elder brother Isaac only survived the disasters by two years. Coles's last public appointment was in 1841, when he served on a committee investigating the U.S. Bank, which ultimately led to the resignation of his friend Nicholas Biddle. Coles unsuccessfully sought political appointments from his Virginia classmates who had become high federal officials, John Tyler and Winfield Scott. Still, rental income from real estate investments (widely spread geographically) kept the growing family financially comfortable. Coles and his young family travelled often to visit his extended family and properties in Virginia and Washington, D.C., as well as Illinois and later Schooley's Mountain, New Jersey. He was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1839. However, Coles never resumed his political career, uncomfortable with the new party system. Nonetheless, he rejoiced when Abraham Lincoln, whom he remembered as a young Illinois lawyer, was elected president. The elderly ex-governor briefly met the newly elected president on his journey to Washington. Coles had also publicly taken exception to Senator Stephen A. Douglas' characterization of slavery's history in Illinois during the Kansas-Nebraska debate of 1854. Coles turned to history during his later years. He was recognized as one of the few remaining men with close personal knowledge of both Madison and Jefferson, and burnished their reputations as champions of the republican ideals that had also motivated Coles during his entire life. Coles had lobbied both Jefferson and Madison (and later Thomas Jefferson Randolph) to free their slaves. Coles was surprised when Madison failed to do so, only later learning that lawyer Robert Taylor had persuaded the former President to leave emancipation instructions for his widow, whose father had gone bankrupt after freeing his slaves many years earlier. Dolley, with other personal economic priorities (especially a son addicted to gambling), freed no slaves upon her death in 1849. Coles also wrote about the Northwest Ordinance. However, most of Coles' own papers from Illinois were destroyed in a fire in 1852 while his friend John Mason Peck was writing a history of the new state. Coles also assisted Virginia historians William Cabell Rives and Hugh Blair Grigsby, and New Yorker Henry S. Randall. To his father's great disappointment, Roberts Coles returned to Virginia in 1860, where he became a slaveowner (buying a plantation from a relative) and engaged to Jennie Fairfax of Richmond. After the Civil War began, he enlisted in the Green Mountain