Samuel Cooper

Samuel Cooper was born 12 June 1798 in Hackensack, New Jersey, the son of a Revolutionary War officer, and graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1815. He served as an artillery officer and from the 1830s in the Adjutant General’s Department, becoming Adjutant General of the United States Army in 1852 — the army’s senior administrative officer. In 1827 he married Sarah Maria Mason, granddaughter of the Virginia statesman George Mason of Gunston Hall, which anchored his domestic life on the Virginia side of the Potomac near Alexandria ^[1] Source 1 Wikipedia, Samuel Cooper (general) Website .

Cooper resigned his U.S. commission on 7 March 1861 and was promptly appointed Adjutant and Inspector General of the Confederate States Army; commissioned a full general on 31 August 1861, his commission date made him by seniority the highest-ranking general in Confederate service throughout the war. Based in Richmond, his role was administrative rather than field-command, but the army’s records, promotions, and dispatches passed through his office, and at the war’s end he turned the Confederate War Department’s papers over to federal authorities — a transfer that became a foundational primary source for later Civil War scholarship.

After the war Cooper returned to his Cameron estate near Alexandria, where he lived in straitened circumstances until his death on 3 December 1876. He is buried at 118 North Washington Street Place 118 North Washington Street Alexandria's Georgian-style Episcopal parish church, consecrated in 1773; pew owners included George Washington and, decades later, the Lee family. in Alexandria.