John Abram Godfrey

Godfrey was subsequently admitted to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in May 1856[9] and to the New York bar in November of that year[10] on the motion of his brother-in-law, Judge Philip J. Joachimsen.

He spoke in opposition to the political agenda of the nascent Republican party at a large meeting at the Cooper Institute in 1860[11] and was elected Master of the Godfrey Lodge of the Masons in 1861.

Several members of the group were killed in an attack upon them by Apache Indians[13][14][15] Godfrey delivered  a speech in Philadelphia in 1864 on behalf of General George McClellan during the 1864 presidential campaign.

This collection, assembled in the years during and immediately after the Civil War, includes over two hundred original signatures including all members of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, most of senior Union and Confederate Generals of the Civil War, most members of the 39th United States Congress, several prominent renowned writers, poets and philosophers of the mid 19th century and four men who had been or who went on to become Presidents - James K. Polk, Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan and Rutherford B. Hayes.

His legal work in New York included large real estate conveyances in mid-town Manhattan, directorship of the Safeguard Insurance Company,[18] NYC Commissioner of Deeds,[19] Secretary of the New York Bar Association[20] and litigation against Mary Todd Lincoln to collect $9,620 for capes and sables purchased from December 1964 to May 1865 from William Moser, a fur merchant located on Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan.

John Godfrey married Mary Alice Macaulay on March 26, 1868 in New York City,[25] unofficially changing his middle name around that time from "Abram" to "Augustus".