Philadelphia to visit family and friends and to search for a wife. His friend Daniel Pope Cook was defeated by a proslavery opponent in 1826, and legislators had selected their pro-slavery speaker John McLean to fill unexpired U.S. Senate terms in 1824 and 1829 (voters ultimately electing Elias Kent Kane and John McCracken Robinson to those seats). Coles made his last run for public office in 1831. As candidate for Congress, running against eight candidates including pro-slavery Democrats Joseph Duncan (allied with Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford) and Sidney Breese (a Jacksonian Democrat), Coles polled a distant third. He had been out of public view for some years, and refused to align himself with any political party. Instead, Coles campaigned on his successful term as governor, proclaimed his association with the founding fathers, and criticized the Jacksonian platform. Still, Coles felt devastated by the political defeat, and moved back east. Nonetheless, in 1835, Illinois legislators authorized Coles to sell bonds to finance his canal project, but since they also refused to back the bonds with state credit, sales proved slow. Back to Virginia Worried about his unmarried status and increasing partisanship, Coles decided to leave Illinois shortly after his election loss. He made another trip to Virginia, which was involved in its own debate over slavery after Nat Turner's rebellion. After Turner's execution, Coles wrote Thomas Jefferson Randolph urging emancipation and colonization to prevent further disasters, stressing that slavery restricted Virginia's economic development. At year's end, while visiting James and Dolley Madison at Montpelier, Madison confided in Coles his wish to manumit his own slaves and asked Coles about his experiences as he tried to find the right way to accomplish this while still providing for Dolley as his widow. However, Madison died in 1836 without freeing any of his slaves which were left in a will to his wife Dolley. Later life in Philadelphia Coles moved to Philadelphia in 1832, gratified by its active social and intellectual life, as well as slavery's absence. At age 46, Coles married prominent socialite Sally Logan Roberts (1809 to 1883) on November 28, 1833. The couple had three children: Mary Coles, Edward Coles, Jr., and Roberts Coles. Sally Coles inherited significant property upon her father's death, but it (and much of Coles' own fortune) was devastated by the Panic of 1837. Furthermore, his family's renovated Enniscorthy plantation burned down in 1839, and his