Cooper attended Oxford University for a time. He studied law, chemistry, and medicine, practicing as both a doctor and an attorney. He failed to obtain a degree though.
Cooper attended Oxford University for a time. He studied law, chemistry, and medicine, practicing as both a doctor and an attorney. He failed to obtain a degree though.
Thomas Cooper was an Anglo-American economist, college president and political philosopher. He was one of the first prominent men to question the wisdom of the South's remaining in the Union, coming to be called the "Schoolmaster of States' Rights."
Background
Cooper was born on October 22, 1759, in London, England. Little is known of his early life, other than what can be gleaned from his later writings - which are not always perfectly consistent. His parents were apparently wealthy, and Cooper did not lack means.
Education
Cooper attended Oxford University for a time. He studied law, chemistry, and medicine, practicing as both a doctor and an attorney. He failed to obtain a degree though. Some years before, he had an interest in medicine, attending anatomical lectures and veterinary dissections.
It is known that by 1785 Cooper was living near Manchester (he later moved to Bolton); in that year he was elected to membership in the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. The papers he read on various subjects displayed erudition and gave expression to radical opinions. He left the society in 1791 in protest at the reticence shown in expressing sympathy for Priestley’s losses during the Birmingham riots. He became a member of the Manchester constitutional Society; and early in 1792, with James Watt, Jr., he visited Paris and read an address pledging the solidarity of the society with the Jacobins. For this Watt and Cooper were bitterly attacked in Parliament by Edmund Burke, who used their action in an attempt to discredit the move for parliamentary reform, against which repressive measures were soon taken.
Cooper sailed for America in August 1793 with two of Priestley’s sons and some of his own family (he had five children by his first wife), returning for the remainder the following year. Priestley also emigrated in 1794, and they both settled in Northumberland, Pennsylvania (Cooper lived with Priestley for some time after the latter’s wife died in 1796). In 1799 Cooper resumed political activities, embracing the republican cause; and in 1800 he was tried for sedition and libel against the president. He served six months in prison, his wife dying just before his release. He became a close friend of Jefferson after the latter became president and from 1804 to 1811 he was a member of the state judiciary in Pennsylvania.
In 1802 Cooper became a member of the American Philosophical Society and in 1811 was offered the chair of chemistry at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He was a professor of applied chemistry and mineralogy at the University of Pennsylvania (1815-1819) and professor of chemistry at South Carolina College (1819-1834); he was elected president of the college in 1821. Much of his time in South Carolina was spent in campaigning vigorously for states’ rights and free trade. In retirement, he compiled the statute laws of the state.
As a practicing scientist, Cooper was not outstanding; his most notable achievement was probably the preparation of potassium in 1810 (almost certainly for the first time in America) by strongly heating potash with iron in a gun barrel, a method originated by Gay-Lussac and Thenard in 1808. Cooper’s greatest service to science was undoubtedly the dissemination of information.
Cooper's religious beliefs - he was a Deist - were bound to cause friction with then President of the College Jeremiah Atwater. Atwater, being a conservative Presbyterian clergyman, mistrusted Cooper from the start and watched for any act of Cooper's that would corrupt the young men of the College. The rivalry between the two eventually embroiled the entire institution. By 1814, Cooper had organized faculty members Shaw, Nulty, and Berard against the President and issued his own stinging denunciation of Atwater. In 1815, Cooper resigned his position in favor, he stated emphatically, of a better paying situation elsewhere.
Politics
Cooper was a relentless campaigner for political freedom. He believed freedom of speech was the most fundamental of those freedoms and that America had major improvements to make in this area. He blamed the clergy in particular for this state of affairs.
Views
Cooper supported the institution of slavery, although he had strenuously opposed the slave trade. In the mid to late 1780's he fought passionately against "that infamous and impolitic traffic."
Membership
American Philosophical Society
,
United States
1802
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
Cooper was barely over five feet tall.
The Nation, The Law and the King: Reform Politics in England
The author argues that the English reform movement from 1789-1799 was motivated by a distinctively revolutionary ethos that was largely responsible for the extreme reaction of the governing classes.