Cooper was born on March 11, 1820 in Franklin, Tennessee. His father, Matthew D. Cooper, was a merchant who later became a banker in Columbia, Tennessee. His mother was Mary Agnes Frierson. His paternal grandfather, Robert Cooper, served in the American Revolutionary War. He had three brothers, including Senator Henry Cooper, and two half-brothers, including Duncan Brown Cooper. He grew up in Columbia, Tennessee, where he was raised as a Presbyterian. He wintered in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1832, and learned to speak French. Cooper graduated from Yale College in 1838. While he was at Yale, one of his professors was Alphonso Taft. Following college, he returned home to Columbia and began the study of medicine. After two years' study in Tennessee, he went to Philadelphia, where he attended medical lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, then abandoned the medical field for law. He joined the law offices of his uncle, Chancellor Samuel Davies Frierson, in Maury County, Tennessee. He was admitted to the bar in 1841.
Career
Cooper was the manager of his family Mulberry Hill Plantation in Maury County, Tennessee from 1840 to 1845. Meanwhile, he also practised the law alongside Samuel Davies Frierson. From 1845 to 1846, he formed a law firm with Alfred Osborne Pope Nicolson. From 1846 to 1851, he practised the law on his own. In 1851-1852, with Return J. Meigs III, Cooper were appointed to codify the laws of Tennessee. They completed their project in 1858, and their work was adopted, almost without modification, as the state's official code. Cooper was initially reluctant to embrace secession, but he fully supported the Confederate States of America once it was established. Meanwhile, he was nominated to the Supreme Court of the CSA by President Jefferson Davis, but the court never came to fruition. Meanwhile, he traveled in Europe. Cooper resumed legal practice in Nashville after the war. He served as the Dean of the Vanderbilt University Law School from 1874 to 1875, when he was succeeded by Thomas H. Malone. He was elected again to the Tennessee Supreme Court in August 1878 and served on the court until 1886. In 1890 he was awarded honorary degrees by Yale University, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Nashville.
Personal life
Cooper never married. He resided at Riverview in East Nashville until he purchased Riverwood, another mansion in Nashville, in 1859. He renamed the property Riverwood because of its location on bluffs on the north side of the Cumberland River.
