Cooper instead of to the Secretary;" but while he thus brought to the service of the Secretary his professional knowledge, the latter eminently great in other departments of learning, no doubt did much to imbue General Cooper's mind with those political ideas which subsequently marked him as more profoundly informed upon the character of our Government than most others of his profession.
In the midst of his professional duties, he found leisure for high literary culture, had much dramatic taste, and in the dull days of garrison life he contributed much to refined enjoyment. When I became Secretary of War, General Cooper was Adjutant-General of the United States army. My intercourse with him was daily, and as well because of the purity of his character as his knowledge of the officers and affairs of the army, I habitually consulted him in reference to the duties I had to perform.
Though calm in his manner and charitable in his feelings, he was a man of great native force, and had a supreme scorn for all that was mean.
To such a man, a life spent in the army could not fail to have had its antagonisms and its friendships; yet when officers were to be selected for special duties, to be appointed in staff corps, or to be promoted into new regiments, where qualifications were alone to be regarded, I never, in four years of constant consultation, saw Cooper manifest prejudice, or knew him to seek favors for a friend, or to withhold what was just from one to whom he bore reverse relations. This rare virtue—this supremacy of judgment over feeling—impressed me as being so exceptional, that I have often mentioned it as a thing so singular and so praiseworthy that it deserves to be known by all men.
When in 1861 a part of the Southern States, in the exercise of their sovereignty, passed ordinances of secession from the Union, and organized a separate Confederacy, General Cooper was at the head of the corps, in which a large part of his life had been passed. This office was one for which he was peculiarly qualified, and which was best suited to his taste. He was a native of a Northern State; his sole personal relation with the South was that he was the husband of a granddaughter of George Mason, of Virginia—Virginia, not yet belonging to the Confederate States. He foresaw the storm, which was soon to burst upon the seceding States—saw that the power which had been refused in the convention which formed the Constitution of the Union—the power to use the
