Written weeks before Texas was annexed by the United States, setting the stage for war with Mexico, politician and businessman Coe, soon to be named Inspector General of the Tennessee Millitia, writes the President of the Planters Bank of Memphis that he was inclined to help the widow of a deceased friend who had treated him “badly by cause of his drinking”. Because of health problems, he was reluctant to face the “dangerous exposure” of coming to the city but he wanted to settle his “considerable debt”, possibly by “hiring the negroes out in Memphis next year”.

“General” Coe was an attorney, active in Democratic politics, who served two terms in the Tennessee Legislature, alongside future President Andrew Johnson. Actively supporting the presidential candidacy of Tennessee Governor James Polk, an old friend, he first displayed a streak of violence when he shot an opponent during a political debate. Passed over for both a Cabinet position and appointment as Army General in the war against Mexico, he refused an offer to run for Tennessee Governor in 1848, but, his “fame being whipped to religious proportions by the common folk of Tennessee”, at the Democratic National Convention that year, his name was placed in nomination for Vice President of the United States.  Again, he was passed over for elevation to higher office.  Late in 1849, while serving as attorney general of Memphis, at a town meeting where “words became heated”, Coe again drew a pistol and shot an opponent, a bank president who was only slightly wounded, going on to become President of the Southern Pacific Railroad. In 1850, after violently denouncing the Missouri Compromise, demanding that slavery in the territories should be enforced, if necessary, at the “point of a bayonet”, Coe became involved in another heated local controversy over control of a Memphis bank. After leaving a court hearing on the matter, which he attended despite threats to his life, Coe and his lawyer were accosted in the street by four opposing businessmen. Fearing assassination. Coe drew a dueling pistol and shot and killed one of them.  He aimed a gun at another man, but it misfired. His lawyer, meanwhile, shot by another of the antagonists, managed to stab the man with a Bowie knife; both men “lay helpless in the street, covered with blood.” Standing alone, Coe emptied two more pistols in the direction of the attackers who were left standing.  He then reached for a fourth pistol which he carried, a “Colt repeater”, but when it was caught in the lining of his coat, he retreated to the nearby doorway of a grocery store.  A fourth attacker then crept up behind him, pushed the muzzle of his gun to Coe’s back and fired.  The bullet pierced Coe’s spinal column, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. He survived for 63 days of “terrible suffering through the heat of the Memphis summer” before dying in August 1850, at the age of 44.

Coe’s autograph letters are rare. None have apparently appeared on the auction market, and an article on Coe which appeared in the Tennessee Historical Quarterly in 1995 (“Politics and Assassination: The Story of General Levin Hudson Coe”) show no collection of Coe correspondence, only a handful of letters preserved in the papers of President Polk.