Peter Cooper and Miss Bedel were married on December 22, 1813, when he was twenty-two and the lady twenty-one. Their married life, as it was exceptionally long, so it was exceptionally happy. It lasted fifty-six years; Mrs. Cooper died in 1869, and Mr. Cooper survived her fourteen years, dying in 1883. Their golden wedding was celebrated in 1863. They had six children, but only two lived to grow up; the Hon. Edward Cooper, once mayor of the city, and Sarah Amelia Cooper, the wife of the Hon. Abram S. Hewitt. Mr. James Parton says: "There never was a happier marriage than this. To old age Mr. Cooper never sat near his wife without holding her hand in his. He never spoke to her, nor of her, without some tender epithet. He attributed the great happiness of his life and most of his success to her admirable qualities. She seconded every good impulse of his benevolence, and made the fulfilment of his great scheme possible by her wise and resolute economy."
Mr. Cooper seems to have inherited something of his father's business restlessness, for in addition to the many pursuits in which we have seen him engage, he now bought a grocery stand, and in about a year gave that up and purchased a glue factory, selling his grocery business and buying a lease of the glue factory for twenty-one years, for $2,000, his whole savings. He differed from his father in this, that everything prospered with which he had to do. The grocery had done well, but the glue factory did better. "At that time nearly all the glue used in this country was imported from Ireland, and sold at a high price. Mr. Cooper studied the subject and experimented, until he was able to make better glue than the Irish and sell it at a lower price, and he soon had nearly the entire glue business of the country in his hands." But chance had nothing to do with Mr. Cooper's success: the secret of that success was unremitting industry and generous economy. He worked that he might earn, and he saved that he might use and give. For twenty years while he held the glue factory, he was his own bookkeeper, clerk, and salesman; going to the factory at daybreak to light the fires, and spending the evenings at home, posting his books, writing, and reading to his family.
In 1828, moved by the interest in business circles in the completion of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, Mr. Cooper, with two partners, bought a tract of three thousand acres within the city limits of Baltimore. By the failure of his associates to meet the payment of their shares, Mr. Cooper was obliged to shoulder the whole cost, amounting to $105,000. The road, too, owing to unexpected difficulties in construction, was dreading bankruptcy, from which it was saved by Mr. Cooper's ingenuity in devising a locomotive that enabled the company to overcome certain difficulties that had been thought insurmountable. Failing in the end to sell his land as he had hoped, Mr. Cooper decided to utilize the timber growing on it in the manufacture of charcoal iron. When he had, after many difficulties, established his works, he sold out to some Boston capitalists, who formed the Canton Iron Company. Mr. Cooper took a large part of the purchase in stock at $45 a share, which he finally sold out at $230 a share.
This was the beginning of his interest in the iron business, where the greater part of his fortune was made. The remainder came from his glue works and the industries connected with them. In 1873, the year of the great panic, in a letter to President Grant suggesting remedial legislation, Mr. Cooper said that not less than a thousand persons depended for their bread on the business carried on in the circle of his family. He had at that time two rolling-mills running, and two mills for the manufacture of wire and springs; and his glue, oil, and isinglass works gave employment to two hundred persons.
The story of Mr. Cooper's connection with the laying of the Atlantic cable has been so often told, that we do not repeat it here. It adds further testimony to his indomitable energy, his largeness of view, his financial ability, and the confidence that was felt in him by his fellow-men. The story of the difficulties, failures and final success of this grandest achievement of modern science and enterprise, is as romantic as any episode in social history.
But, in Peter Cooper's view, the most important event in his life—the one to which all his energies, his thoughts, his economics had been steadily directed since his youth—was the founding of the institution that bears his name, and that has made him a powerful factor in the development of New York. It was the outcome, in the first place, of its founder's regret for the deficiencies of his own early training, which were owing partly to his parents' poverty and partly to the lack of public or free schools in his native city when he was a boy. But this regret, which could only have been felt by a man of superior intelligence, was made to flower in this great result by Mr. Cooper's genuine, deep, and unfailing love for his fellow-men, and his belief in the duty of every man to help the race forward in its progress to a better social condition. He has himself stated the principles on which his life was founded. His aim was "to render some equivalent to society, in some useful form of labor, for each day of his existence;" and "while he had always recognized that the object of business is to make money in an honorable manner, he had endeavored to remember that the object of life is to do good."
In 1876 Mr. Cooper was nominated for the presidency by the National Independent or "Greenback" party. It was with no selfish ambition that he allowed his name to go before the voters of the country, and his only regret at the result was that a policy was defeated which he believed to be for the public good.
Mr. Cooper died April 4, 1883, at the age of ninety-two, after a short illness, the result of a cold. At his funeral, the late Dr. Crosby said: "What an example has been set by this life to our young men! How it shows them what the true aim of life should be! What an example to our wealthy men to show that money obtained by honest industry, and spent in benefiting mankind, will never produce war between labor and capital, but will assuage all angry elements, and give universal peace! Oh! if all our wealthy men were like Peter Cooper, all classes would be satisfied, all commotions cease, and the community would be as near perfection—as near perfection in the pecuniary view—as it possibly could be on earth."[Back to Contents]
