Reason for a Change-Mitch’s Blog

I just edited the Wikipedia article on my great-great-great uncle (my g-g-g-grandfather’s sister Ann married Gen. Coffee’s son, Alexander), Gen. John R. Coffee. Even though he is not a direct blood relative, the name has lived on in my family, my grandfather and his father were both named Alexander Coffee Sloss.

General Coffee was a close friend of Andrew Jackson, he married Jackson’s wife’s neice, Mary Donelson, and engaged in land speculation with Jackson in Tennessee. During the 1813 Jackson-Benton duel in downtown Nashville he pushed Thomas Hart Benton down a flight of stairs after Benton had shot Jackson in the shoulder. He went on to serve as Brigadere General commanding the cavalry under Jackson in the Tennessee miltia during the Creek War, and he was wounded at the Battle of Emuckfaw Creek. He recovered to command the southern flank in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. He marched to New Orleans and commanded the left flank at the Battle of New Orleans, firing from the Cypress swamps to the east of the Mississippi. After the war he became first a land speculator and then a surveyor, and is buried near Florence, Alabama, which he helped to found.

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