Peter Cooper Part 1

Peter Cooper.

by Rossiter W. Raymond.

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 circ.u.mstance, 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 t.i.tles 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 a.n.a.lysis, which I introduce here, as a guide in the interpretation of what is to follow.

1. The time of his birth and the prophetic antic.i.p.ations 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 acc.u.mulating 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 subst.i.tute 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 inst.i.tution 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 cla.s.s 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 st.u.r.dy cla.s.s 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 "b.l.o.o.d.y 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 pa.s.sed.

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 a.s.sist 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 G.o.d 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 antic.i.p.ate a special distinction for the infant who was the fifth of his numerous progeny?

From the standpoint of the modes of thought of the G.o.dly patriots of that generation, and of their ancestors, the English Puritans and the Scotch Covenanters, it is scarcely hazardous to a.s.sume 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 inst.i.tutions 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 acc.u.mulate 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 cla.s.ses 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 first thirty years I was engaged in getting a start in life; during the second thirty years I was occupied in getting means for carrying out the modest plan which I had long formed for the benefit of my fellow men; and during the last thirty years I have devoted myself to the execution of these plans. This work is now done."

Accepting this division of his career, as convenient, though not strictly accurate (since the processes described really overlapped instead of separately succeeding one another), we may consider first Mr.

Cooper's means and method of achieving personal success; and in this survey the conditions of his boyhood and early youth are primarily important.

While he was still very young, the family removed from a temporary residence of three years in New York city to Peekskill, where he remained until, at the age of seventeen, he returned to New York as an apprentice, to be, thenceforward, dependent upon his own exertions for a living.

The intervening period was spent in ways characteristic of the period and of the individual. He attended school for three or four "quarters,"

of which period, according to his later recollection, "probably half was occupied by 'half-day' school." Outside of this scanty formal instruction, there is ample evidence that he developed body and mind in varied work and play. He bore to the end of life the scars of youthful escapades, witnessing the adventurous spirit of his boyhood. When only four years old, he climbed about the framework of a new house, and fell, head downward, upon an iron kettle, cutting his forehead to the bone.

Later on, he was accidentally cut with a knife in the hands of a playmate. Later still, he cut himself dangerously with an axe. Again, he fell from a high tree, holding an iron hook with which he had been reaching for cherry-bearing branches, and managed to hook out one of his teeth. At another time he went for the nest of a hanging-bird, and had the fact that it was a hornet's nest indelibly impressed on his memory.

Of course, he was nearly drowned three times,--such youngsters always have such escapes. In short, he was a thorough boy, adventuring all things, daunted by nothing, and protected from the results of his reckless endeavors by that Providence which watches over small boys.

But such a temperament finds play in useful work also. The boy learned every department of the hat-making business, beginning, when he was very young, with pulling the fur from the skins of rabbits. And, while a.s.sisting his mother in doing the family washing, he made what was, perhaps, his first invention,--a mechanical arrangement for pounding the soiled linen. Again, after carefully dissecting an old shoe, to learn how it was put together, he determined to make shoes and slippers for the family, and succeeded in turning out products of manufacture which were said to be as good as those to be found, at that day, in the regular trade.

He constructed a toy wagon, sold it for six dollars, managed to gather four dollars more, invested the ten dollars in lottery tickets, and drew only blanks, of which experience he said many years later, "I consider it one of the best investments of my life; for I then learned that it was not my _forte_ to make money at games of chance."

When he was between thirteen and fourteen years old, his father built a large malt-house at Newburg, and the son loaded with his own hands and carted to the site selected all the stone for the building. Collecting wild honey and shooting game in the forests around Peekskill were additional employments which combined pleasure with profit. But this life did not satisfy the ambition of the youth; and in 1808, at the age of seventeen, he left the paternal roof and apprenticed himself for four years to John Woodward, a leading coach-builder in New York, whose shop was located on the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street, then the northerly edge of the city, opposite a vegetable garden, the remnants of which, after the occupation of a large portion by city, county, and national buildings, now const.i.tute the City Hall Park. The terms of his employment were his board and a salary of twenty-five dollars a year,--out of which he managed not only to pay all obligations, but also to lay by a little money. During this period he not only mastered the details of the trade, but learned in his hours of leisure other branches, such as ornamental wood-carving, and made several inventions, one of which was a machine for mortising hubs,--an operation performed by hand up to that time. Another invention over which the young apprentice dreamed, and of which he laboriously constructed a model, was an apparatus for utilizing, in the running of machinery, the swift current of the tide in the East River.