At just 16 years old, Samuel Cooper joined the Boston Tea Party, boarding British ships with fellow Sons of Liberty and casting crates of tea into Boston Harbor in protest of unjust taxation. He would later provide one of the few firsthand accounts of that pivotal night.
Cooper went on to serve with distinction in the Continental Army, fighting in key battles including Bunker Hill, Trenton, Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth, eventually rising to the rank of Major. After the war, he served as a tax official in New York before settling in Alexandria, Virginia, where he lived out his final years.
He died on August 19, 1840, and is buried at Christ Church Cemetery, part of the Wilkes Street Cemetery Complex. His gravestone, still standing today, bears a powerful epitaph:
“Who in early youth / At the first onset / Struck for Liberty / and continued to wield the sword / in the defence of his Country / Until Victory Crowned her arms… / As then a valiant soldier / So in afterlife, was he / an active and estimable Citizen / an upright man and a / pious Christian.”
Born in Massachusetts and buried in Virginia, Cooper’s life spanned the full arc of the American founding. His son, Samuel Cooper Jr., would later become the highest-ranking officer in the Confederate Army.
