910 its trustees adopted resolutions honoring his years of service. When Cosima Wagner sought to stop the Metropolitan Opera House from staging Parsifal, arguing that her husband’s dying wish was for the work to be heard only at Bayreuth, Dittenhoefer asked the court whether the world should be denied Hamlet if Shakespeare had wished it played only at Stratford. The injunction was refused.

Sentencing Mark Twain

The judge had a sense of fun to match his learning. On a dull Atlantic crossing to Bremen in 1892, the passengers replaced the usual benefit concert for the Seamen’s Fund with a mock trial of a fellow passenger, Mark Twain, on the charge of being the greatest liar in the world. Dittenhoefer presided. A jury of college students found the prisoner guilty, and the court sentenced him to read his own works for three hours a day until the ship reached port. Twain answered that he would rather be hanged. The evening raised one hundred dollars for the seamen.

The Last Elector

In 1916, at eighty, he published How We Elected Lincoln: Personal Recollections of Lincoln and Men of His Time. He practiced to the end with his son Irving Meade Dittenhoefer as a partner, served as a trustee of Temple Emanu-El, and lived in a brownstone on East Eighty-third Street. He died in New York on February 23, 1919, the last surviving man who had cast an electoral vote for Abraham Lincoln, and was buried at Salem Fields Cemetery.

A Charter Name

In March 1912, a few days after his birthday, the members of City Lodge presented him at his home on East Eighty-third Street with a silver loving cup. The newspapers noted that he was the lodge’s only living charter member, fifty-six years after its founding. He had been part of every stage of its story: the young charter member at Odd Fellows’ Hall, the Master who turned its silver anniversary into a lodge of sorrow for a murdered President, the Commissioner of Appeals wearing the jewel his brothers gave him, and the past master still willing to take a part in the work. City Lodge No. 408 counted many members over the years. Only one of them was there at its beginning and stayed with it to the last years of a long life.

Endnotes and Sources

Lodge and Masonic Sources

  • City Lodge No. 408 notices and reports: New York Daily Herald, March 26, 1858; The New York Times, August 2, 1863; New York Daily Herald, December 11, 1869 and February 5, 1870; Sunday Mercury, January 23, 1870; New-York Tribune, February 16, 1870 (“The Freemason at the Academy”); New York Daily Herald, April 16, 1873, October 16, 1874 and May 25, 1875.
  • “[Lodge of sorrow for President Garfield],” The New York Times, September 27, 1881, p. 2 (City Lodge twenty-fifth anniversary; Dittenhoefer as Master).
  • “Masonic Notes,” The New York Times, April 20, 1882, p. 2 (Master Mason degree by the Worshipful Master, A. J. Dittenhoefer; lecture by J. Edward Simmons).
  • “An Elegant Jewel,” The New York Times, June 26, 1883, p. 5 (Commissioner of Appeals jewel and apron).
  • “The Toilers in Masonic Quarries,” New-York Tribune, October 23, 1898, p. 19 (City Lodge second degree; Past Master Dittenhoeffer assisting).
  • “Ex-Judge Dittenhoefer Honored,” The New York Times, March 28, 1912, p. 20 (silver loving cup; only living charter member).
  • Wikipedia, “Abram J. Dittenhoefer” (service as Master and as Commissioner of Appeals).

Books and Memoirs

  • Abram J. Dittenhoefer, How We Elected Lincoln: Personal Recollections of Lincoln and Men of His Time (Harper & Brothers, 1916; reissued by University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Read free at Project Gutenberg or view the scanned 1916 edition at Internet Archive.
  • M. B. Leavitt, Fifty Years in Theatrical Management (1912), profile of ex-Judge A. J. Dittenhoefer and account of the Actors’ Fund (Internet Archive).
  • Biographical sketch of Abram Jesse Dittenhoefer in Notable New Yorkers (Moses King).
  • Jay Henry Mowbray, ed., Representative Men of New York, vol. II (1898), pp. 55–57.
  • Men of Affairs in New York (L. R. Hamersly & Co., 1906), pp. 183–184.
  • Isaac Markens, The Hebrews in America (1888), pp. 209–212.
  • New York County Lawyers’ Association Year Book, 1919, pp. 243–255 (memorial).
  • The National Cyclopædia of American Biography, vol. XXXVI (1950), pp. 147–148.
  • American Jewish Year Book, biographical entry for Dittenhoefer, Abram Jesse.
  • Discussion of Dittenhoefer and the Wade–Benjamin exchange in a history of Jewish New York, Emerging Metropolis.

Articles

  • Zvi S. Rosen, “The Twilight of the Opera Pirates: A Prehistory of the Exclusive Right of Public Performance for Musical Compositions”, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, vol. 24, no. 3, p. 1157 (2007), discussing the Mikado litigation, Cummings Bill, congressional hearings and Delmonico’s dinner.
  • Carrie H. Gehrmann, “Mark Twain’s Mock Trial,” The New York Times, September 12, 1920.
  • The Weekly News (Mansfield, Ohio), November 10, 1892 (Twain’s mock trial at sea).
  • “Judge Dittenhoefer Dies of Hemorrhage,” The New York Times, February 24, 1919, p. 13; death notice, February 25, 1919, p. 11.

Organizational and Reference Sources

  • [United States v. Rauscher, 119 U.S. 407](United States reports : cases adjudged in the Supreme Court at October term, 1886

United States reports : cases adjudged in the Supreme Court at October term, 1886 By United States Supreme Court

Official Publications from the U.S. Government Publishing Office.

decided December 6, 1886, with A. J. Dittenhoefer for Rauscher. Official report at GovInfo; read the decision at Cornell’s Legal Information Institute.

  • Ex parte Jackson, 96 U.S. 727 (1878), A. J. Dittenhoefer for the petitioner. Official report at the Library of Congress.
  • B’nai B’rith International, “History of Service” timeline (founding at Sinsheimer’s café, 1843; Isaac Dittenhoefer chosen first president).
  • Wikipedia, “Abram J. Dittenhoefer” (draft riots, Hayes campaign, Temple Emanu-El, license fee repeal) and “J. Edward Simmons” (Grand Master of New York, 1883).
  • Daytonian in Manhattan, “An Elegant Facelift: 17 East 83rd Street” (2018).

A Note on the Sources

  • City Lodge was organized in 1856, by the count of both the 1881 anniversary report and the 1912 notice. By his usual birth date Dittenhoefer was twenty that year, while the 1912 notice calls his birthday his seventy-fifth. The date of his raising and his exact years as Master (he was Master by September 1881 and still in June 1883) should be confirmed from Grand Lodge records.
  • J. Edward Simmons was Grand Master of New York in 1883, the year of Dittenhoefer’s appointment as Commissioner of Appeals, which agrees with accounts that Simmons appointed him. The jewel’s engraved date is June 25, 1883.
  • His birth year appears as both 1835 and 1836, his Columbia graduation as both 1855 and 1856, and his marriage as both 1856 and 1858 (to Sophie Englehart). This article follows 1836 for his birth.
  • Some profiles say he voted for Lincoln in the Electoral College in 1860; his own book’s title page and the American Jewish Year Book place his service as elector in 1864, for Lincoln and Johnson, which this article follows.
  • His City Court appointment is dated 1862 in some accounts, but Reuben Fenton did not become governor until 1865, so the year is left open here.
  • One account names the 1892 steamer “Tahn”; the name is probably a misreading of the North German Lloyd liner Lahn, which sailed to Bremen.
  • The identification of B’nai B’rith’s first president, Isaac Dittenhoefer, as Abram’s father comes from the research notes and should be confirmed.

Continue the Story

Dittenhoefer’s life connects City Lodge to a wider history of lawyers, public service and Masonic fellowship.

Read Dittenhoefer in His Own Words

Read How We Elected Lincoln free at Project Gutenberg

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One Lodge, Six Charters / City Lodge No. 408

A charter member and past master of City Lodge No. 408, Judge Abram J. Dittenhoefer cast an electoral vote for Lincoln, rewrote the law of the American stage and once sentenced Mark Twain at sea.

On an October evening in 1898, City Lodge No. 408 conferred the second degree in full form, and among the past masters who stepped in to assist with the work was a sixty-two-year-old lawyer whose name most New Yorkers knew from the newspapers. Judge Abram J. Dittenhoefer had cast an electoral vote for Abraham Lincoln, beaten Gilbert and Sullivan’s lawyers in court and written the law that made stage piracy a crime. In City Lodge he was something older and more particular: one of the brothers who had organized it in 1856, the Master who had led it through its twenty-fifth anniversary year, and, in the end, the last of its charter members still living. More than forty years after the lodge’s founding, he was still taking a part in the degree work.

A Southerner With Northern Principles

He was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on March 17, 1836, to German-Jewish parents, Isaac Dittenhoefer and Babette Englehart. When he was four, the family settled in New York, where Isaac prospered as a merchant and became well liked among the city’s German residents; it was said that many young men owed their start in life to his kindness. Isaac also knew the uses of a lodge. In 1843, at Sinsheimer’s café on the Lower East Side, he joined the small band of immigrants who founded B’nai B’rith, the Jewish fraternal order organized along lodge lines, and he was chosen its first president. His son grew up in a household where fraternity was a working idea.

Abram went through the public schools and Columbia College, where he took the first prizes in Latin and Greek so regularly that Professor Charles Anthon called him the “Ultima Thule” of his class. After graduating he read law in the office of Benedict & Boardman, and he was admitted to the bar at twenty-one.

A Republican Against the Family’s Wishes

His politics set him apart early. He later wrote that he was born of Democratic, pro-slavery parents and came north still carrying the sympathies of his Southern surroundings, and friends urged the young lawyer toward the Democrats. Instead he was won over by the antislavery cause, and by one exchange in particular: Senator Benjamin Wade’s rebuke of Judah Benjamin of Louisiana, a Jew who defended slavery, as “an Israelite with Egyptian principles.” Dittenhoefer joined the new Republican Party and became known, in his own phrase, as “a Southerner with Northern principles.” He even won over his father, who cast his vote for Lincoln and Hamlin and remained a Republican for the rest of his life. The son ran for a city judgeship at twenty-two and lost in a heavily Democratic city, and went on to chair the German Republican Central Committee of New York for twelve consecutive years.

He met Lincoln in New York on February 27, 1860, the day of the Cooper Union address, campaigned for him that year and came to know him personally over the next four years. In 1864 he served as one of New York’s presidential electors for Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. Lincoln offered to nominate him as a federal judge for the District of South Carolina, his native state, but Dittenhoefer declined so that he could keep his New York practice. During the draft riots of 1863, when mobs went hunting for Republicans and Black New Yorkers, rioters told him to leave the city. He refused.

Governor Reuben Fenton later appointed him to the City Court to fill the vacancy left by the death of Judge Florence McCarthy. Dittenhoefer gave his entire judicial salary to McCarthy’s widow, who had been left with little, and when his term ran out he declined renomination and returned to practice. He kept the title “Judge” for the rest of his life.

In the East of City Lodge

City Lodge No. 408 was organized in 1856, when Dittenhoefer was just starting out in the law, and he was among its charter members. In its early decades it was a lively Manhattan lodge on the move. It met in the Corinthian room of Odd Fellows’ Hall at Grand and Centre Streets, then in rooms on Broadway, in the Bleecker Building and on Union Square, before settling into the Ionic Room of the new Masonic Temple on Twenty-third Street in the mid-1870s. Its notices record members lost far from home: a young brother dead of fever at Santiago de Cuba in 1858, and in 1863 a summons to honor a brother who had fallen at Gettysburg. Its ties to Cuba ran deep enough that in February 1870 the lodge staged a grand ball at the Academy of Music for distressed Master Masons on the island, with “City Lodge No. 408, F. and A. M.” spelled out in gas jets across the stage. A driving rain kept the crowd down, but about a hundred couples took the floor.

By the early 1880s Dittenhoefer sat in the East. The lodge had planned a grand celebration of its twenty-fifth anniversary for September 26, 1881, but President Garfield had just died, and the brethren held a lodge of sorrow instead, in an Ionic Room heavily draped in mourning. Worshipful Master Dittenhoefer conducted the service, assisted by Deputy Grand Master William H. Corsa and Grand Marshal Edward M. L. Ehlers. He delivered a eulogy for the President and gave notice that he would propose a fund, raised among the Masons of the whole country, for a Garfield monument at Lake View Cemetery. The following spring he conferred the Master Mason degree himself, on an evening when J. Edward Simmons, a future Grand Master, gave the historical lecture.

In 1883 Grand Master J. Edward Simmons, who had lectured in City Lodge the year before, and the Grand Lodge made him a Commissioner of Appeals for three years. In Masonic practice, a brother tried and disciplined by his lodge may appeal to the Grand Lodge, and the office put a trial lawyer’s judgment at the service of those appeals. City Lodge marked the honor on the evening of June 25, 1883. Grand Secretary Ehlers was received in the lodge and, after remarks on the great services the Worshipful Master had rendered it, presented him with a jewel and a large white satin apron with a broad gold border. The jewel hung from a broad black silk ribbon and bore his name, a laurel wreath, a compass with a large diamond at its rivet, and the words “Grand Lodge, New York.” On the back, the members engraved it as a token of their appreciation and esteem, dated June 25, 1883. The brethren then adjourned to a banquet at Bade’s on Sixth Avenue.

Rank never kept him from the floor of the lodge. In October 1898 the lodge report shows him among the past masters helping to confer a degree, alongside Henry J. Muller, who served as Senior Deacon for the evening, and Past Masters Frederick Hartenstein and Miller.

Counsel for a Poor Mate

Some of his most important work was done for no fee at all. A federal court assigned him to defend William Rauscher, the mate of an American ship and a poor man, who had been extradited from Britain on a charge of murder on the high seas and then tried in the United States for a different crime, cruel and unusual punishment of a seaman. Dittenhoefer argued that a man could be tried only for the offense for which he had been extradited. He lost in the lower court, carried the case to the Supreme Court of the United States without pay, and in December 1886 won. United States v. Rauscher settled a dispute between the United States and Britain that had run for nearly fifty years, and its principle was written into the extradition treaties that followed. He had been before the high court before, arguing Ex parte Jackson in 1878 over Congress’s power to bar lottery circulars from the mails, and he later defended the newspapermen and bankers indicted for refusing to answer a Senate committee investigating the sugar trust, work later credited with helping establish that reporters could protect their confidential sources.

The Stage’s Lawyer

No branch of law was closer to his heart than the theater’s. In 1885 he represented the Duff company in the famous fight over an unauthorized American production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, defeating the injunction sought by Joseph H. Choate. He argued the law as it then stood: an American copyright protected the right to print copies, not the right to perform. The court agreed.

He also believed the law ought to be better. When the playwright Bronson Howard, president of the American Dramatists Club, asked him to draft a federal bill against play piracy, Dittenhoefer wrote it. Introduced in 1894 by Representative Amos J. Cummings and Senator David B. Hill, the bill made pirating a copyrighted play a misdemeanor and allowed an injunction won in one federal court to be enforced across the country. He explained its legal side to the House Committee on Patents for two hours, later appeared as the only witness before the Senate committee, and urged its supporters to accept late amendments rather than lose the bill. It became law in 1897. At the celebration dinner at Delmonico’s that March, Judge Dittenhoefer rose to toast the judiciary.

With the manager A. M. Palmer, he drew up the charter and bylaws of the Actors’ Fund and served for many years as its counsel without pay. He led the fight to repeal a law that had sent New York’s theatrical license fees to the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents for a quarter century, and much of that money afterward went to the Fund. In 1910 its trustees adopted resolutions honoring his years of service. When Cosima Wagner sought to stop the Metropolitan Opera House from staging Parsifal, arguing that her husband’s dying wish was for the work to be heard only at Bayreuth, Dittenhoefer asked the court whether the world should be denied Hamlet if Shakespeare had wished it played only at Stratford. The injunction was refused.

Sentencing Mark Twain

The judge had a sense of fun to match his learning. On a dull Atlantic crossing to Bremen in 1892, the passengers replaced the usual benefit concert for the Seamen’s Fund with a mock trial of a fellow passenger, Mark Twain, on the charge of being the greatest liar in the world. Dittenhoefer presided. A jury of college students found the prisoner guilty, and the court sentenced him to read his own works for three hours a day until the ship reached port. Twain answered that he would rather be hanged. The evening raised one hundred dollars for the seamen.

The Last Elector

In 1916, at eighty, he published How We Elected Lincoln: Personal Recollections of Lincoln and Men of His Time. He practiced to the end with his son Irving Meade Dittenhoefer as a partner, served as a trustee of Temple Emanu-El, and lived in a brownstone on East Eighty-third Street. He died in New York on February 23, 1919, the last surviving man who had cast an electoral vote for Abraham Lincoln, and was buried at Salem Fields Cemetery.

A Charter Name

In March 1912, a few days after his birthday, the members of City Lodge presented him at his home on East Eighty-third Street with a silver loving cup. The newspapers noted that he was the lodge’s only living charter member, fifty-six years after its founding. He had been part of every stage of its story: the young charter member at Odd Fellows’ Hall, the Master who turned its silver anniversary into a lodge of sorrow for a murdered President, the Commissioner of Appeals wearing the jewel his brothers gave him, and the past master still willing to take a part in the work. City Lodge No. 408 counted many members over the years. Only one of them was there at its beginning and stayed with it to the last years of a long life.

Endnotes and Sources

Lodge and Masonic Sources

  • City Lodge No. 408 notices and reports: New York Daily Herald, March 26, 1858; The New York Times, August 2, 1863; New York Daily Herald, December 11, 1869 and February 5, 1870; Sunday Mercury, January 23, 1870; New-York Tribune, February 16, 1870 (“The Freemason at the Academy”); New York Daily Herald, April 16, 1873, October 16, 1874 and May 25, 1875.
  • “[Lodge of sorrow for President Garfield],” The New York Times, September 27, 1881, p. 2 (City Lodge twenty-fifth anniversary; Dittenhoefer as Master).
  • “Masonic Notes,” The New York Times, April 20, 1882, p. 2 (Master Mason degree by the Worshipful Master, A. J. Dittenhoefer; lecture by J. Edward Simmons).
  • “An Elegant Jewel,” The New York Times, June 26, 1883, p. 5 (Commissioner of Appeals jewel and apron).
  • “The Toilers in Masonic Quarries,” New-York Tribune, October 23, 1898, p. 19 (City Lodge second degree; Past Master Dittenhoeffer assisting).
  • “Ex-Judge Dittenhoefer Honored,” The New York Times, March 28, 1912, p. 20 (silver loving cup; only living charter member).
  • Wikipedia, “Abram J. Dittenhoefer” (service as Master and as Commissioner of Appeals).

Books and Memoirs

  • Abram J. Dittenhoefer, How We Elected Lincoln: Personal Recollections of Lincoln and Men of His Time (Harper & Brothers, 1916; reissued by University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Read free at Project Gutenberg or view the scanned 1916 edition at Internet Archive.
  • M. B. Leavitt, Fifty Years in Theatrical Management (1912), profile of ex-Judge A. J. Dittenhoefer and account of the Actors’ Fund (Internet Archive).
  • Biographical sketch of Abram Jesse Dittenhoefer in Notable New Yorkers (Moses King).
  • Jay Henry Mowbray, ed., Representative Men of New York, vol. II (1898), pp. 55–57.
  • Men of Affairs in New York (L. R. Hamersly & Co., 1906), pp. 183–184.
  • Isaac Markens, The Hebrews in America (1888), pp. 209–212.
  • New York County Lawyers’ Association Year Book, 1919, pp. 243–255 (memorial).
  • The National Cyclopædia of American Biography, vol. XXXVI (1950), pp. 147–148.
  • American Jewish Year Book, biographical entry for Dittenhoefer, Abram Jesse.
  • Discussion of Dittenhoefer and the Wade–Benjamin exchange in a history of Jewish New York, Emerging Metropolis.

Articles

  • Zvi S. Rosen, “The Twilight of the Opera Pirates: A Prehistory of the Exclusive Right of Public Performance for Musical Compositions”, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, vol. 24, no. 3, p. 1157 (2007), discussing the Mikado litigation, Cummings Bill, congressional hearings and Delmonico’s dinner.
  • Carrie H. Gehrmann, “Mark Twain’s Mock Trial,” The New York Times, September 12, 1920.
  • The Weekly News (Mansfield, Ohio), November 10, 1892 (Twain’s mock trial at sea).
  • “Judge Dittenhoefer Dies of Hemorrhage,” The New York Times, February 24, 1919, p. 13; death notice, February 25, 1919, p. 11.

Organizational and Reference Sources

  • United States v. Rauscher, 119 U.S. 407, decided December 6, 1886, with A. J. Dittenhoefer for Rauscher. Official report at GovInfo; read the decision at Cornell’s Legal Information Institute.
  • Ex parte Jackson, 96 U.S. 727 (1878), A. J. Dittenhoefer for the petitioner. Official report at the Library of Congress.
  • B’nai B’rith International, “History of Service” timeline (founding at Sinsheimer’s café, 1843; Isaac Dittenhoefer chosen first president).
  • Wikipedia, “Abram J. Dittenhoefer” (draft riots, Hayes campaign, Temple Emanu-El, license fee repeal) and “J. Edward Simmons” (Grand Master of New York, 1883).
  • Daytonian in Manhattan, “An Elegant Facelift: 17 East 83rd Street” (2018).

A Note on the Sources

  • City Lodge was organized in 1856, by the count of both the 1881 anniversary report and the 1912 notice. By his usual birth date Dittenhoefer was twenty that year, while the 1912 notice calls his birthday his seventy-fifth. The date of his raising and his exact years as Master (he was Master by September 1881 and still in June 1883) should be confirmed from Grand Lodge records.
  • J. Edward Simmons was Grand Master of New York in 1883, the year of Dittenhoefer’s appointment as Commissioner of Appeals, which agrees with accounts that Simmons appointed him. The jewel’s engraved date is June 25, 1883.
  • His birth year appears as both 1835 and 1836, his Columbia graduation as both 1855 and 1856, and his marriage as both 1856 and 1858 (to Sophie Englehart). This article follows 1836 for his birth.
  • Some profiles say he voted for Lincoln in the Electoral College in 1860; his own book’s title page and the American Jewish Year Book place his service as elector in 1864, for Lincoln and Johnson, which this article follows.
  • His City Court appointment is dated 1862 in some accounts, but Reuben Fenton did not become governor until 1865, so the year is left open here.
  • One account names the 1892 steamer “Tahn”; the name is probably a misreading of the North German Lloyd liner Lahn, which sailed to Bremen.
  • The identification of B’nai B’rith’s first president, Isaac Dittenhoefer, as Abram’s father comes from the research notes and should be confirmed.

Continue the Story

Dittenhoefer’s life connects City Lodge to a wider history of lawyers, public service and Masonic fellowship.

Read Dittenhoefer in His Own Words

Read How We Elected Lincoln free at Project Gutenberg

Return to the Series

Explore One Lodge, Six Charters

 
Brete Murphy

A Freemason, a local historian, well versed in symbolism, comparative religious studies, esoterica, and a member of several societies. I am currently the Historian of Advance Service Mizpah Lodge 586 in Astoria , New York.

https://www.bretemurphy.com/
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Timeline of the Lodges That Formed Advance Service Mizpah Lodge No. 586