One recorded anecdote illustrated Coffee's thirst for hard liquor and his humor. In the early 1840's he and a fellow lawyer from Bolivar, John T. Payne, had taken a case and received a horse as their payment. While socializing in a Springfield saloon, Coffee and Payne discussed their payment. After a few drinks, the two lawyers began arguing loudly on how to divide the fee. Tired of the heated discussion, Coffee finally unholstered his pistol and started to walk out of the saloon. Payne followed him and demanded to know what Coffee planned to do. Coffee replied: "I am going to shoot my part of that horse. You may do what you please with your part." (7)
On April 4, 1844, Coffee, who was dividing his time between his legal affairs in Springfield and Bolivar, married a Bolivar woman, Catherine Grace Hunt. Again misfortune visited the tranplanted Tennessean. Two weeks after the birth of their only child, Catherine Coffee died. Coffee placed the child, named for her mother in the care of her maternal grandmother, who resided in Bolivar. (8)
By September 1845, the young lawyer decided to marry a third time. He exchanged vows with sixteen-year-old Lavena Harriet Weir of Greenfield, in mid-September. (9) The bride's father, Reverend Samuel Jackson Weir, was a prominent minister and farmer, who had helped establish Greenfield as the Dade County seat. (10) Coffee and his new wife lived in Greenfield after their wedding.
During the late 1840's, Coffee continued to practice law in Southwest Missouri and occasionally assisted land speculators. He left the state, however, for a brief period, after he raised a regiment of Southwest Missourians to fight in the Mexican War. Coffee recruited the company very late in the war, and it had traveled as far as New Orleans when the war ended. Consequently, Coffee discharged his men and returned home, where he became Dade County's circuit attorney in 1849. (11)
As an anti-Benton candidate, Coffee successfully campaigned for the Missouri senate in 1854 and represented the Twenty-fifth District composed of Polk and Dade counties. (12) On December 28, 1854, he received his committee assignments to "Ways and Means" and the "Deaf and Dumb Asylum." (13) His political beliefs were personified by his nomination, before a joint session of the legislature, of the proslavery candidate David Rice Atchison for another term as United States Senator. (14) Coffee sponsored a number of bills, including internal improvements for Southwest Missouri, the incorporation of the Carthage Female Academy, a prohibitory liquor law in Dade County, the incorporation of the town of Fremont in Cedar County and petitions for relief. (15) However, he would not finish out his elected term.
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