Printed Document Signed as Junior Grand Warden of the Masonic Grand Lodge of Kentucky. Sept. 4, 1830. Signed also by 3 other Lodge officers, including a publisher of the first Kentucky newspaper, a founding father of Louisville, and a General of the Kentucky Militia. 1pg.+stampless address leaf. A rare signature on a printed statement about newly-elected officers of the Lodge, sent to the Grand Secretary of the Grand Lodge of Vermont.
Thirty years later, Abraham Lincoln, while running for President in 1860, presented a copy of his Douglas debates to Abraham Jonas, calling him “one of my most valued friends” - a remarkable plaudit, because Jonas was Jewish.
When he signed this document, Jonas was a 29 year-old storekeeper in a small Kentucky town south of Cincinnati, where his family, the first Jews to settle west of the Alleghenies, lived after immigrating from England, Though a newly-arrived Kentuckian, he had already been elected to the state Legislature; he received the same political honor, a decade later, after moving to Illinois, where he started a newspaper and began to practice law.
In both legislature and courtroom, Jonas was friends with Lincoln, another storekeeper-turned-lawyer from Kentucky. Both joined the new Republican Party in the 1850s, when Jonas actively supported Lincoln’s political rise. He received only a postmaster’s appointment from the new President during the three years of Civil War before his death in 1864 – perhaps because of his religion or because three Jonas sons (one a future US Senator) chose to serve in the Confederate Army. When asking Lincoln, in 1863, for permission to visit one son who was being held as a rebel POW, Jonas wrote of "the devotion I have ever had for you and the Government."
Despite holding public office – and heading Masonic Lodges – in two states, Jonas’ signature is rare, even in institutional holdings, except for the seven letters from Jonas in the Lincoln papers, including one, written after the 1860 election, remarkably warning the President-elect of Southern threats to his “personal safety.” No letter or document with Jonas’ autograph has appeared at auction in recent years. A routine 1856 legal letter from Lincoln to Jonas brought $3850 at the Sang sale at Sotheby’s in 1985.