University of Virginia Library

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 Corréa 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

again for discussion by the Board at a meeting held at
Montpelier, the home of Madison. In the teeth of
weather graphically described by General Cocke as the
"most snowy that he had ever seen," Jefferson rode on
horseback over the clogged country highways to be present;
he was now close upon his seventy-sixth birthday;
but neither the infirmities of old age, nor obliterated
roads, nor a nipping wind, were suffered to create insurmountable
obstructions to the journey. It was not simply
that he wished to hasten the progress of the buildings,
—he was acutely interested in Cooper's prompt reelection
because that would allow two professorships to be inaugurated
practically at once.

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 feel now as if I
should have a spell of sickness. But I could not act

otherwise, for if I had expired under the trial, I should
have held out to the last."

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.[23] "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,

Cooper,—who, it will be remembered, had been elected
professor of chemistry and law in Central College,—
was appointed to the diversified chair of chemistry, mineralogy,
natural philosophy, and law, in the recently incorporated
University; he was guaranteed a salary that
was not to fall short of $3,500 in amount; and the Board
agreed to purchase his apparatus at cost, and twenty-five
hundred specimens of his mineralogical collection at fifty
cents apiece. Furthermore, the annual expense of all
articles consumed in the experiments of his chemical lectures
was to be defrayed by the institution, provided that
it did not exceed two hundred and fifty dollars. There
was but one condition in modification of this contract;
namely, that payment for the mineralogical specimens
was to be deferred until more schools had been created,
and more professors engaged; but, in the meanwhile, an
annual interest of six per cent. was to be paid on the sum
of the purchase money. When this liberal agreement
was entered into, there was a prospect that the first lecture
would be delivered at the University in the spring of
1820; but by October, 1819, it was clearly foreseen that
this would be impracticable, and the Board, through the
committee of superintendence,—Jefferson and Cocke,
—so informed Dr. Cooper; who consented to put off
the commencement of his duties to a later date, without
any compensation beyond the advance of fifteen hundred
dollars for his subsistence. This was to be deducted from
the first instalment of salary after he should begin to
discharge his functions; but he reserved the right to occupy
a pavilion in the meanwhile. Jefferson, who, in the
first instance, had been too impatient to contract with
him, looked upon these terms as moderate and reasonable.
Cocke, the other member of the committee, demurred
to Cooper's establishing his domicile at the University
before he could be usefully employed there, since
it was calculated, he said, "to injure the institution at a
time when it stood in need of every friend who could
rally around it."

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.[24]
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,

they wisely and discreetly accepted it. He received the
remainder of the fifteen hundred dollars promised him,
of which seven hundred and fifty had already been anticipated
by him. His final communication with the Board
was marked by both dignity and manliness: "Whatever
my religious creed may be, and perhaps I do not exactly
know it myself, it is a pleasure to reflect that my conduct
has not brought, and is not likely to bring, discredit on
my friends."

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
in 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

brought respect and prosperity to an infant seat of learning,
with a reputation yet to be made and confirmed.