Edward Cooper

FDU Press is grateful to our authors for their contributions to scholarship and understanding. We want our readers to know more about them: what motivates and inspires them to do the work they do.  In this instance, we highlight Edward Cooper, author of six books for FDU Press, including the forthcoming (John McDonald: President Grant and the Whiskey Ring.). An independent scholar, Ed’s deeply researched works represent a pure love of scholarship.

• The Brave Men of Company A: The Forty-First Ohio Volunteer Infantry
• Louis Trezevant Wigfall: The Disintegration of the Union and the Collapse of the Confederacy
• Traitors: The Secession Period November 1860 – July 1861
• William Babcock Hazen: The Best Hated Man
• William Worth Belknap: An American Disgrace
• John McDonald: President Grant and the Whiskey Ring.

Edward Cooper: The Realization of a Dream
by Elizabeth Jaeger

Edward Cooper first learned about the Civil War in his Philadelphia elementary school. Like most boys, he sat in his classroom, listened to his teacher, and learned what she had to teach. The Pennsylvania curriculum taught that slavery sparked the war. Lincoln didn’t approve of the institution and he vehemently opposed it spreading into new states. After his election, starting with South Carolina, the Southern states started to secede from the Union.

At age eleven, Edward moved to Dallas. Suddenly the script had changed. School curriculum varies in different states, and Texas offered their students a different perspective on the war. According to his new teachers, slavery was not the catalyst that propelled the South into rebellion. The South formed the Confederacy because they wanted to maintain States Rights, something they feared Lincoln and the North were determined to restrict.

As young Edward processed this new history, he became troubled and angry. He didn’t agree that the Confederates were like George Washington fighting for freedom from an oppressive government. After all, it was the South who wished to continue oppressing the slaves. This clash of perspectives impacted Edward so much that years later it became the impetus to researching and writing Louis Trezevant Wigfall (to express his view that the war was about slavery) and Traitors: The Secession Period (to draw a sharp distinction between heroes of the Revolutionary War and traitors of the Civil War). But that was still years in the future. At the time, Edward kept silent.

Not only did Edward find a great disparity between North and South in his textbooks, he observed a different culture in each region. In Philadelphia, black and white men and women drank from the same water fountains and they ate at the same counters in restaurants. This was not the case in Dallas where segregation prevailed. Raised with Northern sensibilities, Edward’s father offered his seat on a bus to a pregnant black woman. Outraged, the bus driver expelled him from the bus.  But Edward didn’t just observe the bigotry in his environment, he experienced it. Although white, he is Jewish. For this, his classmates abused him and made a habit of blaming him for personally killing Jesus. How could he speak about his opposition to the way the Civil War was being taught? To do so would have made things more difficult for him.

Three years later, he returned to Philadelphia. In his final year of Middle School he had a phenomenal history teacher. He remembers her as being a delicate, small, dark haired woman who wore large glasses. Regretfully, he does not remember her name, despite the fact that he credits her with being the person who made him determined to be a historian.

But history would have to wait. By the time he finished high school, financial concerns superseded — but did not squelch — his passion for history. He wanted to go to college and Drexel was the most affordable. Drexel was a five year school where students went to class but also took a co-op job. To ease the financial strain of attending college, Edward also joined ROTC. It paid $20 a month but in return, he had to commit to two years in the military after graduation. His co-op job was working for PEPCO, a power company in Washington, D.C. His experience there, combined with his time working as an electronic spy in the Army at the NSA at Fort Meade, demonstrated that he had a talent for making computers do things that no one else thought they could.

Following his stint in the Army, Edward accepted a job at Leeds & Northrup who supplied computer control systems to electric power companies. After only three years, he and his friends realized they could be more effective if they were not restricted to what Leeds & Northrup could supply. Resigning from their jobs, they started Marco Corporation which helped companies plan and acquire computer systems from the best suppliers. It wasn’t history, but Edward “was having great fun making computers sit up and sing.”

During this time, he married his high school sweetheart and they had two children. His passion for history had not died but his love and responsibility was to family. Making a good living to support them became his priority. However, he remained a prolific reader, devouring books about the Civil War and Texas.

After twenty-years, Marco Corporation became so large and successful that Edward grew to dislike his job. To alleviate some of the dread he began to feel regarding work, he and his partners decide to take turns going on sabbatical. Finally, he had time to devote to historical research. He had always been fascinated by Vinnie Ream, the artist who had sculpted the large statue of Admiral Farragut in Farragut Square in Washington D.C., as well as the statue of President Lincoln in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol Building. Spending two sabbaticals doing research in The Library of Congress — where every love letter Ream ever received is stored — and in Madison, Wisconsin — where she was born — he wrote his first book.  Vinnie Ream: An American Sculptor was published by Academy Chicago.

When Edward’s children had graduated college and started families of their own, Edward realized it was now time to focus his attention on the dream that started decades earlier under the influence of one remarkable teacher. He and his partners sold Marco Corporation to KEMA, a Dutch Company. This enabled him to embark on a new full time career as a historian. But even now, family still comes first. If Edward is in the middle of something big he will drop it immediately to attend a grandson’s lacrosse game. No research is more important than meeting his grandsons to play golf or to review a paper one of them has written for school. Even if his son needs help with his boats or his wife needs help with anything, he happily pushes his writing aside. He knows it will always be there waiting for him when he is ready to resume working. And while his family always comes first, one of the greatest rewards he has experienced since becoming a historian is having his grandson call him up from college simply to tell him that four of his books are in the library.

Settling in to life as a historian, Edward felt that while certain Civil War personalities had been researched and written about extensively, others who played pivotal roles had virtually been ignored, earning no more than a brief mention in works focused on other people or events. To bring attention to these lesser know historical figures, he wrote William Babcock Hazen: The Best Hated Man and William Worth Belknap: An American Disgrace.

Some ideas, unfortunately, lead to dead ends. In one instance, Edward had wanted to write a biography about Emily Edson Briggs. She had been a columnist for several newspapers during and after the Civil War. However, the newspapers no longer exist, and without primary source material, Edward couldn’t pursue this story. Before beginning a new project, Edward visits the Library of Congress’ website to see what books have been written about the topic that interests him. For awhile he considered writing about Edmund G. Ross, a politician who had played a vital role in President Johnson’s acquittal, but his initial research revealed that other historians had recently written about him.

Edward’s first book earned him some money, but editorial disagreements with the publishing company prompted him to look for a different publisher for his later works. His prior career had been about making money, this time he wanted to focus on the product, and he admits there is a certain level of prestige that comes with publishing work with a University Press. This appealed to him. Working with Dr. Kalman Goldstein, Professor Emeritus of History, at Fairleigh Dickinson University Press has been a wonderful experience. He credits Dr. Goldstein with recommending revisions that have strengthened and improved his work.

The project Edward enjoyed the most, the one that gave him the most satisfaction, resulted in the book The Brave Men of Company A: The Forty-First Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Shortly after its publication he received an email from FDU Press stating, “We’ve been invited to submit The Brave Men of Company A: The Forty-First Ohio Volunteer Infantry by Edward S. Cooper for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize at Gettysburg College.” He did not win, but just being nominated was an honor.

A vital part of being a historian is reading history. The historian Edward admires most is Bruce Catton. But the historians he returns to repeatedly are the ones who actually participated in the Civil War, either on the battlefields or behind the scenes laboring over strategy. He owns the four volume set Battles and Leaders of the Civil War which contains stories written by hundreds of men who experienced the War. And he frequently visits the Cornell University website that contains access to the one hundred and twenty-seven volumes of The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union an Confederate Armies as well as the thirty volumes of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate navies in the War of the Rebellion which contains the reports soldiers sent to their superiors during and immediately after specific battles. While it is true that some of these men may have exaggerated their bravery or enhanced the reality of their skills, they are the ones Edward relies upon and respects the most. Although, before quoting them or relaying their stories, he always checks the facts to ensure that his work is an accurate portrayal of the past.

Edward has found that being an independent scholar is an extremely rewarding second career. However, rewarding and lucrative are not synonymous. A successful first career enabled him to pursue his dream. And so he advises anyone considering the possibility of being an independent scholar to be aware of the financial restrictions. You can’t raise a family on the income generated by independent scholarship. But once that family is established and provided for, it’s not a bad way to earn a little extra of their respect.

Elizabeth Jaeger is currently finishing up an MFA degree in creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She is an assistant editor at The Literary Review and her work has been published in The Drowning Gull, Icarus Down Review, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, Atticus Review, and The Literary Explorer. An essay of hers has been featured on the podcast No You Tell It. She has recently finished writing a memoir about her time in Nepal traveling with a young Nepalese boy and she hopes to find a home for it soon.