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 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

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 feet 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.[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,

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.[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,

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 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

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