About Thomas Cooper

This site is dedicated to the memory of Thomas Cooper, MD, friend of Thomas Jefferson, influential writer of the Revolutionary period, and author of CONSOLIDATION, a pamphlet explaining the development of American political parties up through the year 1823.

In his 1836 edition of the South Carolina Statutes at large, Cooper summarized the “Consolidation” issue as follows:

Consolidation. The merging and absorbing the separate State Governments into one great, central, indivisible, national Government; as emanating from the whole people : in contradistinction to our present federal government of United States. This seems to have been the aim of many politicians among us, about the time of the Convention in 1787. They were defeated in the Convention by their opponents of the states or federal party. The friends of consolidation were nationalists. After the publication of the work called the “Federalist,” the joint production of Messrs. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, the national party assumed the name of Federalists; by which they were afterwards designated in party warfare, until the accession of General Jackson; since that time, names and parties have been strangely intermingled, modified, and confused. The object of the modern Federal (or national) party, was a single government, with full power of controul over the separate states, and the people, with great revenues, extensive patronage, and an imposing character of power and resources in the eyes of Europe. To effect this, the central government at Washington must be considered as the national government, paramount, predominant, and uncontroulable; the states must be sunk into municipalities, and the constitution of 1787 explained away by construction and implication, or boldly set at nought by open usurpation. All these means and measures have been resorted to; and in fact, they form the subjects of remonstrance and complaint in the documents that follow. Many good and able men have arranged themselves on each side of this great party distinction. But a Carolinian must stand by the doctrines and decisions of his own State, as the legislatures and conventions have deliberately propounded them.

Note: The above selection on Consolidation is but a small part of a longer analysis of Constitutional law and the usurpation of power by the Nationalists / Federalists which may be found in full here, in the 1836 edition of the South Carolina Statutes at large. The entire article is well worth reading.

Dr. Cooper is also well known for an 1827 speech in which he stated: “We shall before long be compelled to calculate the value of our Union, and to inquire of what use to us is this most unequal alliance by which the south has always been the loser and the north the gainer.”

Additional information about Dr. Cooper may be found here: