Samuel Cooper

Samuel Cooper was an American soldier. He entered West Point at the age of 15 in 1813, graduated 36th in a class of 40 two years later, and was commissioned a second lieutenant of artillery in 1815. He was still serving in the US Army in 1861, serving as the Army's Adjutant General. (In 1857 he had also briefly held the position of acting Secretary of War.) That year he declared his allegiance to be with the Rebels in the American Civil War despite being a Northerner. His reasons were personal: He had married into a prominent Virginian family and was a friend of Jefferson Davis.

Offering his services to the Confederate Army, Cooper became that army's senior soldier. He was named Adjutant and Inspector General on March 18, 1861 and continued to hold that position till the Confederacy capitulated four years later.

After the war Cooper became a farmer and lived the rest of his life in Virginia.

Samuel Cooper in The Guns of the South
Samuel Cooper continued to serve as Adjutant and Inspector General of the Confederate Army after the end of the Second American Revolution. In 1868, he signed an order for martial law in North Carolina on behalf of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis.