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The Riverside Biographical Series

NUMBER 4


PETER COOPER

BY

ROSSITER W. RAYMOND





=The Riverside Biographical Series=

          1. ANDREW JACKSON, by W. G. BROWN.
          2. JAMES B. EADS, by LOUIS HOW.
          3. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, by PAUL E. MORE.
          4. PETER COOPER, by R. W. RAYMOND.
          5. THOMAS JEFFERSON, by H. C. MERWIN.
          6. WILLIAM PENN, by GEORGE HODGES.
          7. GENERAL GRANT, by WALTER ALLEN.
          8. LEWIS AND CLARK, by WILLIAM R. LIGHTON.
          9. JOHN MARSHALL, by JAMES B. THAYER.
          10. ALEXANDER HAMILTON, by CHAS. A. CONANT.
          11. WASHINGTON IRVING, by H. W. BOYNTON.
          12. PAUL JONES, by HUTCHINS HAPGOOD.
          13. STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS, by W. G. BROWN.
          14. SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN, by H. D. SEDGWICK, Jr.

          Each about 140 pages, 16mo, with photogravure
          portrait, 65 cents, _net_; _School Edition_, each,
          50 cents, _net_.

          HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
          BOSTON AND NEW YORK





[Illustration: (signed) Peter Cooper]




PETER COOPER

BY

ROSSITER W. RAYMOND

[Illustration]

          BOSTON AND NEW YORK
          HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
          =The Riverside Press Cambridge=




          COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY ROSSITER W. RAYMOND.
          ALL RIGHTS RESERVED




CONTENTS


  CHAP.                                   PAGE
  PREFACE                                  vii
     I. ANCESTRY                             1
    II. BOYHOOD AND YOUTH                   10
   III. BUSINESS VENTURES                   16
    IV. INVENTIONS                          29
     V. THE TOM THUMB                       38
    VI. MUNICIPAL AFFAIRS                   52
   VII. THE COOPER UNION FOR THE
          ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE AND ART    64
  VIII. NATIONAL POLITICS                   96
    IX. THE END                            104




PREFACE


DURING the last decade of Peter Cooper's life, the writer of this
biographical sketch enjoyed some degree of intimacy with him, as
professional adviser and traveling companion, and also, incidentally, as
consulting engineer of the firm of Cooper and Hewitt, and manager of a
department in the Cooper Union. This circumstance, together with the
preference kindly expressed by Mr. Cooper's family, doubtless influenced
the selection of the writer for the honorable task of preparing this
book,--a task which was welcome as a labor of love, though the execution
of it has been hindered and impaired by the demands of other duties. The
real difficulty has been to compress within the prescribed limits a
story covering so many years and so many topics, yet not possessing
those features of dramatic action or adventure which could be treated
briefly, with picturesque effect.

Mr. Cooper's family has kindly furnished abundant material for this
work, including, besides his own published utterances, the notes of the
stenographer to whom Mr. Cooper, in the last years of his life, dictated
his "reminiscences." The use which has been made of these will be
evident to the reader. Beyond an occasional revelation of the character
of the speaker, or a side-light thrown upon the manners and conditions
of our early national life, they have not furnished valuable data; and
the study of them suggests an observation which may be heeded with
advantage in similar cases hereafter, though it comes too late to be
useful in this instance, namely, that the recollections of old people
with retentive memories, like Peter Cooper, may be invaluable, if they
are intelligently aroused and guided; but if the speakers (as in his
case) are left to their own initiative, they are too likely to furnish
superfluous accounts of events already described more accurately in
authentic contemporaneous records.

It has not been practicable to preserve, in the treatment of the
subject, a strictly chronological order. As the titles of the several
chapters indicate, the different lines of Mr. Cooper's activity have
been considered, to some extent, separately, so that their periods
overlap each other.

This sketch of Mr. Cooper's career furnishes the elements of an
analysis, which I introduce here, as a guide in the interpretation of
what is to follow.

1. The time of his birth and the prophetic anticipations of his parents
profoundly influenced his ambition to do something great for his
fellow-citizens of the republic whose life began so nearly with his own.

2. The atmosphere surrounding his youth was one of unlimited and
audacious adventure. New institutions, a virgin continent, the ardent
desire to be independent of the Old World, and a profound belief in the
destiny of America, all combined to stimulate endeavor. What Peter
Cooper said of himself as an apprentice was true of the typical young
American of his time: "I was always planning and contriving, and was
never satisfied unless I was doing something difficult--something that
had never been done before, if possible."

3. The new freedom and the vast opportunity presented in the young
republic encouraged, to a degree not paralleled before or since, that
change of occupation which, with all its drawbacks, had the one great
merit that it educated men to various activities. It was no disgrace to
an American to go into one business after another, seeking the one which
would prove most profitable and agreeable. Thus, Peter Cooper worked
successively as a hatter, a coach-builder, a machinist, a machine-maker,
a grocer, an iron-worker, and a glue-manufacturer, achieving success in
every occupation, but abandoning each for something more promising, and
learning in each something which promoted his success in the next.

4. At every stage of his progress, he followed the ideal of personal
independence, the honest acquisition of property, the establishment of a
home, and the rearing of a family. These were the first duties and the
dearest wishes--no matter what greater things might lie beyond. And he
profoundly realized that temperance, industry, frugality, and patience
were the necessary preliminaries to any longed-for achievement. As he
says, he had first to spend thirty years in getting a start; then to
spend another thirty years in accumulating the means for further advance
into the wider sphere of his aspirations. And during each stage of this
process, he was patient, as well as hopeful, neither wasting his
energies in visionary schemes nor allowing the eddies of daily toil to
divert the current of his deeper purposes.

5. At every stage, however, he found himself hindered by lack of
thorough knowledge. He invented perpetually and profusely; but some of
his most cherished inventions did not find practical recognition,
because he had attempted the premature or the impossible. His guiding
principle, of trying to do something that had never been done before, is
not an adequate substitute for a scientific knowledge of what can be,
and now needs to be, done. He found himself often too far in advance of
his generation. Moreover, he found that the lack of education crippled
him in the attempt to make other men understand and appreciate his
fruitful ideas. This is true of all really great "self-made men." They
may have achieved success and fame in spite of early disadvantages; they
may, perhaps, recognize the fact that such disadvantages, necessitating
a stern struggle, have sifted out, by natural selection, the possessors
of genius and sterling character; but not one of them fails to lament
the lack of that early training which would have made him still more
successful than he is; and not one of them fails to desire, for his
children and the coming generation of his fellows, the early advantages
which were denied to himself.

6. This experience it was which gave form to the aspirations and
purposes of Peter Cooper. As an apprentice, he resolved to do something
for the benefit of apprentices--to found some institution which should
supplement the deficiencies of early education, furnishing to virtuous,
industrious, and ambitious youths the means of progress, and attracting
the thoughtless or indolent into the same ascending road. How this
conception came to be both modified and realized will be seen in later
pages. At this point it is sufficient to note that the plan was
originally not only philanthropic, but patriotic and practical. It
contemplated the benefit, through means adapted to their special
condition, of Americans of that class to which Peter Cooper himself
belonged.

Some further observations concerning the secret of the universal esteem
and affection enjoyed by Mr. Cooper will be reserved for the closing
chapter.





PETER COOPER




I

ANCESTRY


OBADIAH COOPER, who, with his two brothers, came from England to the
colony of New York about 1662, belonged, as we may infer with
confidence, to that sturdy class of republican yeomanry which found the
restored reign of the Stuarts intolerable. He settled at
Fishkill-on-the-Hudson; and his son Obadiah--whom tradition declares to
have been the fourth white man child born in what is now Dutchess
County--was the great-grandfather of Peter Cooper. In 1720 an Obadiah of
the next generation followed, and of his son John, born in 1755, Peter
Cooper was the fifth child.

John Cooper came of age in the year of the Declaration of Independence.
In the issue between the British government and the American colonies
his choice could not be doubtful. He followed the traditions of his
family. Indeed, it is now well established and universally admitted that
the patriots of the American Revolution were not in fact arrayed against
England. They were engaged in a struggle which was but a part of the
great conflict waged against shortsighted and obstinate tyranny by
Englishmen on both sides of the ocean, and in which the victory for
liberty was won on this side sooner than on the other. What the Coopers
and their kind achieved here was applauded openly in the mother country
by the descendants of a common ancestry as a triumph for the common
cause. The use of foreign mercenaries under British commanders in this
country was the direct result of the impossibility of inducing
Englishmen to enlist for service against their American kinsmen. Hence
when John Cooper, of Fishkill, abandoned in 1776 the business he had
just established as a hatter, and became sergeant in a company of
"minute-men," he was but pursuing the course indicated both by his own
convictions and by the history of his fathers and the sympathies of the
party in England to which they had belonged. It was Freedom's battle
"handed down from sire to son."

He served subsequently for two years in the Continental line, and for
the last four years of the war as a lieutenant in the New York militia,
actively employed in the perilous service of protecting life, property,
and the public stores in the zone of debatable territory,--the "bloody
ground" which surrounded the British lines in New York. At the close of
the war, New York having been evacuated by the enemy, Lieutenant John
Cooper retired to civil life, and resumed business as a hatter in that
city,--a worthy example of that American citizen soldiery which has
always been equally ready to leave the ways of peace for its country's
defense, and to return to them when the exigency had passed.

It was in 1779, during his military service, that John Cooper married
Margaret, the daughter of John Campbell, a deputy quartermaster-general
in the Continental army, and a trusted agent of Washington. The outbreak
of hostilities in 1776 had found John Campbell a prosperous merchant and
owner of real estate in New York city. He at once lent to the
Revolutionary government eleven hundred guineas,--the whole of his ready
money,--entered the service, was made deputy quartermaster-general, and
was directed to superintend the hasty evacuation of the city by the Whig
inhabitants, and to protect them and their property as far as possible.
Lingering too long to assist some of the laggards, he was captured by
the forces landed from the British fleet, but was subsequently released;
and he made a temporary home at Fishkill while actively engaged in
establishing the lines by which the British army, though holding the
city and commanding its access to the sea, was practically besieged.
General Campbell served throughout the war, and after hostilities had
ceased commanded the troops at West Point until they were finally
disbanded in 1785.

It is easy to imagine how the young lieutenant and the daughter of the
commander who must have been frequently brought into personal relations
with him may have met and loved and wedded in the midst of those
troublous times, but the romance would have no special bearing on this
history. It is enough to say that by this marriage the best blood of
England and Scotland--of servants of God and lovers of freedom--was
blended in the nine children, seven sons and two daughters, of whom
Peter Cooper--born February 12, 1791, in Little Dock (now Water) Street,
New York--was the fifth.

John Cooper was not characteristically a seer of visions or a dreamer of
dreams. On the contrary, the accounts of him which have come down to us
describe him as a stalwart athlete, who "could lift a barrel of cider
from the ground and put it in a wagon," and who once, being cornered and
attacked by a bull, seized the animal's nose with one hand and so
battered its head with a stone that it was glad to turn and fly. Yet he
came of a race that believed in Divine guidance; and on one occasion at
least he acted upon that belief in a matter then deemed more important,
perhaps, than now. The incident can be given best in the words of Peter
Cooper himself, who wrote:--

"My father used to tell me how he came to call me Peter. When I was born
he became strongly impressed with the idea that I would some day have
more than ordinary fame, and what name he should give me was a matter of
serious and frequent thought. While walking on Broadway one dark night
it seemed as though a voice spoke to him in a clear and distinct manner:
'Call him Peter!' That seeming voice settled my name. My father said
that he felt that I was to be of great good in some way; and his
remarks, with my mother's, concerning their aspirations and hopes for me
acted as a stimulus and made me anxious to fulfill their wishes, and not
disappoint them."

If names were to be characteristic of individual careers, it might be
better to imitate some Indian tribes, and to give the permanent name
only after the career, or at least the character, of its recipient had
been indicated by his acts. In this instance the subsequent life of the
son did not in any peculiar way imitate that of the Apostle Peter.
Evidently not that particular name, but the simple fact that an eminent
name, thus suggested and not already familiar in his family, had been
given to him, produced upon his mind the effect to which he testifies.

But why should practical John Cooper be disposed to anticipate a special
distinction for the infant who was the fifth of his numerous progeny?
From the standpoint of the modes of thought of the godly patriots of
that generation, and of their ancestors, the English Puritans and the
Scotch Covenanters, it is scarcely hazardous to assume that current
public affairs largely affected such domestic choices. Peter Cooper's
birth was practically simultaneous with the launching of that Ship of
State, the "Union, strong and great," in which all patriots had embarked
"their hopes, triumphant o'er their fears." To his veteran-soldier
father he was the first child of the new era; and the dreams that were
dreamed over him were doubtless connected with that glorious future
which had just dawned upon the federated republic. The choice of an
unfamiliar, non-hereditary name, however suggested, symbolized the break
between the old time and the new.

Above all, this incident produced in the son thus christened the
profoundest effects, the deepest motives, that can inspire a boyish
soul,--the belief in a beneficent mission, the yearning to discover it,
the resolve to execute it, and the conviction that it was to be directly
connected with the prosperity and progress of the great nation, the life
of which began with his own.

The naming of Peter Cooper thus strikes the keynote, or, more
accurately, the triple chord, of his life. For he was first of all an
American, keenly aware of the opportunities offered by the free
institutions of his country to individual ambition, industry, and
genius, and of his own personal ability to make use of these
opportunities. Secondly, he was a lover of his fellow men, determined to
employ for their benefit the means and powers which he felt himself able
to accumulate by thought, toil, and frugal economy. Thirdly, he was even
in his philanthropy essentially still an American, intent most of all
upon the welfare of those classes of his countrymen with whose struggles
and needs his own early life had made him familiar. In other words,
while his philanthropy covered a world-wide range, his peculiar mission,
as he conceived it, was indissolubly blent with the success of the
republic of which he was one of the earliest-born sons.




II

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH


AT a meeting of friends, gathered February 12, 1882, to celebrate his
ninety-first birthday anniversary, Mr. Cooper, after expressing his
thanks for their congratulatory good wishes, and observing that in his
case "length of days had not yet resulted in weariness of spirit," added
this review of his life:--

"Looking back, I can see that my career has been divided into three
eras. During the