Myles Cooper and “the Din of War”

By Christopher F. Minty

Rev. Charles Inglis was distraught. “I cannot express the Distress I felt at hearing of your Embarkation for England, & the Cause of it,” he wrote. It was June 1775 and Myles Cooper, his close friend and colleague, had recently departed Manhattan for Britain. Cooper, one of the city’s most prominent and outspoken loyalists, and had long been targeted by revolutionaries. Just a few months before, he was among five New Yorkers who were warned in a April 25, 1775 letter from “Three Millions” that Parliament’s “Repeated insults and unparalleled oppressions” had reduced colonial Americans “to a state of desperation.” Around two weeks later, a mob sought him out on the King’s College (now Columbia University) campus. Thankfully for Cooper, a student alerted him to the hubbub outside, and he escaped half-dressed through a backdoor. On May 11, he boarded a British ship in the harbor, presumably fearing for his life.[1]

Portrait of Myles Cooper, 1769. Source: Wikimedia Commons

By that time, Cooper had been involved in New Yorkers’ disputes with Parliament for around a year. He seldom involved himself in the various committee meetings that occupied much of his opponents’ time, which afforded him the opportunity to discuss and develop detailed analyses of a worsening imperial relationship. Indeed, with many of his Anglican colleagues, Cooper contributed to or was aware of essays and pamphlets that proposed reconciliation between Britain and its North American colonies. Cooper, long viewed as the most prominent Anglican in the city, was also believed to have written against the American cause and popular attitudes toward him were critical. For instance, Charles Lee believed Cooper authored A Friendly Address to All Reasonable Americans (1774) and so responded, to Cooper, in his Strictures on a Pamphlet (1775). Lee criticized every “Ecclesiastick” and alleged they held a “zeal for arbitrary power.”[2]

King's College, erected in 1756. Source: New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Cooper’s religious beliefs had affected and influenced New Yorkers’ lives almost since he arrived in the city. President of King’s College since 1763, he sought a royal charter so it would become a university and, more important, that the college (or university) would promote Anglicanism in the city and across the colonies. Moreover, Cooper repeatedly pressed for an American bishopric, something that regularly created and mobilized opponents, including, most notably, Presbyterians William Livingston, John Morin Scott, and William Smith Jr., who believed an American Episcopate would undermine and probably overhaul religious toleration in the colony. Given that Anglicans were a numerical minority in New York but held a disproportionate amount of political and legal power, Cooper’s opponents reached a wide audience. With at least 62 essays published that criticized his ideas and proposals, Cooper and his colleagues responded in kind with an essay series titled “A Whip for the American Whig.”[3]

Rev. Charles Inglis, D.D. Source: New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Cooper, it seems, was no stranger to city politics. Between 1765 and 1775 not only did he overhaul their curriculum and discipline but he also forged close relationships with Inglis and other Anglicans in and around Manhattan, including Anglicans Rev. Samuel Seabury and Rev. John Milner, both of whom shared his distress at Cooper’s departure. Aboard the Kingfisher and with his friends Thomas Bradbury Chandler and Samuel Cooke, Cooper left Manhattan on 25 May 1775. It had to be a difficult experience for him. The president of King’s College and one of the most recognized and prominent Anglicans in colonial North America became, as he put it, “an Exile from America.” Indeed, to document his experiences he wrote loyalist poetry. In the July 1776 issue of London’s Gentleman’s Magazine, he detailed his experiences of escaping “the din of war” in New York. Cooper and his colleagues in London firmly believed they had been punished for “their Loyalty.”[4]

Cooper’s interpretation of his situation was almost certainly influenced by the letters he received from his friends and colleagues who remained in New York. Between his departure and the publication of his “STANZAS,” he received vivid letters from friends and colleagues in Manhattan. Inglis’s letter to the former president of King’s College was among the first. Indeed, throughout the year Cooper received multiple letters per month; his correspondents included Seabury and Milner, as well as Cadwallader Colden II, John Wetherhead, Isaac Heron, and others. They each provided detailed descriptions of the American Revolution and the war effort on both sides, from the top generals to the “ordinary” colonist. This correspondence, most importantly, offered a dynamic and personal insight into loyalists’ perspectives on the British military leadership, the religious nature of the conflict, and how ordinary people were mobilized.

New York colonial merchant John Wetherhead noted, for instance, on June 7, 1775: “the Continental & provintial Congress seem determind to strike a very large sum of money to raise & pay large Bodies of Men,” adding, “I suppose with a View of imploying the common people, who they foresee will never be able to bear the distress which is harkening upon them.” “This Scheme alarms every body, especially the farmers on Long Island, their Deputies are quarreling dayly in the Congress about it & vow they will go Home & will have nothing to do with such Villainous Schemes— In short I hope I am to see those Committees & Congresses in a most glorious Embarrassmt.”[5]

The next month, Cadwallader Colden II wrote: “Of all the Calamities allready Experienced and impending, from the infatuation of the times, there is scarce any that the thoughts of which, more Emediately shoked and Effected me than that of you being obliged to quit the Country as you did.—” Colden, who was later imprisoned in Kingston and on a prison ship, offered a fascinating and somewhat harrowing insight into what life was like for a loyalist in New York. “Insignificant as I am,” he wrote, “my Liff and Property has been offten threatned till at Last I was obliged and compeld to put my hand to their association Paper (for which my peculiar Surcumstances I hope will at all times plead my excuse).” Colden was forced to sign the Continental Association. Some “honest Church men” refused, and they were “s[e]ized,” “tyed hand and foot and sent down to the Provincial Congress.” “[E]very Churchman is Call’d a torry.”[6]

Samuel Seabury, D.D. First bishop of the American Church. Source: New York Public Library Digital Collections.

In August, Seabury described the revolutionaries’ “deadly malice.” “Military madness has seized all the Whigs to a man,” he told Cooper. “Nothing but blood & slaughter pleases. They seem delighted with their ability to do hurt.”[7] Meanwhile, John Milner criticized the press. “[A]s you may see by the news Papers that we are all metamorphized into Whiggs & Chaplains to the Congress.” “Times are hard.”[8] Watchmaker Isaac Heron, meanwhile, wrote of his wish to send his “Flock of Herons” to Coleraine, Ireland, or Papcastle, England, and New York royal attorney general John Tabor Kempe, writing aboard the transport Dutchess of Gordon, informed Cooper that he had “burnt” the letter Cooper sent him. “I destroyed it the Day I retired,” he told Cooper on November 7, 1775, “not because there was any Thing in it which in my Opinion your very Enemies might not have seen, but because in the present Times the most innocent or praiseworthy Sentimts will be perverted if possible.”[9]

Many of the people who wrote to Cooper in 1775 continued sending convivial and dynamic letters during the Revolutionary War. They offered domestic and military updates, often criticizing British military leadership, and attributing the war’s cause almost exclusively to religious differences. As John Milner put it, “presbyterianism or Independency be established every where over this widely extended Continent—” Two years later, Charles Inglis summed up what many Anglicans believed: “The War is now properly a Presbyterian War.” Equally important, though, Cooper’s colleagues and friends repeatedly expressed their wish that, one day, he would return to New York. In November 1779, Inglis wrote, “I fervently wish for Your Return.” Cooper’s leadership — religious, political, moral — would, perhaps, revitalize Anglicanism in New York, and possibly beyond.[10]

But Cooper never came back to New York. Even though some of his Anglican colleagues eventually returned — most notably, Samuel Seabury and Thomas Bradbury Chandler — and Inglis settled into a prominent role in Canada, Cooper stayed in Britain. He remained interested in American affairs, though, writing on January 15 1785 to Rev. Samuel Peters, “If you hear anything from America, I should be glad to partake of the Intelligence.” Then in Edinburgh, Scotland, Cooper’s jovial and sometimes light-hearted temperament was evident even though he was sick. “I am still very weak,” he told Peters, adding, “I never had so narrow a squeak.” During a large luncheon, filled with the foods and wine he enjoyed and surrounded by many of the friends he valued so much, he died on May 20, leaving behind an important and often underexplored legacy not just for the history of Anglicanism and loyalism, but the history of higher education and friendship.[11]

Christopher F. Minty is Managing Editor of The John Dickinson Writings Project at the Center for Digital Editing at the University of Virginia. He earned his PhD from the University of Stirling, UK, and is the author of “American Demagogues”: The Revolutionary Origins of Loyalism in New York City (Cornell University Press, forthcoming).

[1] Inglis to Cooper, 6 June 1775, The Cause of Loyalty: The Revolutionary Worlds of Myles Cooper, ed. Christopher F. Minty and Peter W. Walker (forthcoming); Peter Force, American Archives: Consisting of a Collection of Authentick Records, State Papers, Debates, and Letters and Other Notices of Publick Affairs, 6 ser., 9 vols. (Washington, DC, 1837–1853), 4th ser., 2:389, available online at: https://bit.ly/3kxzrzO.

[2] Charles Lee, Strictures on a Pamphlet (Philadelphia, 1774), available online at https://bit.ly/3kB1NZV. Philip Livingston also responded to A Friendly Address; see The Other Side of the Question (New York, 1774). The real author of A Friendly Address was Thomas Bradbury Chandler, for which see Clarence H. Vance, “Myles Cooper,” Columbia University Quarterly 22 (1930): 275–76. The pamphlet was burned and its printer, James Rivington, was threatened. See Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, 17 November 1774. See also John Adams, “Reply to A Friendly Address to All Reasonable Americans,” [post 14 Nov. 1774], in Papers of John Adams (Cambridge, MA, 1977– ), 2:193–97, available online at https://www.masshist.org/publications/adams-papers/index.php/view/ADMS-06-02-02-0060.

[3] For this, see Milton M. Klein, The American Whig: William Livingston of New York (New York, 1999); Dorothy Rita Dillon, The New York Triumvirate: A Study of the Legal and Political Careers of William Livingston, John Morin Scott, and William Smith, Jr. (New York, 1949);

[4] The Gentleman’s Magazine, v. 46, p. 326–327, available online at: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000068789299&view=1up&seq=338; Peter William Walker, “The Church Militant: The American Loyalist Clergy and the Making of the British Counterrevolution, 1701–92” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2016), 189.

[5] Wetherhead to Cooper, 7 June 1775, Cause of Loyalty.

[6] Colden to Cooper, 15 July 1775, Ibid. For Colden’s imprisonment, see his Journal, mssHM 607, The Huntington Library, available online at: https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p15150coll7/id/29262. For more on prisoners of war, see T. Cole Jones, Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 2019).

[7] Seabury to Cooper, 1 August 1775, Cause of Loyalty.

[8] Milner to Cooper, 7 August 1775, Ibid.

[9] Heron to Cooper, 8 December 1775; Kempe to Cooper, 7 November 1775, Ibid. Kempe lived on board the Dutchess of Gordon with other exiled loyalists and royal officials, including Gov. William Tryon. See Jonathan Trumbull Sr. to George Washington, 15 January 1776, Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, 28 vols. to date (Charlottesville, 1985– ), 3:97–99, online at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-03-02-0069.

[10] Milner to Cooper, 3 December 1775, Cause of Loyalty; Inglis to Cooper, 24 July 1777, Cause of Loyalty; Inglis to Cooper, 6 November 1779, Cause of Loyalty.

[11] Cooper to Peters, 15 Jan. [1785], in “Letters from the Reverend Dr. Myles Cooper, Formerly President of King's College, New York, Written from Edinburgh To Rev. Dr. Samuel Peters, of London,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 2, no. 1 (1933): 46. Columbia University Archives notes incorrectly that Cooper settled in England. See https://library.columbia.edu/libraries/cuarchives/presidents/cooper_myles.html. See also Cooper’s Dictionary of National Biography entry.