Number 4

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:-