William Frierson Cooper (March 11, 1820–May 7, 1909) was a lawyer and politician who was a judge of the Tennessee Supreme Court from 1878 to 1886.
Cooper was born in Franklin, Tennessee, in 1820, the oldest son of Matthew D. and Mary Agnes Frierson Cooper. His father was a merchant who later became a banker in Columbia, Tennessee.[1]
He spent most of his childhood in Columbia, then studied at Yale College, graduating in 1838. 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 a relative, Chancellor Samuel Davies Frierson, in Maury County, Tennessee, and he was admitted to the bar at the age of 21.[1]
In 1851-1852 he and Return J. Meigs 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.[1]
In 1861, Cooper was elected to a judgeship on the Tennessee Supreme Court. However, the court did not operate during the Civil War. Cooper had been initially unsympathetic to secession, although he was sympathetic to the South once hostilities began. During the war years, he traveled in Europe and studied equity jurisprudence in London. He returned to Nashville after the war ended and took up the private practice of law.[1]
Cooper was elected again to the Tennessee Supreme Court in August 1878 and served on the court until 1886.[1]
In 1890 he was awarded honorary degrees by Yale University, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Nashville.[1]
In 1859 Cooper purchased the Riverwood estate near Nashville, then known as Tammany Wood, from Alexander J. Porter, paying $87,933 for land, buildings, stock, personal property, and slaves. He renamed the property Riverwood because of its location on bluffs on the north side of the Cumberland River.[2][3][4]
William Cooper never married. Upon his death, Riverwood passed to his brother, Duncan Brown Cooper.[3][4]