Thomas Cooper (1759–1839), attorney, judge, scientist, and educator, was a native of London who left Oxford University without a degree because of his dissenting religious views. Along with his friend and mentor Joseph Priestley, he became disillusioned with political conditions in England, settled in 1794 in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, and became a United States citizen. Cooper opposed the Sedition Act of 1798 and in 1800 was himself fined and spent six months in prison for seditious libel. Cooper was TJ’s longtime friend and frequent correspondent. Beginning as a vocal supporter of Jeffersonian republicanism, he eventually became a leading spokesman for states’ rights and nullification. Cooper served as a state district judge in Pennsylvania, 1804–11, as professor of chemistry at Dickinson College from 1811 until it suspended activities in 1815, and as professor of applied chemistry and mineralogy at the University of Pennsylvania, 1815–19. At TJ’s strong urging, Cooper was successively elected to professorships in science and law at Central College in 1817 and its successor, the University of Virginia, two years later, but his Unitarian and materialist religious views made his appointment controversial. Because of a delay in the scheduled opening of the school, Cooper never taught in Charlottesville. He accepted the chair of chemistry at South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina at Columbia) in 1820 and served as its president, 1821–33. In his retirement Cooper edited five volumes of South Carolina statutes (ANB description begins John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 1999, 24 vols. description ends ; DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, 20 vols. description ends ; DSB description begins Charles C. Gillispie, ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 1970–80, 16 vols. description ends ; Dumas Malone, The Public Life of Thomas Cooper, 1783–1839 [1926, repr. 1961]; PTJ description begins Julian P. Boyd, Charles T. Cullen, John Catanzariti, Barbara B. Oberg, and others, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1950– , 31 vols. description ends , 26:715, 31:451–2; Sowerby; Poor, Jefferson’s Library description begins Nathaniel P. Poor, Catalogue. President Jefferson’s Library [1829] description ends ; Malone, Jefferson description begins Dumas Malone, Jefferson and his Time, 1948–81, 6 vols. description ends , 6:264, 364–9, 376–80).

Thomas Peters smith was a chemist and member of the American Philosophical Society who died in 1802 (Wyndham Miles, “Thomas Peters Smith: A Typical Early American Chemist,” Journal of Chemical Education 30 [1953]: 184–5; Sowerby, description begins E. Millicent Sowerby, comp., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 1952–59, 5 vols. description ends no. 848). William maclure, a prominent American geologist, questioned the theories of Abraham Gottlob Werner, who suggested that geological strata had successively precipitated out of an ancient sea. The elementary work of Richard Kirwan, Elements of Mineralogy (London, 1784), was the first systematic study of the subject in English (DSB description begins Charles C. Gillispie, ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 1970–80, 16 vols. description ends ). geognostic specimens would help explain either the earth’s structure or the natural position and grouping of minerals in rock (OED description begins James A. H. Murray, J. A. Simpson, E. S. C. Weiner, and others, eds., The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., 1989, 20 vols. description ends ).

Cooper gave his dissenting opinion in the Pennsylvania court of errors and appeals in the case of Dempsey v. Insurance Company of Pennsylvania. He was opposing a recent ruling by the united states Supreme Court in Croudson et al. v. Leonard (1808), a lawsuit between the owner and insurers of the cargo of the American brig Fame. In that case, the federal supreme court admitted a decision by a British vice-admiralty court that the ship had attempted to evade the blockade of Martinique as conclusive evidence of this allegation (William Cranch, Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the United States [1804–17], 4:434–43 [United States Supreme Court Reports, vol. 8]). Shortly thereafter Patrick Byrne printed and Alexander dallas published The Opinion of Judge Cooper, on the Effect of a Sentence of a Foreign Court of Admiralty (Philadelphia, 1810; Sowerby, description begins E. Millicent Sowerby, comp., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 1952–59, 5 vols. description ends no. 2120).

Cooper’s compilation did not appear at this time, but he later published A Practical Treatise on Dyeing, and Callicoe Printing exhibiting the processes in the French, German, English, and American practice of fixing colours on woollen, cotton, silk, and linen (Philadelphia, 1815).