Year two, 1823, of Thomas Cooper’s two-year span as president of South  Carolina College (now University of South Carolina) was the annus horribilius of that internationally renown professor’s career. The English-born, Oxford-educated Cooper had no patience with juvenile  high-jinx. Carolina, as most antebellum universities, was known for its rowdy undergraduates. Yet, history records that it was the school’s  president who nearly incited the state into a bitter upstate -  lowerstate feud.
Beyond Cooper’s inability to discipline a rebellious  student-body, Carolina’s board of trustees and the state legislature accused him of spreading atheism among the students.
If these dissatisfactions weren’t grounds for dismissal, then the legislature’s 1828 condemnation of President Cooper’s inflammatory remarks on the
“Tariff of Abominations” did finish the man’s career. Cooper nearly  incited a riot with his partisanship on political matters. Yet, how could this scholarly associate of learned men such as Jefferson,  Madison, and Joseph Priestley be sacked as President of our state’s  flagship institution of higher learning?
Thomas Cooper was well-known to be puritanical in his personal behavior, but a free thinker in religion. Carolinia’s all- male student population, on the other hand, were known to be libertine in their daily lives, but pious on the Sabbath.
The tumultuous relationships between  students and their masters, the city of Columbia and the College and  the legislature and their top academician, were in jeopardy of becoming  a parody of what Britain predicted would happen if America split away.
The State’s only major institution of higher learning was at risk of  demise just as the new Republic was forming.
“What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders,  they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the  streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is  to become of them?” Those words are not from the Columbia Gazette; rather, they are taken from Book Four of Plato’s Republic. In these words and other thoughts from the classics did Thomas Cooper take solace  in his struggle to modernize Carolina College into an institution of rational, enlightenment thought.
Cooper never took his triple degree of Law, Medicine, and Theology at  Oxford’s University College in 1779. Resistance to the idea of the Holy Trinity, “freethinking” as it was known, kept Cooper from the  prestigious trifecta of academe — Anglican’s foremost bastion, Oxford.
Association with anti-monarchist, anti-trinitarian Joseph Priestley led  Cooper to move to Philadelphia in 1793.
Brilliant and outspoken, Cooper was briefly imprisoned in Philadelphia  during the War of 1812 for violating the Alien and Sedition Act —an act that restricted free speech during war. Being a Deist and a ardent  Anti-Federalist, Cooper was the political enemy of John Adams and the  confidante of Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson recruited Professor Cooper to come to Charlottesville’s new university. However, an opening at  Carolina had more appeal. Cooper and Jefferson maintained a lively correspondence, however. Perhaps Cooper sensed that once at Carolina he’d be offered the presidency.
The boys at Carolina showed much disrespect to Professor Cooper from  the outset of his arrival. They jeered him and called him “Old Coot”  when he passed them on the Horseshoe. The eccentric Cooper was a comical  character.
Usually the students cut classes on days of inclement  weather according to Edwin L. Green’s History of The University of South  Carolina (1916). They used the slightest cloudcover as pretext of foul  weather. Despite these antics, Carolina turned out some of the greatest scholars of the antebellum age.
It was customary for the college president to have the young men over to his residence to mingle with the legislature and the justices.
Even some of these occasions turned raucous.
In the dining hall there were frequent food fights and at least once, the students threw all of the college’s plates and cutlery down a nearby  well. On another occasion the altar of the chapel was desecrated.
Thomas Jefferson wrote to Cooper concerning young Mister Eppes, Jefferson’s nephew. Cooper lamented in a letter to Jefferson that he’d “not seen Eppes — as the students do not visit the houses of the  professors. Mr. Eppes, he said, had not been to call upon Mrs.Cooper.”
Shortly after this correspondence with the former president, Thomas Cooper repeated a saying attributed to Timothy Dwight of Yale that he, Cooper, also “doubted that a successful college could b maintained  south of the Mason-Dixon line.” He implied that southern males were too  wild for university.
Being mocked by the students was just part of Cooper’s troubles. The learned don derided Christianity in just about every lecture and speech he made. He was a disciple of Locke, Hume, Diderot, and Voltaire.
The “Age of Reason” carried more hope for humanity in Cooper’s view than did  the “Age of Faith.”
“Old Coot’s” students may have been irreverent in  the taverns, but they rose in stouthearted defense of the Gospels under siege by the heretic Cooper. Thomas Cooper was asked to step down as president just two years after he was installed.
Even so, he was appreciated enough that he was stay on as professor of  chemistry.
During the 1820s religious colleges around the state such as  Wofford, Newberry, and Furman gained considerably from the backlash against Cooper’s liberalism.
The imminent, irreverent scholar might  have lasted at Carolina had not his vitriol waxed hot in divisive  political matters. Tensions were so high that Cooper’s speeches against  the hated Congressional tariffs nearly caused Columbians to riot.
Cooper even publicly questioned the value of the Union — much to the  delight of Charleston’s disunion set. It was the last straw, even though  Governor Stephen Decatur Miller, a Democrat-Nullifier, spoke on Cooper’s  behalf. He had to go in 1831.
Professor Cooper desired to set up a law practice but was persuaded by  the legislature to assume the onerous task of codifying the laws of the  state — a task he assumed with relish.
Cooper’s daughter married Joseph W. Lesesne, the salutatorian of the Class of 1832. Esteemed medical doctor, J. Marion Sims, father of gynecology, was a member of the Carolina class of 1832. He recalled of Thomas Cooper that  many students felt that the honor bestowed upon Lesesne was influenced by Cooper.
In 1976, The University’s Thomas Cooper Library was named for  scientist, theologian, political theorist, and lawyer - 145 years after  he was terminated at the college.

(Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter-Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant. Visit his Web site online at www.historyslostmoments.com).