Later Life
After the war and some failed investments, Coffee began work as a surveyor, laying down the town of Florence, Alabama. In 1816 he surveyed the boundary line between Alabama and Mississippi. He later moved to near Florence, Alabama.
His friend and former business partner Jackson was elected President of the United States. Jackson worked toward removal of Southeast Indian tribes to territory west of the Mississippi River. Jackson appointed Coffee as his representative, along with Secretary of War John Eaton, to negotiate treaties with Southeast American Indian tribes to accomplish removal, a policy authorized by Congressional passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Coffee negotiated the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek of 1830 with the Choctaw by which they ceded their lands in the Southeast. He started negotiations with the Chickasaw, but the US did not conclude a treaty with these people until after his death.
Coffee died in Florence.
Read more about this topic: John Coffee
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Virtue and vice suppose the freedom to choose between good and evil; but what can be the morals of a woman who is not even in possession of herself, who has nothing of her own, and who all her life has been trained to extricate herself from the arbitrary by ruse, from constraint by using her charms?... As long as she is subject to man’s yoke or to prejudice, as long as she receives no professional education, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there can be no moral law for her!”
—Flora Tristan (1803–1844)
“‘Tis of the essence of life here,
Though we choose greatly, still to lack
The lasting memory at all clear,
That life has for us on the wrack
Nothing but what we somehow chose;
Thus are we wholly stripped of pride
In the pain that has but one close,
Bearing it crushed and mystified.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)