John Cooper, the father of Peter Cooper, was of English stock. He was twenty-one years old in that most unforgetable year, Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six. At the first call to arms, he enlisted as a minuteman. He fought valiantly through the war, in the field, and in the fortifications surrounding New York City, and came out of Freedom's fight penniless, but with one valuable possession—a wife.
In Seventeen Hundred Seventy-nine, he married the daughter of General John Campbell, his commander, who was then stationed at West Point. It was an outrageous thing for a sergeant to do, and I am sorry to say it was absolutely without orders or parental permission. The bride called it a Cooper union.
The Campbells, very properly, were Scotch, and the Scotch have a bad habit of thinking themselves a trifle better than the English. Like the Irish, they regard an Englishman with suspicion. The Scotch swear that they have never been conquered, certainly not by J. Bull, who has always been quite willing to give them anything they ask for.
At the time of his marriage, Sergeant Cooper was engaged in the laudable business of looking after General Campbell's horses, and also, let it be known, of making garden for the Campbell family.
In his garden work, John Cooper was under the immediate orders of Margaret Campbell. After hours, the Sergeant used to play a piccolo, and among other tuneful lays he piped one called "The Campbells Are Coming." It was on one such musical occasion that the young couple simply walked off and got married, thus proving a point which I have long held, to wit: Music is a secondary love manifestation.
On being informed of the facts, General Campbell promptly ordered that Sergeant John Cooper be shot. Before the execution could take place, the sentence was commuted to thirty days in the guardhouse. After serving one day, the culprit was pardoned on petition of his wife.
In a month he was made a captain, and later a lieutenant. The business of a soldier is not apt to be of a kind to develop his mental resources. Soldiers fight under orders; and initiative, production and economy are mere abstractions to your man of the sword.
Suffice it to say that in the war, John Cooper lost the ability to become a civilian of the first rank. He was industrious but improvident; he made money and he lost it. He had a habit of abandoning good inventions for worse ones. The ability to eliminate is good, but in sifting ideas let us cleave to those that are workable, until Fate proves there is something really better.
Peter Cooper was the fifth child in a family of nine. Bees know the secret of sex, but man does not. Peter Cooper's mother thought that her fifth child was to be a girl, but it was not until after the boy had grown to be a man and was proving his prowess, that his parents remembered why they had called him Peter, and said, "On this rock shall our family be built."