SECOND PERIOD
GERMINATION -ACADEMY AND COLLEGE History of the University of Virginia, 1819-1919; The Lengthened Shadow of One Man, Volume I | ||
XV. Fight Against Cooper
By February, 1818, the prospect of retaining Cooper had become overclouded. An acute hostility to his appointment had already been expressed by members of the religious denominations. During the following autumn, after the Report of the Rockfish Gap Commission, in favor of converting Central College into the State University, had been drafted for delivery to the General Assembly, Abbe Corrèa endeavored to strengthen Cooper's position by trumpeting his great attainments. "Learning and love of science and of its diffusion," he wrote Francis W. Gilmer, "are as different as light and caloric. They are not always united. I have met through life many a phosphoric savant who did not communicate heat. Judge Cooper does both." The University having been chartered, his reappointment came up
Chapman Johnson, one of the most astute lawyers of the State, and a very accomplished and winning man, had taken David Watson's place on the Board. He, together with Cabell and Cocke, were averse to Cooper's reappointment. Cabell had written to Jefferson and hinted a doubt about the expediency of the choice, but if he was employed, said he, he should not be permitted to come alone. Nevertheless, Cabell thought that Jefferson should be sustained if he had committed himself to Cooper; and this seems to have been Johnson's attitude, too, when he learned from R. H. Lee, of Staunton, who had been one of Cooper's pupils, -that his character was entitled to unquestionable respect. Cocke, however, was not so much inclined to yield, though pained by the position in which his conscientious objections put him. "The thought of opposing my individual opinion," he wrote Cabell on March 1, 1819, "upon a subject of this nature against the high authority of Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison, has cost me a conflict which has shaken the very foundations of my health, for I feet now as if I should have a spell of sickness. But I could not act
Jefferson, however, was not to be turned in his resolution; he urged that the new institution was bound in law to enter into a contract with Cooper, should he accept the proposal which had been made to him.[33] "Moreover," he added with the extravagance which tinged his impressions quite frequently when the spirit of the partisan was aroused in him, " Cooper is acknowledged by every enlightened man who knows him to be the greatest man in America in the powers of his mind, and in acquired information, and that without a single exception. I understand that a rumor unfavorable to his habits has been afloat in some places, but I never heard of a single man who undertook to charge him with present or late intemperance, and I think rumor is fairly outweighed by the counter-evidence of the great desire shown at William and Mary to get him; that shown by the enlightened men of Philadelphia to retain him; and the anxiety of New York to get him; that of Corrèa to place him here, who is in constant intercourse with him; the evidence I received on his visit here, when the state of his health permitted him to eat nothing but vegetables and drink nothing but water; his declaration to me at the table that he dared not drink ale or cider or a single glass of wine, and this in the presence of Corrèa, who, if there had been any hypocrisy in it, would not have failed to tell me so."
Jefferson carried his point, and on March 29, 1819,
The deep aversion of the religious sects now again raised a threatening voice. Cooper had published an edition of Dr. Priestley's works, in the preface to which he had given expression to views flagrantly unorthodox.[34] Dr. John H. Rice, editor of the justly influential Evangelical Magazine, who, as we shall soon see, had taken an energetic part in creating a popular sentiment favorable to the passage of the University bill, came out with a vigorous but temperate article condemning Cooper's employment as a teacher of youth. The quotations which he submitted from Cooper's writings were such as to shock the minds of a conservative people like the Virginians; and he was, therefore, sustained by public opinion in the assertion that, as the University was a State institution, the different denominations who joined in supporting it had a right to be offended by the selection of professors whose heresies struck, as they thought, at the foundations of "social order, morals, and religion." Jefferson's choler was quickly and thoroughly aroused by these clerical reflections on Cooper, who, he declared with bitterness, had been charged with Unitarianism "as presumptuously as if it were a crime.." "For myself," he wrote General Robert B. Taylor, "I am not disposed to regard the denunciation of these satellites of religious inquisition"; but his colleagues differed in view from him, and when the mortified Cooper offered his resignation,
Jefferson did not disguise his chagrin over this miscarriage. "I have looked to him," he wrote General Taylor, in May, 1820, "as the corner-stone of our edifice. I know of no one who could have aided us so much in forming the future regulations for our infant institution, and although we may hereafter procure from Europe equivalents in the sciences, they can never replace the advantages of his experience, his knowledge of the character, the habits, and manners of our country, his identification with its sentiments and principles, and the high reputation he has obtained in it generally." Such was the unlucky upshot of the only formal arrangement which was entered into to procure a professor for Central College. The contract was passed on to the University, where it ended in the disaster which has been described. The later experience with Professors Long and Key, who did not remain until the end of the terms for which they were employed, confirms the pertinency of Jefferson's reasons for so ardently wishing to engage Cooper so far as those reasons related to his residence of many years n the country, and to his sympathy with Republican doctrines and institutions. From other points of view, his resignation, perhaps, was no cause for regret. He seemed to flourish most in a storm-centre created by himself; but that was not the atmosphere which would have
Writing to Cabell Feb. 19, 1819, Jefferson says, "Our engagement with Dr. Cooper obliges us to receive him, and I shall propose to let an usher of our nomination and under our patronage, give a grammar school for the senior classes in Charlottesville on his account altogether, receiving nothing from the College. In that case, Cooper may take the highest or higher classes and may open his law school."
"I fear that Cooper's appointment," William H. Cabell wrote to his brother, Joseph, March 21, 1820, "will do the University infinite injury. His religious views are damnable, as exhibited in a book published by him shortly after the death of Priestley. You will have every religious man in Virginia against you."
SECOND PERIOD
GERMINATION -ACADEMY AND COLLEGE History of the University of Virginia, 1819-1919; The Lengthened Shadow of One Man, Volume I | ||