Land-agent of Liberty: South Carolina’s Thomas Cooper

Abstract

President John Adams’s dismissive description of Thomas Cooper as `a talented mad-cap’ scarcely does justice to a remarkable transatlantic career. Born in the year Voltaire published Candide Cooper was the son of a wealthy Manchester industrialist He read law at Oxford, though without taking a degree. On the strength of attending a clinical course at the Middlesex hospital, and observing veterinary dissections at Clerkenwell, he became assistant to a Manchester physician. His own interest in industrial chemistry, and his support for religious toleration, brought him the friendship of Joseph Priestley, and at Priestley’s suggestion he crossed the Atlantic to reconnoitre a suitable refuge for what Priestley called `the friends of liberty’.