LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 University of California. 
 
 Class 
 
<3Tfre ifttoer?ibe biographical &erie 
 
 i. ANDREW JACKSON, by W. G. Brown. 
 
 2. JAMES B. E ADS, by Louis How. 
 
 3. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, by Paul E. 
 
 More. 
 
 4. PETER COOPER, by R. W. Raymond. 
 
 5. THOMAS JEFFERSON, by H. C. Mbr- 
 
 WIN. 
 
 6. WILLIAM PENN, by George Hodges. 
 
 7. GENERAL GRANT, by Walter Allen. 
 
 8. LEWIS AND CLARK, by William R. 
 
 LlGHTON. 
 
 9. JOHN MARSHALL, by JamesB. Thayer. 
 
 10. ALEXANDER HAMILTON, by Chas. A. 
 
 CONANT. 
 
 11. WASHINGTON IRVING,by H. W. Boyn- 
 
 TON. 
 
 12. PAUL JONES, by Hutchins Hapgood. 
 
 13. STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS, by W. G. 
 
 Brown. 
 
 14. SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN, by H. D. 
 
 Sedgwick, Jr. 
 
 15. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, by Hor- 
 
 ace E. SCUDDER. 
 
 Each about 140 pages, i6mo, with photogravure 
 portrait, vols. 1-9, 75 cents ; other subsequent 
 vols., each 65 cents, net; School Edition, 
 each, 50 cents, net. 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
 Boston and New York. 
 
Wfyt Hitomfoe Biographical Series 
 
 NUMBER 4 
 
 PETER COOPER 
 
 BY 
 
 ROSSITER W. RAYMOND 
 
PETER COOPER 
 
 BY 
 
 ROSSITER W. RAYMOND 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
g 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1 901, BY ROSSITER W. RAYMOND. 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 Preface vii 
 
 I. Ancestry 1 
 
 II. Boyhood and Youth .... 10 
 
 III. Business Ventures 16 
 
 IV. Inventions 29 
 
 V. The Tom Thumb 38 
 
 VI. Municipal Affairs .... 52 
 VII. The Cooper Union for the Advance- 
 ment of Science and Art ... 64 
 VIII. National Politics . 96 
 IX. The End 104 
 
 227630 
 
PKEFACE 
 
 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 com- 
 panion, and also, incidentally, as consulting 
 engineer of the firm of Cooper and Hewitt, 
 and manager of a department in the Cooper 
 Union. This circumstance, together with 
 the preference kindly expressed by Mr. 
 Cooper's family, doubtless influenced the se- 
 lection of the writer for the honorable task 
 of preparing this book, a task which was 
 welcome as a labor of love, though the exe- 
 cution 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 adven- 
 ture which could be treated briefly, with 
 picturesque effect. 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 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 fur- 
 nished valuable data ; and the study of 
 them suggests an observation which may be 
 heeded with advantage in similar cases here- 
 after, 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 de- 
 scribed more accurately in authentic contem- 
 poraneous records. 
 
 It has not been practicable to preserve, 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 in the treatment of the subject, a strictly 
 chronological order. As the titles of the 
 several chapters indicate, the different lines 
 of Mr. Cooper's activity have been consid- 
 ered, to some extent, separately, so that 
 their periods overlap each other. 
 
 This sketch of Mr. Cooper's career fur- 
 nishes the elements of an analysis, which I 
 introduce here, as a guide in the interpreta- 
 tion of what is to follow. 
 
 1. The time of his birth and the pro- 
 phetic anticipations of his parents pro- 
 foundly influenced his ambition to do some- 
 thing 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 adven- 
 ture. New institutions, 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 stimu- 
 late endeavor. What Peter Cooper said of 
 himself as an apprentice was true of the typi- 
 cal young American of his time : " I was al- 
 
x PREFACE 
 
 ways planning and contriving, and was never 
 satisfied unless I was doing something diffi- 
 cult something that had never been done 
 before, if possible." 
 
 3. The new freedom and the vast oppor- 
 tunity presented in the young republic en- 
 couraged, 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 activ- 
 ities. It was no disgrace to an American 
 to go into one business after another, seek- 
 ing the one which would prove most profit- 
 able and agreeable. Thus, Peter Cooper 
 
 i worked successively as a hatter, a coach- 
 builder, a machinist, a machine-maker, a 
 grocer, an iron-worker, and a glue-manufac- 
 turer, achieving success in every occupation, 
 but abandoning each for something more 
 I promising, and learning in each something 
 \ which promoted his success in the next. 
 
 4. At every stage of his progress, he fol- 
 lowed the ideal of personal independence, 
 the honest acquisition of property, the es- 
 tablishment of a home, and the rearing of a 
 
PREFACE xi 
 
 family. These were the first duties and the 
 dearest wishes no matter what greater 
 things might lie beyond. And he pro- 
 foundly 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 an- 
 other thirty years in accumulating 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 hope- 
 ful, neither wasting his energies in visionary 
 schemes nor allowing the eddies of daily 
 toil to divert the current of his deeper pur- 
 poses. 
 
 5. At every stage, however, he found 
 himself hindered by lack of thorough know- 
 ledge. He invented perpetually and pro- 
 fusely ; but some of his most cherished in- 
 ventions 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 substitute 
 
xii PREFACE 
 
 for a scientific knowledge of what can be, 
 and now needs to be, done. He found him- 
 self often too far in advance of his genera- 
 tion. 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, recog- 
 nize the fact that such disadvantages, ne- 
 cessitating 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 suc- 
 cessful than he is; and not one of them 
 fails to desire, for his children and the com- 
 ing generation of his fellows, the early advan- 
 tages which were denied to himself. 
 
 8. This experience it was which gave 
 form to the aspirations and purposes of 
 Peter Cooper. As an apprentice, he re- 
 solved to do something for the benefit of 
 apprentices to found some institution 
 
PREFACE xiii 
 
 which should supplement the deficiencies of 
 early education, furnishing to virtuous, in- 
 dustrious, 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 modi- 
 fied and realized will be seen in later pages. 
 At this point it is sufficient to note that 
 the plan was originally not only philanthro- 
 pic, but patriotic and practical. It contem- 
 plated the benefit, through means adapted 
 to their special condition, of Americans of 
 that class to which Peter Cooper himself be- 
 longed. 
 
 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 
 
 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 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 
 
2 PETER COOPER 
 
 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 estab- 
 lished 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 short- 
 sighted and obstinate tyranny by English- 
 men 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 command- 
 ers 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 
 
ANCESTRY 3 
 
 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 de- 
 batable 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, Lieu- 
 tenant 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 ser- 
 vice, that John Cooper married Margaret, the 
 
4 PETER COOPER 
 
 daughter of John Campbell, a deputy quarter- 
 master-general in the Continental army, and a 
 trusted agent of Washington. The outbreak 
 of hostilities in 1776 had found John Camp- 
 bell 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 di- 
 rected 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 subse- 
 quently 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 command- 
 ing its access to the sea, was practically be- 
 sieged. General Campbell served through- 
 out the war, and after hostilities had ceased 
 commanded the troops at West Point until 
 they were finally disbanded in 1785. 
 
ANCESTRY 5 
 
 It is easy to imagine how the young lieu- 
 tenant 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 ser- 
 vants of God and lovers of freedom was 
 blended in the nine children, seven sons 
 and two daughters, of which 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. 
 
6 PETER COOPER 
 
 Yet he came of a race that believed in Di- 
 vine 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 be- 
 came 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 indi- 
 vidual careers, it might be better to imitate 
 some Indian tribes, and to give the per- 
 
ANCESTRY 7 
 
 manent 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 testi- 
 fies. 
 
 But why should practical John Cooper 
 be disposed to anticipate a special distinc- 
 tion for the infant who was the fifth of his 
 numerous progeny? From the standpoint 
 of the modes of thought of the godly patriots 
 of that generation, and of their ancestors, 
 the English Puritans and the Scotch Cove- 
 nanters, it is scarcely hazardous to assume 
 that current public affairs largely affected 
 such domestic choices. Peter Cooper's birth 
 was practically simultaneous with the launch- 
 ing of that Ship of State, the " Union, strong 
 and great," in which all patriots had em- 
 barked " their hopes, triumphant o'er their 
 
8 PETER COOPER 
 
 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, sym- 
 bolized 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 boy- 
 ish 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 institutions of his coun- 
 try to individual ambition, industry, and 
 genius, and of his own personal ability to 
 
ANCESTRY 9 
 
 make use of these opportunities. Secondly, 
 he was a lover of his fellow men, deter- 
 mined to employ for their benefit the means 
 and powers which he felt himself able to 
 accumulate by thought, toil, and frugal econ- 
 omy. Thirdly, he was even in his philan- 
 thropy essentially still an American, intent 
 most of all upon the welfare of those classes 
 of his countrymen with whose struggles and 
 needs his own early life had made him famil- 
 iar. In other words, while his philanthropy 
 covered a world-wide range, his peculiar mis- 
 sion, 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 Febru- 
 ary 12, 1882, to celebrate his ninety-first birth- 
 day anniversary, Mr. Cooper, after express- 
 ing 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 get- 
 ting 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 
 
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 11 
 
 (since the processes described really over- 
 lapped 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 indi- 
 vidual. 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 esca- 
 pades, witnessing the adventurous spirit of 
 
12 PETER COOPER 
 
 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 in- 
 delibly 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 pro- 
 tected from the results of his reckless en- 
 deavors 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, be- 
 ginning, when he was very young, with pull- 
 
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 13 
 
 ing the fur from the skins of rabbits. And, 
 while assisting his mother in doing the 
 family washing, he made what was, perhaps, 
 his first invention, a mechanical arrange- 
 ment 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 manu- 
 facture 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 expe- 
 rience 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 four- 
 teen 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 
 
14 PETER COOPER 
 
 wild honey and shooting game in the forests 
 around Peekskill were additional employ- 
 ments which combined pleasure with profit. 
 But this life did not satisfy the ambition of 
 the youth; and in 1808, at the age of seven- 
 teen, he left the paternal roof and appren- 
 ticed himself for four years to John Wood- 
 ward, 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 vege- 
 table garden, the remnants of which, after 
 the occupation of a large portion by city, 
 county, and national buildings, now consti- 
 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 
 
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 15 
 
 time. Another invention over which the 
 young apprentice dreamed, and of which he 
 laboriously constructed a model, was an ap- 
 paratus for utilizing, in the running of ma- 
 chinery, the swift current of the tide in the , 
 East River. 
 
 \ 
 
Ill 
 
 BUSINESS VENTURES 
 
 At the end of his apprenticeship, his em- 
 ployer offered to set him up in business as 
 a coach-builder, lending him the necessary 
 capital. Many years later, Mr. Cooper told 
 the story thus : 
 
 " I was about to accept his generous offer, 
 when an incident occurred which changed 
 my decision. Mr. Woodward had just com- 
 pleted one of the finest coaches ever built in 
 New York, for a gentleman who was sup- 
 posed to be one of the richest men in the 
 city. But a day or two before the coach 
 was to be delivered the gentleman died, and 
 it was then found, that he was insolvent. 
 This made me hesitate. If I should accept 
 my employer's kind offer and have such a 
 misfortune happen to me in the sale of an 
 elegant and expensive coach, I should con- 
 sider myself a slave for life, since the law of 
 
BUSINESS VENTURES 17 
 
 imprisonment for debt had not then been 
 abolished. So I changed my plans, and 
 went to Hempstead, Long Island, to visit my 
 brother." 
 
 The visit to Hempstead became a pro- 
 longed residence. He obtained work at 
 $1.50 a day (then regarded as high wages) 
 in a factory making machines for shearing 
 cloth, and after nearly three years had 
 saved enough money to purchase the right 
 for the State of New York to a patented 
 machine for that purpose. He used to tell, 
 in his old age, of his elation when he effected 
 his first sale of a county-right, for which he 
 received five hundred dollars from Mr. Vas- 
 sar, of Poughkeepsie, afterwards the founder 
 of Vassar College. 
 
 The manufacture and sale of the new 
 shearing-machine, into which Mr. Cooper 
 introduced many additional improvements, 
 was a prosperous business, especially during 
 the war of 1812, when domestic woolen 
 goods were in great demand. He married, 
 December 18, 1813, Sarah Bedell, a lady of 
 Huguenot descent, who made for him a happy 
 
18 PETER COOPER 
 
 home during fifty-seven years. 1 He bought 
 a house in Hempstead, expecting to remain 
 there ; and in the household, as in business, 
 he gave rein to his ardent and versatile in- 
 ventive faculty. One of his domestic con- 
 trivances rocked the cradle, fanned away 
 the flies, and played a lullaby to the baby. 
 He sold the patent in Connecticut to a 
 Yankee peddler for a horse and wagon, and 
 the peddler's stock, including a hurdy-gurdy. 
 Another invention was a machine for mow- 
 ing grass, constructed on the principle of his 
 cloth-shearing machine. 
 
 But after the war, the domestic woolen 
 mills were shut down, and there was no sale 
 
 V 
 
 1 Many years after his wife's death, arid shortly before 
 his own, Mr. Cooper dictated the following passage, which 
 is almost the last in his Reminiscences : 
 
 " Not only do I think of my wife during my waking 
 moments ; she often comes to me in my dreams, some- 
 times once a week, sometimes once in two weeks, and 
 sometimes at longer intervals. It is one of the greatest 
 pleasures of my life that I can believe that she has been, 
 and is now, my guardian angel, and it is one of my hap- 
 piest hopes that I shall see that this our world is but 
 the bud of a being that is to ripen and bear its choicest 
 fruits in another and a better." 
 
BUSINESS VENTURES 19 
 
 for Mr. Cooper's machines. So lie first 
 turned his factory into a furniture shop, and 
 then, selling it for what he could get, he 
 moved to New York, and started in the 
 grocery business, buying for this purpose a 
 long lease of the ground where the Bible 
 House now stands, opposite the Cooper 
 Union on Ninth Street. Upon this ground 
 he erected several buildings, one of which 
 he used as his office. The business was 
 profitable ; but the real foundation of Mr. 
 Cooper's wealth was laid when, at the age 
 of thirty-three, he purchased a glue factory, 
 situated where the Park Avenue Hotel now 
 stands, and established himself as a glue 
 manufacturer.* The business speedily ac- 
 quired and Held for half a century practi- 
 cally the whole trade of the country in glue 
 and isinglass, a monopoly fairly earned by 
 the cheapness and excellence of its product. 
 Mr. Cooper's inventions improved the 
 quality and reduced the cost of his product, 
 while his energy, industry, and frugality 
 steadily increased his surplus cash, and en- 
 abled him, without borrowing capital, to 
 
20 PETER COOPER 
 
 extend his sphere of operations. For many 
 years, he carried on his glue business with- 
 out bookkeeper, agent, or salesman. Dawn 
 found him at the suburban factory (on what is 
 now Thirty-Second Street) lighting the fires 
 and preparing for the day's work ; at noon, 
 he drove in his buggy to the city, where he 
 made his own sales and purchases ; and all 
 his evenings he spent at home, making up 
 his accounts, answering his correspondents, 
 studying out new inventions, or talking and 
 reading to his wife and children. 
 
 By these simple, old-fashioned methods he 
 built up a business and accumulated a fortune 
 too large to be thus administered. It would 
 have been impossible for one head to carry the 
 details of work and management, for one pair 
 of eyes to superintend each part of the work, 
 or for one pair of feet, however tireless, to 
 travel all the ways which lead to and from a 
 great modern industrial establishment. Still 
 less could financial direction and protection be 
 compassed by the simple scheme which Mr. 
 Cooper, in his old age, recalled with pride. 
 " I used," he said once, " to pay all my 
 
BUSINESS VENTURES 21 
 
 debts every Saturday night ; and I knew 
 that what I had left was my own ! " This 
 could not have been strictly true ; but it 
 doubtless expressed an old man's memory of 
 the way he began, and the principles he had 
 followed, with that horror of debt which 
 dated from the time when debtors could be 
 put in jail. Fortunately for Mr. Cooper, his 
 son Edward, and his son-in-law, Abram S. 
 Hewitt, were at hand to undertake the man- 
 agement of his business enterprises at the 
 time when his own simple methods would 
 have proved inadequate, so that his inven- 
 tive genius, adventurous courage, and, above 
 all, intense philanthropy, were backed with 
 ample means. 
 
 In this account of his business ventures 
 (though of much later date than those al- 
 ready mentioned) the part played by Peter 
 Cooper in the development of the American 
 iron industry and in the construction of the 
 first transatlantic submarine telegraph may 
 be recorded. 
 
 The manufacture of iron was one of the 
 early industries of the American colonies, 
 
22 PETER COOPER 
 
 and after the Revolution it was prosecuted 
 with increased activity in small and primi- 
 tive establishments. With its development 
 into scientific forms on a large scale Mr. 
 Cooper was both directly and indirectly con- 
 nected. His Ringwood estate in New Jersey 
 had been the scene of the operations of the 
 Ringwood Company in 1740, and of its suc- 
 cessors, Hasenclever (1764) and Erskine 
 (1771) ; and the Durham furnace, on the 
 Delaware River in Pennsylvania (on the site 
 of the Durham Iron Works of Cooper & 
 Hewitt), made its first blast in 1727. Mr. 
 Cooper himself was engaged in 1830 in the 
 manufacture of charcoal 'iron near Baltimore, 
 and in 1836, together with his brother 
 Thomas, he operated a rolling-mill in New 
 York (on Thirty-Third Street, near Third 
 Avenue). At this mill anthracite was used 
 for puddling in 1840. In 1845 the busi- 
 ness was removed to Trenton, N. J. ; and in 
 the new rolling-mill then the largest in 
 the United States built at Trenton for 
 the manufacture of rails, the first iron beams 
 for buildings were rolled in 1854. By the 
 
BUSINESS VENTURES 23 
 
 erection of blast furnaces at Phillipsburg 
 and Kingwood, N. J., and Durham, Pa., and 
 the addition of wire mills, bridge shop, chain 
 shop, etc., to the works at Trenton, the pur- 
 chase of iron and coal lands, and the develop- 
 ment of numerous mines, the firm of Cooper 
 & Hewitt achieved high rank among the 
 ironmasters of America ; and the Iron and 
 Steel Institute of Great Britain conferred 
 upon Peter Cooper in 1879 the " Bessemer 
 gold medal " for his services in the develop- 
 ment of the American iron trade. In 1890 
 the same honor was given to Mr. Abram S. 
 Hewitt in recognition of the experiments at 
 Phillipsburg as early as 1856 to test the 
 new invention of Bessemer, of his introduc- 
 tion of the open-hearth steel process into the 
 United States, and of other services rendered 
 to the steel industry, in all of which he 
 may be said to have followed, with the ad- 
 vantages of a wider culture and ampler 
 means, the example set by Mr. Cooper. 
 
 One of the boldest yet wisest and most 
 profitable operations of Mr. Cooper was his 
 investment in the Atlantic cable enterprise 
 
24 PETER COOPER 
 
 of Cyrus Field. He was already past mid- 
 dle age when this audacious scheme began 
 to be dreamed of. In 1842 Morse had laid 
 'down an experimental cable from Castle 
 Garden to Governor's Island in New York 
 harbor, and claimed as a practical inference 
 that a telegraphic communication on his 
 plan could " with certainty be established 
 across the Atlantic." * In 1851 the first 
 cable was laid between France and England, 
 and others rapidly followed on ocean lines 
 over short distances. The principle was 
 thus established, and the doubts as to its 
 practical application to a line of at least 
 twenty-five hundred miles were of such a 
 character as to seem more serious to scien- 
 tific men than to American capitalists of Mr. 
 Cooper's type. In March, 1854, |he New 
 York, Newfoundland, & London Telegraph 
 Company was organized, and Mr. Cooper 
 became (and remained for twenty trying 
 years) its president. There was little diffi- 
 culty in raising the money for the eighty- 
 
 1 Letter of Morse to the Secretary of the Treasury in 
 the autumn of 1843. 
 
BUSINESS VENTURES 25 
 
 five miles of cable which were to be laid 
 under the Gulf of St. Lawrence, or in ob- 
 taining from the British colonies favorable 
 charters granting exclusive privileges, land 
 grants, and even subsidies. Yet the con- 
 struction of the land line across Newfound- 
 land to the terminus at Heart's Content 
 proved difficult and costly, and the St. Law- 
 rence cable was lost in laying. Yet addi- 
 tional capital was subscribed ; and a couple 
 of years later the Newfoundland line, the 
 St. Lawrence cable, and another submarine 
 link of thirteen miles across the Straits of 
 Northumberland had been successfully fin- 
 ished. Nothing remained to be done except 
 the procuring of means and the devising of 
 successful methods for the installation of the 
 Atlantic cable itself, without which all this 
 preliminary expenditure would have been 
 thrown away. 
 
 The capital estimated as necessary for 
 making and laying the cable was raised by 
 Mr. Field in ^England, where the Atlantic 
 Telegraph Company was formed to construct 
 and operate the line under concessions from 
 
 '., 
 
26 PETER COOPER 
 
 the parent Newfoundland company. All 
 classes in England felt a sentimental in- 
 terest in the romantic enterprise ; and the 
 subscribers to the new stock included such 
 men as Thackeray and others of equal note, 
 outside of business circles altogether. 
 
 The company proceeded with vigor, se- 
 cured from the governments of Great Brit- 
 ain and the United States guaranties of 
 subsidies and the free use of ships for laying 
 the cable ; contracts for the cable and its in- 
 sulating covering were executed ; and by the 
 end of July, 1857, the British Agamemnon 
 and the American Niagara had each twelve 
 hundred and fifty miles of it on board. 
 In August they connected the two halves of 
 it in mid-Atlantic, and in September the 
 shore end was landed at Heart's Content. 
 
 The sequel is familiar history. A few 
 messages had been sent and received, when 
 the current grew weaker and weaker, and at 
 last failed entirely. The result was a strong 
 reaction in popular sentiment. It was even 
 questioned whether any messages had actually 
 crossed the Atlantic. Fortunately this doubt 
 
BUSINESS VENTURES 27 
 
 could be conclusively disproved, especially 
 in England, where it was known that the 
 British government had wired by the cable 
 before its failure news of great political im- 
 portance. The British company indeed cour- 
 ageously proceeded to make another cable ; 
 but when this parted in mid-ocean during 
 the process of laying it even British tenacity 
 of purpose was daunted, and for some two 
 years the enterprise seemed to be dead. 
 Meanwhile public opinion on this side was 
 far more unfavorable, and the parent com- 
 pany found itself without means or credit. 
 To retain its privileges it must pay addi- 
 tional money, and to make those privileges 
 worth anything capital must be raised for 
 a third attempt to lay the transatlantic 
 line. 
 
 Without describing in detail the difficul- 
 ties and anxieties of this period, it may be 
 said that the intelligent courage of Peter 
 Cooper saved the enterprise, while it secured 
 to him a large pecuniary reward; for he 
 perceived that the real problem had been 
 solved by the first apparent failure ; that 
 
28 PETER COOPER 
 
 the failure of a cable in use or the loss of a 
 cable in laying it were mere incidental mis- 
 fortunes which more thorough precautions 
 and better luck would preclude ; and he 
 backed with his own faith and money the 
 undaunted enthusiasm and persuasive elo- 
 quence of Mr. Field, whose expenses he paid 
 for another journey to England, and who 
 succeeded at last in raising there the funds 
 for the third and successful attempt. More- 
 over Mr. Cooper upheld the credit of the 
 Newfoundland company, personally paying 
 the drafts drawn upon it, and taking its 
 bonds as his security. It is too much to say 
 that the Atlantic cable would never have 
 been laid, but there can be no doubt that 
 the enterprise would have been long sus- 
 pended, without this timely aid. The third 
 cable was a success ; the lost second was re- 
 covered and made useful ; and now the thing 
 is easy which thus seemed so problematical. 
 If Peter Cooper received in the end a hand- 
 some sum from this investment, who could 
 grudge him the wealth so acquired ? 
 
IV 
 
 INTENTIONS 
 
 The inventions projected, though in many 
 instances not perfected or successfully intro- 
 duced, by Mr. Cooper constitute a long list 
 and cover a wide field. A few of them may 
 be mentioned here, in addition to those to 
 which allusion has been made already. It 
 will be seen that even those which failed of 
 commercial success generally contained the 
 germs of future mechanical progress, and 
 bore witness to the extraordinary vigor and 
 versatility of his genius. 
 
 When the Erie Canal was approaching 
 completion it occurred to Mr. Cooper that 
 canal boats might be propelled by the power 
 of water drawn from a higher level and 
 moving a series of endless chains along the 
 canal. After some preliminary experiments 
 he built a flat-bottomed scow, arranged a 
 water wheel to utilize the tidal current in 
 
30 PETER COOPER 
 
 the East Eiver, and actually achieved a trial 
 trip of two miles and return, in which Gov- 
 ernor Clinton and other invited guests took 
 part. The governor was so well pleased 
 that he paid Mr. Cooper eight hundred dol- 
 lars for the first chance to purchase the 
 right of applying the method on the new 
 canal. But the scheme failed for the reason 
 (as Mr. Cooper explained half a century 
 later) that the right of way for the Erie 
 Canal had been secured from the farmers of 
 the State by representing to them the profit 
 which they would realize from selling forage, 
 etc., for the use of canal boats, which were 
 to be drawn by horses or mules. The in- 
 troduction of mechanical power would de- 
 stroy these inducements, and the plan was 
 abandoned, though Mr. Cooper had de- 
 monstrated its feasibility by running his 
 endless chain on the East Eiver for ten days 
 and carrying hundreds of passengers over 
 the trial route. It is not likely that such a 
 use of water power on the Erie Canal would 
 have proved practicable on a large scale ; 
 but the endless chain, which Mr. Cooper 
 
INVENTIONS 31 
 
 apparently considered as a minor feature 
 only, has been adopted since, and lies at the 
 basis of the famous Belgian system of river 
 and canal transportation. 
 
 In 1824 the wave of enthusiastic sym- 
 pathy for the Greeks which swept over the 
 country upon receipt of the tidings of their 
 revolt against Turkish tyranny stimulated 
 Mr. Cooper to invent a torpedo boat, to be 
 steered from the shore by " two steel wires, 
 like the reins of a horse." But on the trial 
 trip of the boat a ship crossed and broke the 
 wires when about six of their total length of 
 ten miles had been let out. The delay made 
 the invention too late for use by the Greeks, 
 and it was not further pursued. 
 
 About 1835 the subject of aerial naviga- 
 tion had in the United States one of its 
 periodical revivals. Mr. Cooper, believing 
 that a motive power developed from materials 
 of small weight was essential to the solution 
 of the problem, resolved to employ the ex- 
 plosive force of chloride of nitrogen, one 
 of the most dangerous compounds known to 
 chemists. The result of his experiments in 
 
32 PETER COOPER 
 
 this direction was an explosion which blew 
 his apparatus to pieces, and nearly cost the 
 audacious inventor an eye. In fact, though 
 the organ was saved from total destruction, 
 it was permanently injured. 
 
 The conveyance of freight by aerial cables 
 a method now widely used was prac- 
 ticed by Mr. Cooper at an early day. The 
 use of elevators in buildings was foreseen 
 and provided for by him in the erection of 
 the Cooper Union building, and in that 
 building also he introduced for the first time 
 iron beams as part of a fire-proof construc- 
 tion. In these and other inventions his pro- 
 phetic intuitions were illustrated. 
 
 But such intuitions do not fully take the 
 place of scientific training ; and one of the 
 inventions of Peter Cooper which he con- 
 sidered for many years, and possibly to the 
 very last, as his crowning achievement was 
 a curious example of misdirected ingenuity. 
 It is worthy of notice here, however, for 
 another reason, namely, because of its acci- 
 dental association with one of its inventor's 
 most remarkable triumphs. 
 
INVENTIONS 33 
 
 As a young apprentice he had studied the 
 steam engine, and had resolved that he would 
 improve it by doing away with the crank. 
 To his mind this was a source of great loss 
 of power, and he believed that, if he could 
 transform the rectilinear motion of the piston 
 rod directly into rotary motion without the 
 intervention of the crank, he would effect a 
 notable economy. 
 
 Now, there is no such loss of power through 
 the crank as he imagined, nor is it likely that 
 any other device for obtaining rotary from 
 rectilinear motion will be found superior to 
 that which Watt devised. But Peter Cooper 
 assailed this fancied evil with undoubting 
 confidence, both as to its existence and as to 
 his ability to do away with it. The result 
 was an invention for which he received, 
 April 28, 1828, letters patent of the United 
 States. At that early day patents were 
 comparatively few, so few that this one 
 bears no number ; and the duties of general 
 administration did not prevent the highest 
 officials from attending to details. This 
 patent, issued to Peter Cooper, of New York, 
 
34 PETER COOPER 
 
 was personally signed by John Quincy Ad- 
 ams,* President; countersigned by Henry 
 Clay, Secretary of State; transmitted to 
 William Wirt, Attorney-General ; examined, 
 approved, and signed by him, and returned 
 to the Department of State for final delivery 
 to the patentee. It grants for fourteen 
 years to the said Peter Cooper, his heirs, ad- 
 ministrators, and assignees the exclusive right 
 to make, use, or license others to use, the 
 described improvement in the method of ef- 
 fecting rotary motion directly from the alter- 
 nate rectilinear motion of a steam piston. 
 Evidently these distinguished statesmen 
 Adams, Clay, and Wirt were not experts 
 in mechanics, or at least did not undertake 
 to hinder by technical criticism the experi- 
 ments of American ambition ; and there was 
 no trained c*orps of patent-examiners to de- 
 cide upon the novelty, practicability, and 
 usefulness of any proposed improvement in 
 the arts. Probably the government shared 
 at that time the dominant American feeling 
 of unconquerable youth, ready to attack all 
 problems, especially those which previous 
 
INVENTIONS 35 
 
 experience had pronounced insoluble, and to 
 determine the impossible by attempting it. 
 This spirit has in fact more or less dominated 
 the United States Patent Office down to the 
 present time. With all its present equip- 
 ment of examiners, trained in theory and 
 versed in technical literature, it still concerns 
 itself chiefly in the consideration of a pro- 
 posed invention with the question of novelty, 
 rather than that of feasibility or value ; and 
 the effect has been that, while thousands of 
 patents are granted for absurd, unnecessary, 
 or inoperative devices, the net result of the 
 encouragement thus given to individual in- 
 genuity and audacity is a catalogue of great 
 inventions unmatched in the history of any 
 other nation. 
 
 The patent of Peter Cooper, which now 
 lies before me, a time-stained parchment 
 bearing the great seal of the United States 
 and the autographs of the famous men named 
 above, is accompanied by no drawings ; 
 but it contains a detailed specification which 
 shows that the invention consisted in an ar- 
 rangement by which, at each forward move- 
 
36 PETER COOPER 
 
 ment, a prolongation of the piston rod clawed 
 into an endless chain, which was pnlled back 
 by the return stroke. This chain passed 
 around a wheel, to which it consequently 
 imparted a rotary motion. 
 
 Engineers do not need to be told that 
 this cumbrous arrangement could not suc- 
 cessfully replace the crank, even if such a 
 replacement were desirable. Yet the in- 
 ventor constructed a working-machine, and ' 
 satisfied himself, by a " duty trial " of some 
 sort, that it " saved two fifths of the steam." 
 His discovery, however, was not hailed with 
 immediate recognition by the mechanical 
 public; and its author, undisturbed in his 
 faith, bided his time. 
 
 This, by the way, points to a character- 
 istic of Peter Cooper, differentiating him 
 from the numerous enthusiasts whom pru- 
 dent men are accustomed to avoid. He 
 was not a man " of one idea." His fertile 
 and ingenious mind threw out its sugges- 
 tions in every direction, into fields untrod- 
 den by experience ; but when any such plan 
 failed of acceptance, he turned, with undi- 
 
INVENTIONS 37 
 
 minished courage and hope, to something 
 else, remaining, nevertheless, still steadfast 
 in his former conception, and ready to seize 
 any opportunity for its realization. 
 
 Thus it came to pass that Mr. Cooper's 
 abortive improvement upon the steam en- 
 gine was the source of his fame as the 
 builder of the first American locomotive, as 
 the following chapter will explain. 
 
THE TOM THUMB 
 
 In the specification of the patent secured 
 in 1828 by Mr. Cooper for an improved 
 steam engine, he took pains to declare the 
 suitability of his invention as a motor for 
 " land carriages." No doubt he had heard 
 of Stephenson's " Rocket," if not of the 
 engine built by Blenkinsop in 1813, the 
 sight of which in operation caused Stephen- 
 son to resolve that he would " make a bet- 
 ter." The famous competitive trial of the 
 Rocket, the Novelty, the Sanspareil, and 
 the Perseverance, on a two-mile section of 
 the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad, took 
 place in October, 1827, at which time Peter 
 Cooper must have been perfecting the appli- 
 cation for his patent. 
 
 But other circumstances played their part 
 in the result which we are about to consider. 
 
THE TOM THUMB 39 
 
 Some time before 1830 Mr. Cooper had 
 been drawn into a land speculation at Can- 
 ton, in the suburbs of Baltimore. Failing 
 of support from his partners, he had been 
 obliged to buy them out, and to assume the 
 whole burden of the enterprise. Just at 
 that time there was great popular expecta- 
 tion of the future importance of Baltimore. 
 A little earlier, there had been general de- 
 spair among the merchants of that city. 
 New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore were 
 seeking the trade of the region beyond the 
 Alleghanies, then " the West," but now 
 the centre of the population of the United 
 States. New York flanked the mountains 
 with her Erie Canal; Philadelphia got at 
 last a practicable, though less satisfactory, 
 water line ; but Baltimore, though nearest 
 of all to the longed-for market, found, 
 through careful examination by eminent 
 engineers, that no canal was practicable for 
 her, at a cost within her means. In 1824 
 and 1825 the consequent general despond- 
 ency concerning the future of the city was 
 
40 PETER COOPER 
 
 so strong that Baltimore merchants began 
 to move to New York and Philadelphia. 1 
 
 But at this period the world began to 
 hear of railways. A well-known merchant 
 of Baltimore, returning from England, de- 
 scribed with enthusiasm the coal trains, 
 drawn by the cumbrous ante-Stephenson 
 engines, which he had seen there. The 
 idea of a tramway (with or without steam 
 motors) found ready acceptance in a com- 
 munity both enterprising and desperate. A 
 town meeting, held in 1826, to consider 
 Western communications, resulted in an ap- 
 plication to the Maryland legislature, and 
 the incorporation, in March, 1827, of the 
 Baltimore and Ohio, the first railroad 
 company thus created in the United States 
 for purposes of general transportation, the 
 leader of that vast multitude of similar en- 
 terprises, the history of which is the history 
 of our nation's marvelous commercial pro- 
 
 1 These and other statements in this chapter are taken 
 from a lecture, delivered March 23, 1868, before the 
 Maryland Institute, by Hon. J. H. B. Latrobe, giving 
 his personal recollections of the early history of the Bal- 
 timore and Ohio Railroad. 
 
THE TOM THUMB * 41 
 
 gress. By the legislative charter, the city 
 of Baltimore and the State of Maryland 
 were authorized to subscribe to the com- 
 pany's stock. 
 
 In the address already cited, Mr. La- 
 trobe, an eye-witness, says of the scenes 
 which followed : 
 
 "Then came a scene which almost beg- 
 gars description. By this time, public ex- 
 citement had gone beyond fever heat and 
 reached the boiling point. Everybody 
 wanted stock. The number of shares sub- 
 scribed were to be apportioned, if the limit 
 of N the capital should be exceeded; and 
 every one set about obtaining proxies. Par- 
 ents subscribed in the names of their chil- 
 dren, and paid the dollar on each share that 
 the rules prescribed. Before even a survey 
 had been made, the possession of stock in 
 any quantity was regarded as a provision 
 for old age ; and great was the scramble to 
 obtain it. The excitement in Baltimore 
 roused public attention elsewhere ; and a 
 railroad mania began to pervade the land." 
 
 The proposed railroad was to pass through 
 
42 PETER COOPER 
 
 Mr. Cooper's Canton property, which he 
 had already begun to develop, " so that it 
 should pay the taxes," by building upon it 
 charcoal kilns, after a design of his own, 
 with the purpose of turning the forest into 
 charcoal, and, by means of this fuel, smelt- 
 ing the iron ore which the land contained. 
 What was the immediate commercial out- 
 come of this enterprise is not recorded. 
 Mr. Cooper's characteristic recollection, more 
 than sixty years later, was that, " with the 
 exception of a dangerous explosion," which 
 nearly cost him his life, the charcoal kilns 
 were " a great success ! " 
 
 But the great value of the property was 
 expected to be realized through the new 
 railroad ; and this expectation suffered a 
 serious blow when the horse cars failed to 
 pay expenses ; the operation of the line was 
 suspended ; the directors lost faith in the 
 enterprise ; and many of the principal stock- 
 holders declared that they would rather lose 
 the investment made so far than "throw 
 good money after bad." For the hope that 
 the new agency of steam might help them 
 
THE TOM THUMB 43 
 
 out was blighted by the news from England 
 that Stephenson had said that steam could 
 not be used as a motive power on a road 
 having curves of less than 900 feet radius ; 
 and this road had, at Point of Rocks, a ne- 
 cessary curve with a radius of only 150 feet! 
 The situation presented exactly the sort 
 of challenge calculated to arouse the cour- 
 age and ingenuity of Peter Cooper, besides 
 appealing to another of his personal charac- 
 teristics, namely, his undying and unalter- 
 able faith in his own ideas and conclusions, 
 whether they had achieved recognition or 
 not. He could lay aside a scheme which 
 had not found immediate and successful ap- 
 plication, and turn his attention, with undi- 
 minished vivacity, to something else; but 
 he never owned to a real defeat. And now 
 the problem presented at Baltimore seemed 
 to him a providential call for his interven- 
 tion. If the English engineers could not 
 run their locomotives around sharp curves, 
 it must be because they persisted in using 
 the vicious crank, which he had already su- 
 perseded by his (temporarily unappreciated) 
 
44 PETER COOPER 
 
 invention ! And, with unshaken faith in 
 that device, he informed the Baltimore and 
 Ohio directors (to use the words in which, 
 long afterwards, he told the story) that he 
 thought he "could knock together a loco- 
 motive which would get a train around the 
 Point of Rocks." 
 
 It is a curious circumstance that, ever 
 since that day, the characteristic difference 
 between English and American locomotives 
 has been the ability of the latter to pass 
 curves of shorter radius than the former 
 can safely follow. The reason, as all rail- 
 way engineers know, is that the usual Eng- 
 lish construction involves a rigid frame, 
 while the American has a movable truck or 
 "bogie" under the front part of the en- 
 gine. This solution of the problem was not 
 reached by Mr. Cooper. What he, in fact, 
 accomplished was simply a piece of audacity, 
 which encouraged the enterprise of his coun- 
 trymen, by proving that the dictum of lim- 
 ited experience abroad was not conclusive. 
 Two features of his Baltimore experiment 
 were characteristic of him. The first was 
 
THE TOM THUMB 45 
 
 that he undertook it, not merely in order to 
 vindicate his invention, but to effect a prac- 
 tical result, namely, to make his land specu- 
 lation pay. And the second was that when 
 he found it difficult to operate his pet in- 
 vention in this experiment, he laid it aside 
 at once, without losing an atom of faith 
 in it, but also without persisting (as a typi- 
 cal enthusiast would have done) in risking 
 upon the vindication of his personal opinion 
 in one matter the success of another under- 
 taking, more immediately important. 
 
 Mr. Cooper's own recollection of this 
 event deserves to be told in his own words. 
 He says : 2 
 
 " I came back to New York for a little 
 bit of a brass engine of mine about one 
 horse power (it had a 3^ in. cylinder and 
 14 in. stroke) and carried it back to Bal- 
 timore. I got some boiler iron and made a 
 boiler about as high as an ordinary wash 
 boiler ; and then how to connect the boiler 
 with the engine I did n't know. I could n't 
 find any iron pipes. The fact was that 
 
 1 Manuscript of his Reminiscences, 
 
46 PETER COOPER 
 
 there were none for sale in this country. 
 So I took two muskets, broke off the wooden 
 parts, and used the barrels for tubing, one 
 on one side and the other on the other side 
 of the boiler. I went into a coach-maker's 
 shop and made this locomotive, which I 
 called the Tom Thumb, because it was so 
 insignificant. I did n't intend it for actual 
 service, but only to show the directors what 
 could be done. I meant to test two things : 
 first, I meant to show that short turns could 
 be made; and secondly, that I could get 
 rotary motion without the use of a crank. 
 I effected both of these things very nicely. 
 I changed the movement from a reciprocat- 
 ing to a rotary motion. 
 
 " I got up steam one Saturday night. 
 The president of the road and two or three 
 other gentlemen were there. We got on 
 the truck and went out two or three miles. 
 All were delighted ; for it opened new pos- 
 sibilities for the railroad. I put up the lo- 
 comotive for the night in a shed, and in- 
 vited the company to ride to Ellicott's Mills 
 on Monday. Monday morning, what was 
 
THE TOM THUMB 47 
 
 my chagrin to find that some scamp had 
 been there, and chopped off all the copper 
 from the engine, doubtless in order to sell 
 it to some junk dealer ! 
 
 " It took me a week or more to repair the 
 machine ; then some one got in and broke a 
 piece out of the wheel, in experimenting 
 with it ; and then two wheels, cast one after 
 the other, were damaged by the carelessness 
 of the turner. I was thoroughly disgusted 
 and discouraged ; but, being determined 
 that I would not be balked entirely, I 
 changed the engine so that the power could 
 be applied through the ordinary connection 
 with a crank. 1 
 
 " At last all was ready ; and, on a Monday, 
 we started, six in the engine, and thirty- 
 six on the car which I took in tow. We 
 went up an average grade of eighteen feet 
 to the mile ; made the thirteen miles to 
 Ellicott's Mills in one hour and twelve min- 
 utes ; and came back in fifty-seven minutes. 
 
 1 This was the sacrifice of a favorite invention to im- 
 mediate practical considerations, which has been men- 
 tioned above as an instance of Mr. Cooper's common 
 
48 PETER COOPER 
 
 The result of that experiment was that the 
 bonds of the railroad company were sold at 
 once, and there was no longer any doubt as 
 to the success of the road." 
 
 The Tom Thumb continued for several 
 weeks to make trips to Ellicott's Mills ; and 
 on one occasion (September 18, 1830) ran a 
 race from Riley House into Baltimore (about 
 nine miles) with a light car, drawn on a 
 parallel track by a gray horse noted for speed 
 and endurance. The contest was planned 
 by the stagecoach proprietors of Baltimore, 
 with the view of demonstrating that nothing 
 could be gained by the substitution of steam 
 for horse power on the railroad. The gray 
 horse won the race, but not until after the 
 Tom Thumb had passed him, and only by 
 reason of a temporary breakdown of the 
 machine, which caused a delay too great to 
 be subsequently made up. Mr. Cooper's 
 characteristic recollection of the event, as 
 given fifty-five years later, was that " they 
 tried a little race one day, but it didn't 
 amount to anything. It was rather funny ; 
 and the locomotive got out of gear." 
 
THE TOM THUMB 49 
 
 Mr. Latrobe says of the Tom Thumb : 
 " The machine was not larger than the 
 hand cars used by workmen to transfer them- 
 selves from place to place ; and as the speaker 
 now recalls its appearance, the only wonder 
 is that so apparently insignificant a contriv- 
 ance should ever have been regarded as 
 competent to the smallest results. But Mr. 
 Cooper was wiser than many of the wisest 
 around him. His engine could not have 
 weighed a ton ; but he saw in it a principle 
 which the forty-ton engines of to-day have 
 but served to develop and demonstrate. 
 The boiler of Mr. Cooper's engine was not 
 as large as the kitchen boiler attached to 
 many a range in modern mansions. It was 
 of about the same diameter, but not much 
 more than half as high. It stood upright 
 in the car, and was filled above the furnace, 
 which occupied the lower section, with ver- 
 tical tubes. The cylinder was but three 
 and one half inches in diameter ; and speed 
 was got up by gearing. No natural draft 
 could have been sufficient to get up steam 
 in so small a boiler ; and Mr. Cooper used, 
 
50 PETER COOPER 
 
 therefore, a blowing apparatus, driven by a 
 drum, attached to one of the car wheels, over 
 which passed a cord, that, in its turn, worked 
 a pulley on the shaft of the blower. The con- 
 trivance for dispensing with a crank, though 
 its general appearance is recollected, the 
 speaker cannot describe with any accuracy ; 
 nor is it important, it came to no- 
 thing. . . . 
 
 " In a patent case, tried many years 
 afterwards, the boiler of Mr. Cooper's engine 
 became, in some connection which has been 
 forgotten, important as a piece of evidence. 
 It was hunted for, and found among some 
 old rubbish at Mount Clare. It was diffi- 
 cult to imagine that it had even generated 
 steam enough to drive a coffee mill, much 
 less that it had performed the feats here 
 narrated." 
 
 After this experimental demonstration, 
 the Tom Thumb retired into honorable 
 but obscure repose in its maker's warehouse 
 at New York, from which it emerged, fifty 
 years later, to take part in the centennial 
 celebration of the beginning of the commer- 
 
THE TOM THUMB 51 
 
 cial history of Baltimore (that place having 
 been made a port of entry in 1780). Accord- 
 ing to a contemporary report of the festival, 
 " in the vast procession, Mr. Cooper and his 
 little Tom Thumb locomotive were the two 
 most conspicuous objects, and received all 
 the honors which could be paid by a quarter 
 of a million of enthusiastic people." 
 
VI 
 
 MUNICIPAL AFFAIRS 
 
 Peter Cooper's acquaintance with the 
 affairs of New York city ranged from the 
 time when, as a child, he was taken by his 
 mother to see the last remaining fragments 
 of the stockade erected by the early inhabit- 
 ants for protection against the Indians, to 
 the full metropolitan glory of the decade of 
 his death. This wonderful municipal history 
 is too commonly regarded from a special 
 standpoint, as if it were but the record of a 
 continually renewed and often unsuccessful 
 struggle against corrupt and incompetent 
 city government. Contests of this kind, 
 under democratic institutions, always occupy 
 more space in the press, and make more 
 noise in public oratory, than the quiet but 
 steady progress of commercial undertakings, 
 and the labors of unselfish citizens for edu- 
 cation, art, and social improvement, which go 
 
MUNICIPAL AFFAIRS 53 
 
 on beneath the turbulent surface. Americans 
 have long suffered under the unjust imputa- 
 tion of peculiar devotion to " the almighty 
 dollar." The fact is that in no other country 
 do individuals give so much or do so much 
 without pecuniary reward whether for 
 personal friendship or for public spirit as 
 in the United States. The munificence of 
 private benefactions and endowments, far 
 surpassing the government support given in 
 other nations to similar institutions, furnish 
 an abundant proof of the first half of this 
 proposition ; while the other half is proved 
 by the innumerable boards, committees, and 
 other organized bodies, to which active busi- 
 ness men give time and thought without re- 
 muneration. 
 
 This spirit has never been wholly missed 
 in public affairs, even in the city of New 
 York, so often charged with the lack of it. 
 All the great features of its municipal pro- 
 gress, even those which have been, at some 
 stage, tainted with lamentable corruption, 
 have been originated or supported by un- 
 selfish public spirit. It might even be said 
 
54 PETER COOPER 
 
 that without this support, innocently given 
 and deceitfully misused, the schemers for 
 private gain could not have achieved their 
 periodical and temporary successes. 
 
 Peter Cooper was an illustrious example 
 of good citizenship in this respect. First 
 elected to public office as " assistant alder- 
 man," in 1828, he turned his attention im- 
 mediately upon the subject most important 
 to the growth and welfare of a city, yet 
 most likely to be neglected until it is forced 
 upon the community as an unwelcome neces- 
 sity, namely, the water supply. Up to 
 that time, New York had depended upon 
 the springs of Manhattan Island, some of 
 which supplied water, conveyed through the 
 streets by means of wooden pipes (bored 
 logs), while most of them were utilized by 
 means of pumps only, to which the inhabit- 
 ants sent for their supply. 1 
 
 1 A curious survival of this state of things is the Man- 
 hattan Company, which secured from the legislature a 
 perpetual charter, so skillfully framed (by Aaron Burr) 
 that, although it grants much more extensive powers 
 than could now be obtained by a corporation, it cannot 
 be successfully assailed so long as the fundamental con- 
 
MUNICIPAL AFFAIRS 55 
 
 Mr. Cooper induced the water com- 
 mittee, of which he had been appointed a 
 member, to visit Philadelphia and inspect 
 the works by which the water of the Schuyl- 
 kill was raised to a high reservoir, and 
 thence distributed in iron pipes throughout 
 that city, and then to examine the Croton 
 and Bronx rivers, for the purpose of ascer- 
 taining what these streams could supply. 
 The season being dry, the rivers were so low 
 that Mr. Cooper was not satisfied of their 
 capacity to furnish the needed quantity ; so 
 he investigated further, on his own account, 
 the watershed (then a wilderness) of the 
 Hackensack Eiver in New Jersey, and sub- 
 
 dition is fulfilled, namely, that the company shall be 
 prepared to furnish water at all times, on demand. It is 
 said that, in compliance with this requirement, a small 
 steam pump is kept continually running, in connection 
 with a short system of pipes, somewhere near the City 
 Hall, and that the company stands ready to furnish water 
 to any applicant only, the charter does not fix the price 
 which it may exact ! So far as I know, the only use now 
 made of the extensive powers granted by this famous 
 charter is the maintenance of the Manhattan Bank. A 
 few years ago, excavations in lower Broadway brought to 
 light bored logs, which were supposed to be relics of the 
 old " Manhattan " system. 
 
66 PETER COOPER 
 
 sequently submitted to the board of alder- 
 men plans and models, illustrating a scheme 
 for the supply of water to New York from 
 that region, by means of pipes laid under 
 the North Eiver. 
 
 To the end of his life, Mr. Cooper ad- 
 hered to his preference for this method of 
 conveying water across river channels, as 
 compared with elevated aqueducts, like the 
 " high bridge " subsequently constructed 
 across the Harlem River. And in this par- 
 ticular, his intuitive engineer's judgment was 
 not at fault, although the classic example 
 of the Romans, who spent untold labor 
 and time in building aqueducts, where bur- 
 ied conduits would have been both cheaper 
 and better, still dominated the professional 
 world. But Peter Cooper furnished another 
 example of his practical wisdom, by sacri- 
 ficing his superior theory for the sake of the 
 useful result contemplated. Thorough study 
 showed that, although the Croton region 
 could not be relied upon at all times for an 
 immediately adequate water supply, yet its 
 average through the year was sufficient for 
 
MUNICIPAL AFFAIRS 57 
 
 the purpose, so that the creation, by means 
 of higher dams, of large storage reservoirs, 
 would solve the pressing problem. This plan 
 was ultimately adopted, and has been pur- 
 sued with suitable enlargements, ever since. 
 Peter Cooper was made chairman of the 
 water committee, a position which he 
 retained until some years after the Croton 
 system was completed. 
 
 In the procurement of iron pipes for the 
 system of distribution, and their proper test- 
 ing before acceptance, his integrity and in- 
 telligence were specially effective in protect- 
 ing the interests of the city, by securing the 
 best material at the lowest cost. While Mr. 
 Cooper was a strong " protectionist," favor- 
 ing the encouragement of American indus- 
 tries, he never recognized any distinctions 
 among Americans. In his patriotic thought, 
 the unit to be regarded was not the city or 
 the State of New York, but the United 
 States of America ; and he earnestly opposed 
 the contention of the New York iron found- 
 ers, that contracts for the pipe of the Croton 
 system ought not to be made with inhabit- 
 
58 PETER COOPER 
 
 ants of another State. His arguments pre- 
 vailed; and the pipe was ordered from a 
 Philadelphia manufacturer, who offered a 
 better article at a lower price. 
 
 During Mr. Cooper's official service, and 
 not without his active aid and advice (though 
 his personal attention was mainly given to 
 the water department), the beginnings of an 
 organized police and fire service were estab- 
 lished. When he was first elected to office 
 the city was guarded by watchmen, who 
 served four hours every night for seventy- 
 five cents. Every householder was expected 
 to have leathern buckets in his hall, and in 
 case of an alarm of fire to throw them into 
 the street, so that the citizens voluntarily 
 running to the rescue could form a lme to 
 the nearest pump, and, passing the water by 
 means of the buckets, supply the tank of the 
 small hand-engine, which then squirted it 
 upon the burning building. It is needless to 
 detail here the steps by which out of this 
 crude beginning the present effective New 
 York Fire Department has been perfected. 
 Suffice it to say that the beginning itself was 
 
MUNICIPAL AFFAIRS 59 
 
 promoted, and its future importance was 
 foreseen, by Peter Cooper and his public- 
 spirited colleagues. 
 
 But a still more profoundly important 
 element of municipal and national progress, 
 in which the participation of Peter Cooper 
 was active and influential, was the free 
 public school system in New York. This 
 system was originally planted by the great 
 mayor and governor, De Witt Clinton, to 
 whom the State is indebted for the Erie 
 Canal, and for many other plans and im- 
 pulses scarcely less significant. While Clin- 
 ton was an advocate of universal suffrage, 
 he perceived the danger of granting this 
 power to an ignorant and largely foreign 
 population ; and in 1805 he secured a char- 
 ter for "The Society for Establishing a 
 Free School in the City of New York for 
 the Education of Such Poor Children as do 
 not Belong to, or are not Provided for by, 
 Any Religious Society." 
 
 The appeal of this society to " the affluent 
 and charitable of every denomination of 
 Christians " was liberally answered, and by 
 
60 PETER COOPER 
 
 December, 1809, a school capable of accom- 
 modating five hundred children had been 
 erected upon a purchased site. This was 
 the beginning in New York city of the free 
 school system, over which for twenty-five 
 years De Witt Clinton presided. During that 
 period the schools, supported by generous 
 private contributions, and also after a while 
 by a state tax, steadily increased in number, 
 efficiency, and public favor. Peter Cooper 
 had been always a zealous supporter of these 
 schools, but not until 1838 did he become 
 by election as a trustee of the Free 
 School Society officially connected with 
 them. It was a critical period in their his- 
 tory. The original national debt of the 
 Union had been recently extinguished, and 
 a considerable surplus had been returned to 
 the contributing States, of which New York 
 devoted its share to educational purposes, 
 thus largely increasing the fund for the city. 
 In 1822, sixteen years before, the common 
 council had made the free schools " unsecta- 
 rian," excluding from the benefits of the 
 fund all institutions of denominational char- 
 
MUNICIPAL AFFAIRS 61 
 
 acter. The various sects had submitted re- 
 luctantly to this decision so long as the fund 
 was too small to be divided among them ; 
 but its sudden enlargement encouraged an 
 attempt to secure appropriations for paro- 
 chial schools. 
 
 In his first annual message Governor 
 Seward recommended to the legislature the 
 establishment of schools in which the chil- 
 dren of foreigners might be " instructed by 
 teachers speaking the same language with 
 themselves and professing the same faith." 
 The Roman Catholic community, acting at 
 once upon this suggestion, sent a deputation 
 to the New York common council demand- 
 ing for their schools " a pro rata share " of 
 the educational fund, to' which as taxpayers 
 they contributed. 
 
 In the resistance made to this claim by 
 the Free School Society Mr. Cooper took a 
 prominent and ardent part. The advocates 
 of unsectarian public schools were victorious ; 
 but the controversy continued to agitate the 
 State until the passage by the legislature in 
 1842 of an act establishing in New York 
 
62 PETER COOPER 
 
 city a new board of education to control 
 the schools supported from the funds of the 
 State, and at the same time forbidding the 
 support from this fund of schools in which 
 " any religious sectarian doctrine or tenet 
 shall be taught, inculcated, or practiced." 
 The Free School Society, resenting and dis- 
 trusting this new (and in some respects 
 complicated) arrangement, continued its 
 separate activity for eleven years; but in 
 1853, the unsectarian character of the pub- 
 lic schools of New York having been es- 
 tablished beyond question, the society and 
 the board of education were by common 
 consent amalgamated by statute. At the 
 final meeting of the society Peter Cooper 
 delivered the valedictory address, the lan- 
 guage of which indicates that not without 
 apprehension did he contemplate the sur- 
 render of the public schools to the exclusive 
 control of a body of officials likely to be 
 more or less influenced by partisan or po- 
 litical considerations. 
 
 Yet his characteristic common sense came 
 again in this instance to the front. The 
 
MUNICIPAL AFFAIRS 63 
 
 moral which he drew from his doubts and 
 fears was that " the stewardship we are about 
 to resign is not a reprieve from the responsi- 
 bilities of the future." And in obedience to 
 this conviction he accepted, with fourteen of 
 his old colleagues, membership in the board 
 of education, of which he served for two years 
 as vice-president, resigning in January, 1855, 
 at which time he had formed and begun to 
 carry out the great plan of an institution for 
 free popular education with which his name 
 is now forever associated. 
 
 Many years later Mr. Cooper became the 
 president of the Citizens' Association of 
 New York, which he supported with untiring 
 enthusiasm and lavish expenditure, and which 
 in its day did good work in securing for the 
 city an efficient fire department, boards of 
 health, docks, and education, and an im- 
 proved charter. Mr. Cooper retired in 1873, 
 and the association died soon after, to be 
 revived in other organizations, which have 
 from time to time continued the perennial 
 battle for good government in New York 
 begun by him. 
 
VII 
 
 THE COOPER UNION FOR THE ADVANCE- 
 MENT OF SCIENCE AND ART 
 
 In many respects the industrial conditions 
 under which Peter Cooper began his career 
 had been revolutionized before he finished 
 it. The apprentice system has well-nigh 
 passed away; and the old freedom with 
 which an intelligent, industrious, and ambi- 
 tious young man could turn from one occu- 
 pation to another, seeking that road which 
 offered greatest promise of preferment, is 
 greatly hampered by the modern regime of 
 " organized labor," which, whatever its ad- 
 vantages, presents its own peculiar perils 
 for the workingman. But it remains for- 
 ever true that under either of these systems, 
 or any others that can be evolved or invented, 
 knowledge is power, and the bestowal of it 
 is the one gift which neither pauperizes the 
 recipient nor injures the community. 
 
THE COOPER UNION 65 
 
 As a struggling young apprentice, Peter 
 Cooper regarded with intense sympathy the 
 needs and limitations of the class to which 
 he belonged. But his notion of a remedy 
 was not that of paternal legislation, or bel- 
 ligerent organization, or social reconstruc- 
 tion. To his conception the atmosphere of 
 personal liberty and responsibility furnished 
 by the new democratic republic, offering free 1 
 scope to individual endeavor and rewarding 
 individual merit, was the best that could be 
 asked. 
 
 What he dreamed of doing was simply to 
 assist these social conditions by providing 
 for those who were handicapped by circum- 
 stances the means of power and opportu- 
 nity, to be utilized by their own assiduity. 
 This plan included not only what he then 
 thought to be the most effective system 
 for intellectual improvement, but also pro- 
 vision for such innocent entertainment as 
 would supersede the grosser forms of recrea- 
 tion, which involved the waste of money and 
 health. 
 
 Walking up the Bowery Road then the 
 
66 PETER COOPER 
 
 stage route to Boston, but now a crowded 
 down-town street he selected in the sub- 
 urbs of the city the site for his great insti- 
 tution ; and, as he accumulated the necessary- 
 funds, he bought at intervals lot after lot at 
 the intersection of Third and Fourth Ave- 
 nues, until he had acquired the entire block, 
 paying for his latest purchases (made after 
 the neighborhood had been solidly built up 
 and had become a centre of business) very 
 high prices compared with those he had paid 
 at the beginning. At last (in 1854) he 
 commenced the erection of a six-story fire- 
 proof building of stone, brick, and iron. This 
 work occupied several years, and during its 
 progress a period of great financial distress 
 threatened to interrupt it. But he persisted 
 in the undertaking, at great risk to his private 
 business ; and the building was finished at a 
 cost (including that of the land) of more 
 than six hundred and thirty thousand dol- 
 lars. Subsequent gifts from Mr. Cooper, 
 together with the legacy provided by his 
 will, and doubled by his heirs, and still later 
 donations from his family and immediate 
 
THE COOPER UNION 67 
 
 relatives, make up a total of more than 
 double that amount. 1 
 
 1 Not aU of this amount is represented in permanent 
 endowments, since large contributions to cover deficits in 
 annual income as compared with current expenses, or for 
 special repairs and alterations, do not appear under that 
 head. According to the balance-sheet of January 1, 1900, 
 the total assets consist of $1,075,428.62, the appraised 
 value of the building, furniture, and apparatus ; and $947,- 
 021.39 in cash on hand or investments, making a total 
 of $2,022,450.01. Of the invested sum $953,159.30 is in 
 " special endowments," of which the income only can be 
 expended. This fund comprises $200,000 from Peter 
 Cooper and $340,000 from the family of the late William 
 Cooper, his brother ; the remainder is made up of smaller 
 gifts (the chief of which are a bequest of $30,000 from 
 Wilson G. Hunt, one of the original trustees, and $10,000 
 each from Mary Stuart, J. Pierpont Morgan, Morris K. 
 Jesup, and John E. Parsons), and one of $300,000 made in 
 December, 1899, by Andrew Carnegie. In addition to the 
 aggregate thus made up Hon. Edward Cooper, the son, 
 and Mr. Abram S. Hewitt, the son-in-law of Peter Cooper, 
 have undertaken to furnish a further income of $10,000 
 per annum ; and finally, according to the 41st Annual 
 Report of the Trustees (May, 1900), the Cooper Union, 
 as residuary legatee under the will of the late John 
 Holstead, will ultimately receive between $200,000 and 
 $300,000. 
 
 These recent additions to the endowment of the insti- 
 tution will enable the trustees to enlarge its usefulness 
 in many ways, and especially (being no longer dependent 
 for annual income upon rents) to utilize the whole of the 
 
\ 
 
 68 PETER COOPER 
 
 Up to the time when the building was 
 completed Mr. Cooper had taken little ad- 
 vice as to the details of his project. Its out- 
 lines in his mind were those which he had con- 
 ceived a quarter-century before, and though 
 he was doubtless conscious that new social 
 and industrial conditions had intervened 
 which would require some modifications of 
 his plan, he had not formulated such changes. 
 
 The classes which he wished especially 
 to reach were those who, being already en- 
 gaged in earning a living by labor, could 
 scarcely be expected to take regular courses 
 in instruction ; and the idea of such instruc- 
 tion appears to have been at the beginning 
 subordinate in his mind. He had a strong 
 impression that young mechanics and ap- 
 prentices, instead of wasting their time in 
 dissipation, should improve their minds dur- 
 ing the intervals of labor ; and not unnatu- 
 rally his first thought as to the means of 
 such improvement turned to those things 
 
 building for educational purposes. Yet the total endow- 
 ment will still be modest, as compared with that of many 
 similar institutions of later origin. 
 
THE COOPER UNION 69 
 
 which had aroused and stimulated his own 
 mind. Probably he did not realize that the 
 mass of men were not like himself, and that 
 something more than mere suggestion or op- 
 portunity would be required to develop the 
 mental powers and enlarge the knowledge of 
 the "average workingman. However that 
 may l?e, the original vague design of Mr. 
 Cooper was something like this : 
 
 Ther. was in the city of New York a 
 famous collection of curiosities known as 
 Scudder's Museum. Barnum's Museum 
 afterwards took its place ; but that, too, has 
 long since disappeared ; and the small so- 
 called museums now scattered through the 
 city but faintly remind old inhabitants of 
 the glories of Scudder's or Barnum's in their 
 prime. These establishments contained all 
 sorts of curiosities, arranged without much 
 reference to scientific use, wax-works, his- 
 torical relics, dwarfs, giants, living and 
 stuffed animals, etc. There was also a 
 lecture-room, devoted principally to moral 
 melodrama ; and on an upper floor a large 
 room was occupied by the cosmorama, 
 
70 PETER COOPER 
 
 an exhibition of pictures, usually of note- 
 worthy scenery, foreign cities, etc., which 
 were looked at through round holes, enhan- 
 cing the effect of their illumination. 
 
 Peter Cooper doubtless often lingered in 
 these museums, receiving the inspiration 
 which came from visions of a world much 
 wider than his individual horizon, from the 
 curious and wonderful works of nature, and 
 from the works of man in former times and 
 in foreign lands. From the queer mechani- 
 cal devices exhibited by inventors to the 
 " Happy Family " and the cosmorama, every- 
 thing was full to his quick sympathy of in- 
 tellectual, moral, or sentimental suggestion ; 
 and no doubt he felt, after an hour of such 
 combined wonder and reflection, a satisfying 
 sense of time well spent. 
 
 He wished that this means of mental im- 
 provement and recreation combined might 
 be freely afforded to those whose scanty 
 earnings would not permit them otherwise to 
 make frequent use of it, and he resolved 
 that the museum and the cosmorama should 
 be included in his institution. 
 
THE COOPER UNION 71 
 
 Another agency of which Mr. Cooper had 
 made fruitful use, and the efficacy of which 
 he highly appreciated, was conversation and 
 debate. If people could be brought together 
 and made to talk he thought they would 
 learn a great deal from each other. In this 
 he had undoubtedly grasped one of the great 
 principles of progress. To meet and inter- 
 change our ideas of books and by personal 
 discussions is indeed the mightiest factor of 
 modern improvement. But the mere meet- 
 ing to talk about things unless it is com- 
 bined with the disposition and the apparatus 
 for studying things is but barter without 
 production, and may degenerate to a barren 
 exchange of words, as unprofitable as that 
 described in the Yankee proverb, " swapping 
 jackknives in a garret." This aspect of the 
 truth Mr. Cooper doubtless came to appre- 
 ciate; but at the outset, habituated as he 
 was to get ideas from everybody he met and 
 everything he saw, it seemed to him that 
 free discussions would be an unmixed benefit 
 to all, and he resolved that his institution 
 should contain rooms, devoted to the several 
 
72 PETER COOPER 
 
 handicrafts, where the practitioners of each 
 could meet and " exchange views." 
 
 It was also his intention that the lower 
 part of the building he erected should be oc- 
 cupied by stores and offices, the annual rent of 
 which should pay the running expenses of the 
 institution. In the course of time the Cooper 
 Union came to need for full efficiency both 
 more money than this source would supply 
 and more room than was left to it after sub- 
 tracting the rooms thus rented. These needs 
 have now been met in some measure by fur- 
 ther endowments, so that before long the 
 whole building will be devoted to educational 
 uses. But the wisdom, at that time, of Mr. 
 Cooper's plan has been vindicated by the 
 great work done with the modest means 
 thus provided. 
 
 The building of the Cooper Union repre- 
 sented his original ideas. Above the shops 
 and offices to be rented was an immense 
 room intended for the museum. A large 
 part of the building was cut up into small 
 meeting-rooms for the conferences of the 
 trades ; in an upper story another, great 
 
THE COOPER UNION 73 
 
 room was provided for the eosmorama ; and 
 the flat roof was to be safely inclosed with a 
 balustrade, so that on pleasant days or even- 
 ings the frequenters of the institution might 
 sit or promenade there, partake of harmless 
 refreshments, listen to agreeable music, 1 and 
 enjoy the magnificent prospect of the city 
 below, the heights beyond the East River 
 on one side, the Hudson on the other, and 
 the magnificent island-studded harbor. 
 
 A noteworthy feature of this scheme was 
 the complete obliteration of all distinctions 
 of class, creed, race, or sex among its bene- 
 ficiaries. It is a significant fact that through 
 nearly half a century, while these distinctions 
 have been the subjects of vehement and some- 
 times bitter social and political discussion, the 
 Cooper Union has gone quietly on educating 
 its thousands of pupils without the least em- 
 barrassment in its discipline, and apparently 
 without even the consciousness on the part 
 of its founder or its trustees that in this 
 
 1 Old New Yorkers will be reminded of the closing 
 lines of Fitz-Greene Halleck's poem, 
 
 And there is music twice a week 
 On Scudder's balcony." 
 
74 PETER COOPER 
 
 perfect solution of what was supposed to be 
 a difficult problem they had accomplished 
 anything extraordinary. 
 
 When Mr. Cooper, consulting with wise 
 and practical advisers, addressed himself at 
 last to the final arrangement of details, he 
 surrendered one after another many parts of 
 his youthful design. The name, " The Cooper 
 Union for the Advancement of Science and 
 Art," epitomized this change. His primary 
 purpose was unchanged; but he perceived 
 that systematic education would be of more 
 value to the class he sought to aid than mere 
 amusement or miscellaneous talk. The great 
 free reading-room of the Cooper Union was 
 substituted for the museum; the conversa- 
 tion parlors for the various trades became 
 class-rooms for instruction ; the cosmorama 
 yielded to lecture-halls and laboratories ; and 
 the roof was abandoned to the weather. To 
 all these changes, and to many other novel- 
 ties adopted afterwards, Mr. Cooper was 
 reconciled by one conclusive argument ; 
 namely, the proof afforded by their results 
 that the Cooper Union was giving to the work- 
 
THE COOPER UNION 75 
 
 ing classes that which they needed most and 
 most desired. Now and then perhaps a sigh 
 might escape him for the dream of his youth. 
 I remember one occasion when I accom- 
 panied him to the roof of the building, where 
 some new construction was going on which 
 he wished to inspect. The old man stood 
 for some time admiring the view in all direc- 
 tions, and at last, recalling how he had once 
 imagined happy crowds enjoying the delights 
 of that " roof-garden," and casting a mourn- 
 ful glance at the central spot where the band 
 was to have been, he said, " Sometimes I 
 think my first plan was the best ! " 1 But 
 such regrets did not occupy his mind. He 
 
 1 There may have been more than a mere sentimental 
 regret in his mind at that time ; for his inventive intui- 
 tion had struck out half a century before an idea to 
 which the slow thought of his fellows had not yet at- 
 tained, the plan of utilizing roofs for the purpose of 
 giving to all classes an ownership of free air and far dis- 
 tance and boundless sky as complete as any landowner 
 could command by fencing off a mountain for his own 
 pleasure. As he looked down upon the vast wilderness 
 of roofs and thought of the multitude laboring beneath 
 them or trudging through the streets (" up one canon 
 and down another," as old Jim Bridger the scout said in 
 St. Louis), igDorant of the upper sphere within reach, he 
 
76 PETER COOPER 
 
 was satisfied to know that the institution he 
 had founded, building better than he knew, 
 had proved its fitness by its success in the 
 eager and grateful use made of it by those 
 for whose benefit it was intended and in the 
 actual evidences of such benefit. Every year 
 managers of the different departments took 
 pains to report to him instances in which 
 students already earning wages had increased 
 their earnings through the added knowledge 
 or skill acquired in the evening classes ; and 
 this was the feature of the annual statements 
 upon which he dwelt with the greatest satis- 
 faction. 
 
 might well have felt that one part of his original scheme 
 would still be a physical and moral boon to the metro- 
 polis. In fact the disappearance of the " vacant lots," so 
 numerous in his youth, and so freely available as infor- 
 mal parks and playgrounds, had created new necessity 
 for air and space. Whether he consciously recalled the 
 hanging gardens of Babylon, or the flat roofs universally 
 utilized for social and domestic purposes in eastern and 
 southern countries, I do not know. At all events he had 
 seized upon a similar idea, and now nearly a score of 
 years after his death we are waking up to its value. 
 Even the Cooper Union building some day, after more 
 pressing needs of equipment shall have been satisfied, 
 may be crowned with its garden of rest and outlook. 
 
THE COOPER UNION 77 
 
 The charter of the Cooper Union was 
 finally adopted in its present form by the 
 legislature of the State of New York, 
 April 13, 1859 ; and the deed of trust, exe- 
 cuted in compliance therewith, on the 29th 
 day of the same month, by Peter Cooper 
 and his wife, Sarah, conveyed to the board 
 of trustees the title to " all that piece and 
 parcel of land bounded on the west by 
 Fourth Avenue, on the north by Astor 
 Place, on the east by Third Avenue, and on 
 the south by Seventh Street, ... to be for- 
 ever devoted to the advancement of science 
 and art, in their application to the varied and 
 useful purposes of life." 
 
 ' Even through this dry legal phraseology, 
 it is not difficult to discern the frank and 
 simple joy of the patient enthusiast, who 
 was at last able to speak of the land which 
 he had laboriously acquired, lot by lot, 
 through many years, and the building which 
 he had raised, stone by stone, through many 
 more, as one " piece or parcel," his to dedi- 
 cate forever. 
 
 The delivery of this deed to the board of 
 
78 PETER COOPER 
 
 trustees was accompanied with a long letter, 
 setting forth the wishes, hopes, and plans 
 of the grantor, in the formal and diffuse 
 rhetoric peculiar to his generation, and, per- 
 haps, too much contemned by ours. To say 
 the least, we are no more warranted in de- 
 spising the utterances of noble, self-sacrificing 
 philanthropists, because they are clothed in 
 phrases now deemed verbose and stilted, 
 than we would be in disparaging the deeds 
 of historic heroes, because they wore armor 
 now antiquated and struck their doughty 
 blows with weapons obsolete. When Peter 
 Cooper wrote, in the letter now before me, 
 " The great object I desire to accomplish by 
 the establishment of an institution devoted 
 to the advancement of science and art is to 
 open the volume of nature by the light of 
 truth so unveiling the laws and methods 
 of Deity that the young may see the beauties 
 of creation, enjoy its blessings, and learn to 
 love the Being J from whom cometh every 
 good and perfect gift,' " he was not guilty 
 of cant, because cant is the use of language 
 expressing an emotion which the user does 
 
THE COOPER UNION 79 
 
 not really feel. And the same may be said of 
 the elaborate additional exposition, contained 
 in this letter, of the writer's faith in God and 
 man, and of his confident hope in the future 
 of his race, and particularly of his country. 
 
 The letter shows some traces still of his 
 original plan. Thus, he writes : 
 
 " In order most effectually to aid and 
 encourage the efforts of youth to obtain use- 
 ful knowledge, I have provided the main 
 floor of the large hall on the third story for 
 a reading-room, literary exchange, and scien- 
 tific collections the walls around that floor 
 to be arranged for the reception of books, 
 maps, paintings, and other objects of interest. 
 And when a sufficient collection of the works 
 of art, science, and nature can be obtained, 
 I propose that glass cases shall be arranged 
 around the walls of the gallery of the said 
 room, forming alcoves around the entire 
 floor for the preservation of the same. In 
 the window spaces I propose to arrange such 
 cosmoramic and other views as will exhibit 
 in the clearest and most forcible light the 
 true philosophy of life." 
 
80 PETER COOPER 
 
 Other characteristic paragraphs are here 
 quoted, the whole letter being too long 
 for full republication. 
 
 " To manifest the deep interest and sym- 
 pathy I feel in all that can advance the hap- 
 piness and better the condition of the female 
 portion of the community, and especially of 
 those who are dependent on honest labor for 
 support, I desire the trustees to appropriate 
 two hundred and fifty dollars yearly to assist 
 such pupils of the female school of design 
 as shall, in their careful judgment, by their 
 efforts and sacrifices in the performance of 
 duty to parents or to those that Providence 
 has made dependent on them for support, 
 merit and require such aid. My reason for 
 this requirement is not so much to reward 
 as to encourage the exercise of heroic vir- 
 tues that often shine in the midst of the 
 greatest suffering and obscurity without so 
 much as being noticed by the passing 
 throng. 
 
 " In order to better the condition of wo- 
 men and to widen the sphere of female em- 
 ployment, I have provided seven rooms to 
 
THE COOPER UNION 81 
 
 be forever devoted to a female school of 
 design, and I desire the trustees to appro- 
 priate out of the rents of the building fifteen 
 hundred dollars annually towards meeting 
 the expenses of said school. 
 
 " It is the ardent wish of my heart that 
 this school of design may be the means of 
 raising to competence and comfort thousands 
 of those that might otherwise struggle 
 through a life of poverty and suffering. . . . 
 
 " Desiring, as I do, to use every means to 
 render this institution useful through all 
 coming time, and believing that editors of 
 the public press have it in their power to 
 exert a greater influence on the community 
 for good than any other class of men of 
 equal number, it is therefore my sincere 
 desire that editors be earnestly invited to 
 become members of the society of arts to 
 be connected with this institution. . . . 
 
 " It is my desire, also, that the students 
 shall have the use of one of the large rooms 
 (to be assigned by the trustees) for the pur- 
 pose of useful debates. I desire and deem 
 it best to direct that all these lectures and 
 
82 PETER COOPER 
 
 debates shall be exclusive of theological and 
 party questions, and shall have for their 
 constant object the causes that operate 
 around and within us, and the means neces- 
 sary and most appropriate to remove the 
 physical and moral evils that afflict our city, 
 our country, and humanity." . . . 
 
 Other paragraphs indicate his plan that 
 the students shall, in the first instance, frame 
 the rules which shall control the discipline 
 of the institution. Thus he says : 
 
 " It is my desire, and I hereby ordain, 
 that a strict conformity to rules deliberately 
 formed by a vote of the majority of the 
 students, and approved by the trustees, shall 
 forever be an indispensable requisite for 
 continuing to enjoy the benefits of this insti- 
 tution. I now most earnestly entreat each 
 and every one of the students of this insti- 
 tution, through all coming time, to whom I 
 have intrusted this great responsibility of 
 framing laws for the regulation of their con- 
 duct in their connection with the institution, 
 and by which any of the members may lose 
 its privileges, to remember how frail we are, 
 
THE COOPER UNION 83 
 
 and how liable to err when we come to sit 
 in judgment on the faults of others, and 
 how much the circumstances of our birth, 
 our education, and the society and country 
 where we have been born and brought up, 
 have had to do in forming us and making us 
 what we are." 
 
 In this scheme Mr. Cooper anticipated 
 the plan of self-government now followed in 
 some of our colleges; and while he ex- 
 pected too much of the students of the 
 Cooper Union, and was himself afterwards 
 obliged to consent to the restriction of their 
 autonomy, it may be fairly said that the 
 spirit of his hope and exhortation has never 
 ceased to be felt ; and, to the great honor 
 of the Cooper Union, it may be recorded 
 that questions of discipline have been well- 
 nigh unknown within its walls. 
 
 This noble trust was accepted by a body 
 of men who have discharged it with un- 
 wearied fidelity, zeal and wisdom. The 
 original board consisted of Mr. Cooper, his 
 son Edward Cooper, his son-in-law Abram 
 S. Hewitt, and John E. Parsons, Wilson G. 
 
84 PETER COOPER 
 
 Hunt, and Daniel F. Tiemann. Three of 
 these, Messrs. Cooper, Hewitt, and Tiemann, 
 have been mayors of the city of New York. 
 All of them were well-known and eminent 
 citizens, burdened with the duties of active 
 business ; and the time they gave so freely 
 to the management of the Cooper Union was 
 not the superfluity of leisure. The difficulty 
 with " business men " too often is, that, 
 when nominally charged with the adminis- 
 tration of organized charities, they slight 
 the work because they have not time to at- 
 tend to it. But the United States can show 
 not a few instances in which the affairs of 
 religious, educational, or benevolent institu- 
 tions are carefully managed by the active 
 directors of great private enterprises ; and 
 their management, when it is thus thorough, 
 is generally much better than that of literary 
 or philanthropic amateurs. This is conspic- 
 uously shown in the history of the Cooper 
 Union. * 
 
 1 Of the original board, Peter Cooper was the first to 
 pass away. Mr. Hunt and Mr. Tiemann have since died, 
 and Mr. R. Fulton Cutting has been elected a trustee. 
 The other vacancies have not been filled. 
 
THE COOPER UNION 85 
 
 This is not the place for a detailed ac- 
 count of the development of the Cooper 
 Union, or even of its present scope and pro- 
 spective operations. Such an account would 
 worthily occupy a separate volume ; for the 
 institution, in the hands of its wise direct- 
 ors, was a pioneer and model in many re- 
 spects in which later enterprises, with larger 
 means, have, perhaps, surpassed it. I must 
 content myself here with brief mention of a 
 few particulars. 
 
 The immense free reading-room, with its 
 average daily attendance of nearly 1500 to 
 2000 persons, was Mr. Cooper's special 
 delight ; and well it might be so ; for the 
 sight is one almost without a parallel not 
 in the architecture, size, or furnishing of the 
 place, but in the extent and constancy of its 
 use by the public. Entrance is free to all 
 who are not unclean, intoxicated, or disor- 
 derly. In the main, the privileges thus given 
 are not abused, but occasionally the evils al- 
 most inseparable from so large an attendance 
 have been felt. At one time, the curator' 
 earnestly represented to the trustees the ne- 
 
86 PETER COOPER 
 
 cessity of doing something to check the mu- 
 tilation of books a practice which public 
 librarians know well as one of their most 
 troublesome foes. It appeared that some 
 unknown persons, who combined a love of 
 the beautiful in language with a barbaric 
 ignorance of it in conduct, were accustomed 
 to slash out with their penknives favorite 
 passages of poetry for preservation, treating 
 in this matter newspapers and books alike. 
 It was found difficult to keep whole the vol- 
 umes of Tennyson and Longfellow. But a 
 more frequent and injurious practice was 
 the cutting out of plates from illustrated 
 books. This was not for love of art, as the 
 other for love of poetry. The object was to 
 sell such engravings for two or three cents 
 each to the print-shops in the city, where 
 they were bought by refined amateurs, for 
 the purpose of " illustrating " special vol- 
 umes. This fashionable hobby has been the 
 indirect cause of the ruin of many a choice 
 book ; and buyers of fine old editions are well 
 aware that they must look well to their bar- 
 gains, lest they find that the thief, at the bid- 
 
THE COOPER UNION 8T 
 
 ding of the " collector," has plundered the vol- 
 umes of the plates which once adorned them. 
 When this subject came up for discussion 
 in the board of trustees, Mr. Cooper was 
 so full of pity for the poor fellows, who 
 were obliged to sell stolen engravings at 
 two cents a piece to keep body and soul 
 together, that he could scarcely be brought 
 to take a severe view of the offense. Nor 
 was he willing (and in this his fellow-trus- 
 tees agreed with him) to impose any restric- 
 tion or censorship upon admittance to the 
 reading-room. Even if the books suffered, 
 the room must continue to be free. The 
 great mass of well-behaved people must not 
 be annoyed by measures intended to exclude 
 a few rogues. The result vindicated the 
 sagacity, as well as the charity, of this view. 
 The officers in charge, not being permitted 
 to adopt any sweeping measures of preven- 
 tion, simply redoubled their vigilance, and 
 finally caught one or two offenders and 
 " made examples of them; " and the nuisance 
 was immediately abated, though perhaps not 
 entirely and permanently abolished. 
 
88 PETER COOPER 
 
 The report of 1900, after mentioning the 
 great (legitimate) wear and tear of the 
 books, of which 12,000 had to be re-bound, 
 adds : 
 
 " The decorum of the visitors has been 
 excellent, and it is remarkable, in view of 
 such a very large number of persons visit- 
 ing the room, that so few mutilations and 
 injuries occur to the periodicals and books, 
 and that so few books, probably not more 
 than half a dozen in the course of a year, 
 and those of small consequence, are stolen." 
 
 It seems then, after all, that Peter Coop- 
 er's faith in the people was justified. 
 
 The great hall in the basement is an- 
 other noteworthy feature, and worthy of 
 wider imitation than it has yet received/ 
 Such a hall, if located upstairs in such a 
 building, would have been open to three ob- 
 jections : it would have monopolized, for oc- 
 casional use only, space which was required 
 for constant use ; it would have been intol- 
 erably noisy, by reason of the roar and rat- 
 tle in the streets which surround the build- 
 ing on all sides ; and it would have been 
 
THE COOPER UNION 89 
 
 dangerous, as all such places are, when great 
 audiences must make their exit by going 
 down stairs. Nothing has ever been in- 
 vented that will prevent people from being 
 crushed and trampled when they are crowd- 
 ing down a stairway. In all these respects, 
 the great hall of the Cooper Union is admir- 
 able. It occupies space not otherwise val- 
 uable. It is quiet, and acoustically perfect. 
 The means of exit and entrance are ample 
 and safe. Even in case of an unreasoning 
 panic, there is little danger that a crowd, 
 tumbling up the stone stairways to the 
 street, would cause the horrible maiming 
 and killing which so often attend the efforts 
 of a frightened multitude to get down. Fi- 
 nally, the ventilation is excellent, for the 
 simple reason that natural or automatic ven- 
 tilation of such a large, low basement room 
 could not be expected, and consequently 
 mechanical ventilation by means of a large 
 fan, run by steam power, was provided. The 
 efficiency of this system has sometimes been 
 severely tested. On one occasion, during 
 a scientific lecture, the experimental illustra- 
 
90 PETER COOPER 
 
 tions of which were on a large and imposing 
 scale, the learned professor on the platform 
 had the misfortune to crack an immense 
 glass jar ? in which he was exhibiting the 
 brilliant combustion of phosphorus in oxy- 
 gen gas. The white fumes of phosphorous 
 acid floated out into the air, and began to 
 diffuse themselves through the hall towards 
 the ventilation outlets at the sides and rear. 
 To one who knew the irritating nature of 
 these fumes it seemed inevitable that the 
 hall must be emptied of its crowded audi- 
 ence in a few minutes. Already coughing 
 had begun on the front seats, when Mr. 
 Hewitt, who was seated on the platform, 
 quickly rose, and pulling a cord, reversed 
 the currents of ventilation and opened a 
 new outlet into the street, behind and above 
 the platform. The curling clouds of vapor 
 paused, wheeled, and retreated, and in an- 
 other minute the air was perfectly pure. 
 The lecturer had not even been interrupted. 
 It was a beautiful and timely " experiment " 
 not on the programme, and, to use the words 
 of one who was present, "It was just the 
 
THE COOPER UNION 91 
 
 sort of thing to please Peter Cooper to the 
 bottom of his soul." 
 
 The great hall was dedicated from the 
 beginning to free speech. Peter Cooper 
 may have overestimated the value of mere 
 talk. As I have already told, it was his 
 first notion that conversation and discussion 
 were the chief things required in education. 
 He came to see that study, instruction, and 
 training were equally essential, but he never 
 surrendered his faith in free speech ; and 
 the great hall was at the service of all sects, 
 parties, and classes, religious, philosophical, 
 political, scientific, literary, or philanthropic. 
 It has been the scene of many memorable 
 meetings and addresses. But nothing in its 
 history has been more useful and noteworthy 
 than the series of free popular lectures which 
 were given, as part of the operations of the 
 Cooper Union, within its walls. These lec- 
 tures began in 1868, and continued until 
 they were adopted by the city as part of the 
 general scheme of free lectures which has 
 been so successful during the last few years. 
 In awarding due praise to the promoters 
 
92 PETER COOPER 
 
 and managers of this plan, it should not be 
 forgotten that the Cooper Union inaugurated 
 it, and maintained it for many years, dur- 
 ing which the free Saturday night popular 
 lectures in its great hall were the only ones 
 of their kind. They covered many sciences 
 and arts, chronicles of travel and themes of 
 history and literature. The most eminent 
 authors, teachers, investigators, travelers, 
 and orators of the generation were comprised 
 in the list of lecturers ; and many of them 
 performed this service without other reward 
 than the consciousness of contributing to a 
 noble charity, and the evident gratitude of 
 the vast and eagerly attentive audience. 
 
 Mr. Cooper loved to attend these Satur- 
 day evening lectures, and an arm-chair was 
 always ready for him on the platform. 
 Many a speaker on that platform has been 
 surprised by an untimely outburst of applause 
 and has turned to discover the cause in the 
 entrance of the beloved founder. Often 
 the subject of the evening was beyond his 
 experience or knowledge, but that made no 
 difference in his respectful attention, or in 
 
THE COOPER UNION 93 
 
 the benign satisfaction with which he con- 
 templated the attentive audience, and real- 
 ized that they were receiving benefit. I have 
 often felt that the scene exhibited almost 
 every Saturday night for many years during 
 the latest period of his life could be equaled 
 only by the spectacle presented at Ephesus, 
 where the aged St. John the Divine fronted 
 the congregation of loving believers, always 
 with his one last message, " Little children, 
 love one another." 
 
 But sometimes the old man would be in- 
 tensely interested and aroused by the lecture. 
 I remember such an occasion, when I was my- 
 self the lecturer, and had been laying down, 
 with due scientific decorum and diagrams, the 
 " law of storms." At the close of the lec- 
 ture, Mr. Cooper arose, advanced to the 
 front, and gave a vivid and animated de- 
 scription of a whirlwind which he had wit- 
 nessed some seventy years before, which was 
 received with rapt attention and tremen- 
 dous applause. The lecture was undoubt- 
 edly eclipsed in interest by this unexpected 
 after-piece ; but the lecturer was amply 
 
94 PETER COOPER 
 
 compensated by his triumph in having thus 
 stirred the spirit and aroused the recollec- 
 tions of the dear old founder. 
 
 With regard to the various schools and 
 classes of the Cooper Union, it must suffice 
 to say briefly that under the elastic and 
 comprehensive plan of the deed of trust, 
 two objects were constantly kept in view by 
 the trustees. In the first place, a complete 
 four years' course was always maintained, 
 for the benefit of those who could afford the 
 time and who felt the need of such training. 
 In the second place, classes were instituted 
 in such special departments as were most 
 likely to be useful and most evidently in de- 
 mand ; and with regard to these the demand 
 and the evidence of usefulness were followed 
 as guides in determining the extent of the 
 facilities offered, up to the capacity and 
 means of the institution. 
 
 De Morgan, in his " Budget of Para- 
 doxes," tells of an old fellow who, wishing 
 to have a chair that would fit him perfectly, 
 sat for a while on a mass of shoemaker's 
 wax, which he then carried to a worker in 
 
THE COOPER UNION 95 
 
 wood, and instructed him to " make a seat 
 like that ! " This homely illustration indi- 
 cates the manner in which the special classes 
 of the Cooper Union have been established, 
 enlarged, and regulated, to meet the evi- 
 dent demands of its constituency. It is 
 pleasant to know that the future means and 
 sphere of the institution will be enlarged 
 under the same wise management. 
 
VIII 
 
 NATIONAL POLITICS 
 
 Peter Cooper's prominent activity in 
 national politics belongs to two periods, 
 that of the war for the Union, and that of 
 the subsequent controversies over questions 
 of financial policy. 
 
 As has been explained, he felt his life to be 
 peculiarly identified with that of the nation 
 born with him ; and the idea that this nation 
 should be destroyed in the midst of its tri- 
 umphant progress was profoundly abhorrent 
 to him. Like many other patriots, he was 
 ready to save the Union by a compromise, if 
 that were practicable. He advocated the 
 purchase and liberation by the government 
 of all the slaves in the United States ; he 
 promoted a " peace conference " on the very 
 eve of the war. But when South Carolina 
 had formally seceded and the gauntlet had 
 
NATIONAL POLITICS 97 
 
 been cast at the feet of national authority, his 
 course was not uncertain. He was a repre- 
 sentative of the New York Chamber of Com- 
 merce in the deputation of thirty leading 
 citizens of New York which visited Wash- 
 ington in order to discover what plan Mr. 
 Buchanan (then still President) had in 
 view. They got no satisfaction from the 
 President, but assured themselves of the 
 firm loyalty of Mr. Seward, then Senator 
 from New York. 
 
 A few weeks later the bombardment of 
 Fort Sumter put an end to all projects of 
 compromise. At the memorable mass meet- 
 ing held in Union Square, New York, shortly 
 after the receipt of this news, Peter Cooper, 
 then seventy years old, was among the first 
 to mount the platform. His familiar white 
 hairs and kindly face were recognized by the 
 crowd, which vociferously called for a speech 
 from him. Stepping to the front, he uttered 
 a few ringing sentences which sounded the 
 keynote of the meeting. I quote but one or 
 two : 
 
 " We are contending with an enemy not 
 
98 PETER COOPER 
 
 only determined on our destruction as a na- 
 tion, but to build on our ruins a government 
 devoted with all its power to maintain, ex- 
 tend, and perpetuate a system in itself re- 
 volting to all the best feelings of humanity, 
 an institution that enables thousands to 
 sell their own children into hopeless bond- 
 
 " Shall it succeed ? You say ' No ! ' and 
 I unite with you in your decision. We can- 
 not allow it to succeed. We should spend 
 our lives, our property, and leave the land 
 itself a desolation before such an institution 
 should triumph over the free people of this 
 country. . . . 
 
 " Let us, therefore, unite to sustain the 
 government by every means in our power, to 
 arm and equip in the shortest possible time 
 an army of the best men that can be found 
 in the country." 
 
 From that day on his patriotism never 
 doubted or faltered. When the war loan 
 was announced he was the first man at the 
 door of the subtreasury in New York wait- 
 ing to make payment over the counter of 
 
NATIONAL POLITICS 99 
 
 all the money he had been able to collect 
 without business disaster. " In those days," 
 says a friend, " whenever he had nothing 
 else to do, he would go down to the recruit- 
 ing office and put in a substitute." It is 
 estimated that he must have sent, first and 
 last, about a score of soldiers to serve for him 
 under the flag. 
 
 From the first he urged the emancipation 
 and enlistment of the Southern negroes, 
 a policy which was ultimately adopted with 
 successful results ; and when in 1864, at the 
 darkest hour of the struggle, there was dan- 
 ger of a fatal compromise, he actively pro- 
 moted that great mass meeting in the hall of 
 the Cooper Union which marked the turning- 
 point of the struggle, carried the State of 
 New York for Lincoln, and secured the tri- 
 umph of the Union. 
 
 After the war was over he presided at an- 
 other meeting, called to favor aid to the dis- 
 abled soldiers of the nation ; and the following 
 paragraph quoted from his remarks on that 
 occasion forms a fitting close to this brief 
 notice of his patriotic activity : 
 
100 PETER COOPER 
 
 " If we required a stronger stimulus to 
 urge us to perform our duty, we have only 
 to turn our thoughts back to that fearful 
 day when the armies of rebellion had entered 
 Pennsylvania with the intent to subjugate 
 the North to their domination. Had they 
 been successful, they would have gloried in 
 making us pay for the loss of their slaves 
 and the expenses of their war. I trust that 
 the government will not hesitate to tax my 
 property and the property of every other 
 man enough to provide for the comfort of 
 our disabled soldiers and the families de- 
 pendent on them for support." 
 
 In the financial controversies which accom- 
 panied and followed the period of u recon- 
 struction " after the war, and were involved 
 in the payment and adjustment of the na- 
 tional debt, Mr. Cooper appeared as an ad- 
 vocate of the " Greenback " party, and did 
 not seem to realize that this was a complete 
 reversal of his earlier position as a " hard- 
 money " Democrat. I think the clue to this 
 change may be found in his recollection of 
 the war waged by Andrew Jackson on the 
 
NATIONAL POLITICS 101 
 
 i 
 
 United States Bank, and a vague feeling 
 that the national banking system instituted 
 by Secretary Chase was open to similar ob- 
 jections. To this may be added his growing 
 inclination in favor of " paternal govern- 
 ment," which in a man so thoroughly 
 self-supporting and self-reliant can be ex- 
 plained only by the fact that his personal 
 philanthropy overbalanced his political phi- 
 losophy ; that he became more anxious to 
 relieve the distress he saw than to question 
 the wisdom of measures taken for that pur- 
 pose. Two things are certain: first, that 
 Mr. Cooper's motives in his later political 
 course were thoroughly pure and unselfish ; 
 and secondly, that his utterances and publi- 
 cations in this connection show him to be 
 dealing with subjects which he did not un- 
 derstand. This statement is made without 
 regard to the merits of the controversy, or 
 the strength of the arguments contributed 
 to it by others. The simple truth is that 
 Mr. Cooper was too pld to make original 
 investigation of such questions, intelligently 
 weighing all the modern conditions of indus- 
 
102 PETER COOPER 
 
 try and commerce, in which he was no longer 
 an active participant. He accepted in 1876 
 the nomination of the Greenback party for 
 the presidency; but the issue was already 
 practically dead, and he received but 81,740 
 votes out of a total of 8,412,833 cast. Un- 
 daunted by this defeat, he continued to utter 
 his views. Those who wish to study them 
 in detail may consult the volume " Ideas for 
 a Science of Good Government in Addresses, 
 Letters, and Articles on a Strictly National 
 Currency, Tariff, and Civil Service," which 
 he issued at the age of ninety-two, in the 
 last year of his life. His own summary of 
 his position, given on page 212 of this book, 
 shows that he desired a national legal-tender 
 paper currency, irredeemable in coin, but 
 "interconvertible" with government bonds, 
 and regulated bylaw as to volume per capita ; 
 a "discriminating" protective tariff, "help- 
 ful to all the industries of the country, where 
 the raw material and the labor can be fur- 
 nished by our own people ; " and a civil ser- 
 vice divorced from party politics, based on 
 
NATIONAL POLITICS 103 
 
 personal fitness, with tenure of office during 
 good behavior, moderate salaries, and pen- 
 sions for the aged and sick, and provision 
 for widows and orphans. 
 
IX 
 
 THE END 
 
 In 1874, at the age of eighty-three, Mr. 
 Cooper said at a reception given in his 
 honor : 
 
 " When I was born, New York contained 
 27,000 inhabitants. The upper limits of the 
 city were at Chambers Street. Not a single 
 free school, either by day or night, existed. 
 General Washington had just entered upon 
 his first term as President of the United States, 
 the whole annual expenditures of which did not 
 exceed $2,500,000, being about sixty cents 
 per head of the population. Not a single 
 steam engine had yet been built or erected 
 on the American continent ; and the people 
 were clad in homespun, and were character- 
 ized by the simple virtues and habits which 
 are usually associated with that primitive 
 garb. I need not tell you what the country 
 now is, and what the habits and the gar- 
 
THE END 105 
 
 ments of its people now are, or that the 
 expenditure, per capita, of the general gov- 
 ernment has increased fifteen-fold. But I 
 have witnessed and taken a deep interest in 
 every step of the marvellous development 
 and progress which have characterized this 
 century beyond all the centuries which have 
 gone before. 
 
 "Measured by the achievements of the 
 years I have seen, I am one of the oldest 
 men who have ever lived ; but I do not feel 
 old, and I propose to give you the receipt 
 by which I have preserved my youth. 
 
 " I have always given a friendly welcome to 
 new ideas, and I have endeavored not to feel 
 too old to learn ; and thus, though I stand 
 here with the snows of so many winters 
 upon my head, my faith in human nature, 
 my belief in the progress of man to a better 
 social condition, and especially my trust in 
 the ability of men to establish and maintain 
 self-government, are as fresh and as young 
 as when I began to travel the path of life. 
 
 " While I have always recognized that the 
 object of business is to make money in an 
 
106 PETER COOPER 
 
 honorable manner, I have endeavored to 
 remember that the object of life is to do 
 good. Hence I have been ready to engage 
 in all new enterprises, and, without incur- 
 ring debt, to risk in their promotion the 
 means which I had acquired, provided they 
 seemed to me calculated to advance the gen- 
 eral good. This will account for my early 
 attempt to perfect the steam engine, for my 
 attempt to construct the first American 
 locomotive, for my connection with the tele- 
 graph in a course of efforts to unite our 
 country with the European world, and for 
 my recent efforts to solve the problem of 
 economical steam navigation on the canals ; 
 to all of which you have so kindly referred. 
 It happens to but few men to change the 
 current of human progress, as it did to Watt, 
 to Fulton, to Stephenson, and to Morse ; but 
 most men may be ready to welcome laborers 
 to a new field of usefulness, and to clear the 
 road for their progress. 
 
 " This I have tried to do, as well in the 
 perfecting and execution of their ideas as in 
 making such provision as my means have per- 
 
THE END 107 
 
 mitted for the proper education of the young 
 mechanics and citizens of my native city, in 
 order to fit them for the reception of new 
 ideas, social, mechanical, and scientific 
 hoping thus to economize and expand the 
 intellectual as well as the physical forces, 
 and provide a larger fund for distribution 
 among the various classes which necessarily 
 make up the total of society. If our lives 
 shall be such that we shall receive the glad 
 welcome of ' Well done, good and faithful 
 servant,' we shall then know that we have 
 not lived in vain." 
 
 For nine years after this utterance he 
 continued the peaceful and happy life which 
 it describes. When the end came, it was 
 quiet and painless. Surrounded by his chil- 
 dren and grandchildren, and whispering 
 with almost his last breath the desire for an 
 increase of his bequest to that other well- 
 beloved child, the Cooper Union, he " fell on 
 sleep," April 4, 1883. 
 
 On the day of his funeral New York city 
 presented an almost unexampled spectacle. 
 All Soul's Unitarian Church, in which his 
 
108 PETER COOPER 
 
 body was deposited, early in the morning 
 was thronged with a mighty multitude, pass- 
 ing in procession to look upon the beloved 
 face. Eighteen young men from the Cooper 
 Union surrounded it, as a guard of honor. 
 A body of 3500 students of that institution, 
 of both sexes, marched by, casting flowers 
 upon the coffin, and followed by delegations 
 from all the municipal and charitable organ- 
 izations of the city, and by uncounted mul- 
 titudes, whose relation to the beloved phi- 
 lanthropist was not official or representative, 
 but simply personal. 
 
 The busiest streets of New York, through 
 which the funeral procession passed on its 
 way to Greenwood Cemetery, beyond the 
 East River, were closed to business and 
 hung in black. The flags on all public 
 buildings, and on the ships in the harbor, 
 were at half-mast. The bells of all churches 
 were tolled. The whole city mourned, as it 
 had not done since, eighty years before, the 
 funeral procession of George Washington 
 moved through its streets. 
 
 If we seek, without affectionate prejudice, 
 
THE END 109 
 
 to discover the cause of this universal grief, 
 affection, and admiration, we shall find, I 
 think, that it lies chiefly in two circum- 
 stances; namely, the character of Peter 
 Cooper as a lover of his kind, and the op- 
 portunity afforded him by his long life, not 
 only to prove that character, but to become 
 personally known to many thousands of 
 those whom he sought unselfishly to serve. 
 Few persons except military commanders 
 have such an opportunity. The philanthro* 
 pists who labor in secret, no matter with 
 what noble motive, and do not come face to 
 face with their beneficiaries, may win the 
 applause of posterity, but cannot expect to 
 receive the immediate and personal affection 
 of their contemporaries. Least of all do 
 posthumous gifts arouse this sentiment. 
 Peter Cooper, above all other claims to re- 
 nown and gratitude, identified himself with 
 his philanthropy, and was known where he 
 was loved. 
 
 " Who gives himself with his gift, feeds three : 
 Himself, his hungering neighbor, and Me ! ' ' 
 
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