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 DOCUMENTS /. Letters of Dr. Thomas Cooper, 182^-18^2. Mr. William Nelson, Jr., Corresponding Secretary of the New Jersey Historical Society, and the possessor of the papers of Mahlon Dickerson, has extracted from that collection the following letters of the famous Dr. Thomas Cooper, which he has kindly permitted the Review to use. Dickerson, an eminent Democratic politician of New Jersey, was a senator of the United States from 1 8 17 to 1833, and these letters are, with one exception, addressed to him at Washington. In some respects they have a close relation to the correspondence which forms the second group of documents in the present issue of the Review, and they might have been classed with them ; for they cast light on that stage of South Caro- lina politics, previous to 1828, when Calhoun was still reckoned among the nationals and conservatives, and when the line of cleav- age in state politics ran between him and his friends Hamilton and Hayne and McDuffie on the one hand, and the extremer state- rights men led by Judge Smith on the other hand. But on the whole the main interest of these letters lies in their relation to Dr. Cooper's petition for the restoration of the fine inflicted upon him by Justice Chase in 1800, under the Sedition Act, on account of a newspaper libel on the President, and in their characteristic exhi- bition of the traits which so strongly marked Cooper himself, the "learned, ingenious, scientific and talented madcap" of John Adams's pungent phrase. After his brief and eccentric career as a Pennsylvania judge, 1806-1811, and after a brief service as professor of chemistry in Dickinson College and in the University of Pennsylvania, Cooper was in 18 19 elected to the same chair in the South Carolina Col- lege, and in 1820 became its president. This was the position which he occupied at the time when these letters were written. There seems to be no question that, with his extraordinary ac- quirements, energy and versatility, he was a most stimulating and effective teacher, and left a permanent mark upon the intellectual life of the institution. But his heterodoxy in matters of religion, set forth with characteristic aggressiveness and pugnacity, aroused so much excitement and indignation in the state, that he was put (725)