iah--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 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 established 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 shortsighted and obstinate tyranny by
Englishmen 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 commanders 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 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 debatable 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, Lieutenant 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 service, that John Cooper married
Margaret, the daughter of John Campbell, a deputy quartermaster-