The ratio of marriages, we are told, keeps pace with the price of corn. On the strength of his five hundred dollars, Peter Cooper embarked on the sea of matrimony, as the village editors express it. When Peter Cooper married Sarah Bedell, it was a fortunate thing for the world. Peter Cooper was a Commonsense Man, which is really better than to be a genius. A Commonsense Man is one who does nothing to make people think he is different from what he is. He is one who would rather be than seem! But a Commonsense Man needs a Commonsense Woman to help him live a Commonsense Life. Mrs. Cooper was a Commonsense Woman. She was of Huguenot parentage.
Persecution had given the Huguenots a sternness of mental and moral fiber, just as it had blessed and benefited the Puritans. The habit of independent thought got into the veins of these Huguenots, and they played important parts in the War of the Revolution. Like the Jews, they made good Freethinkers. They reason things out without an idolatrous regard for precedent.
For fifty-seven years Peter and Sarah fought the battle of life together. He clarified his thought by explaining his plans to her, and together they grew rich—rich in money, rich in knowledge, rich in experience, rich in love.
There are men who are not content to put all their eggs into one basket, and then watch the basket.
Peter Cooper craved the excitement of adventure. His nature demanded new schemes, new plans, new methods upon which to break the impulse of his mind. The trade-wind of his genius did not blow constantly from one direction. Had he been content to focus on coach-building, he could have become rich beyond the dream of avarice. As it was, the fact that he could build as good a coach as any one else satisfied that quarter-section of his nature.
When the war of Eighteen Hundred Twelve closed, there was a great shrinkage in wool. Peter Cooper sold his holdings for a grocery-store, which he ran just long enough to restock and sell to a man who wanted it more than he did.
Then he started a furniture-factory, for he was an expert worker in wood. But the bench for him was only by-play. As he worked, his mind roamed the world.
He used glue in making the furniture. He bought his glue from a man who had a little factory on the site of what is now the Park Avenue Hotel. The man who made the glue did not like the business. He wanted to make furniture, just as comedians always want to play Hamlet. Peter Cooper's furniture-shop was in a rented building. The glue-man owned his site. Peter Cooper traded his furniture-shop for the glue-factory, and got a deed to the premises.
He was then thirty-three years old. The glue-factory was the foundation of his fortune. He made better glue and more glue than any other concern in America. Few men of brains would get stuck on the glue business. There are features about it not exactly pleasant. The very difficulties of it, however, attracted Cooper. He never referred to his glue-factory as a chemical laboratory, nor did he call it a studio. He was proud of his business. He made the first isinglass manufactured in America, and for some years monopolized the trade.