William Cowper (d. by 26 October 1784), member of the Convention of 1776, was born probably in Nansemond County sometime between 1730 and 1735. He was the son of John Cowper and his first wife, Elizabeth Cowper, whose maiden name may have been Wills. About 1765 Cowper married Mary Godwin. They had one son and three daughters. Personal and family data are scarce and unreliable for several reasons, among them confusion between Cowper and several near contemporaries of the same name, conflated references to him and his brother and business partner, Wills Cowper, and loss of most of the county, family, and business records. One of Cowper's brothers also married a member of the Godwin family, thus making them and their sons and daughters all related in ways unusually complicated even for Virginians.
Cowper and his brothers ran a commercial and shipping company known before the Revolutionary War by the style Wills, Cowper and Company, but details about it are nearly as scarce as details about the family. Evidence suggests that some of the younger brothers may have spent time at sea while Cowper remained in charge in Nansemond County. They may have constructed ships as well. Cowper was elected to the Suffolk Parish vestry on 23 April 1772, was appointed to the county court on 9 December of that year, and was a captain in the militia by the spring of 1775 and a major by June 1776.
A member of the county committee formed late in 1774 or early in 1775, Cowper was one of two militia officers who confronted the rector of Suffolk Parish during a church service in the spring of 1775 and demanded that he vacate the church rather than continue to preach that colonial protestors were traitors. Finding that parishioners had barred the church doors against him, the minister left the county. A vestry committee on which Cowper sat declared the ministry vacant, and the county committee found the rector guilty of opposing the cause of American liberty and ordered him jailed.
On 8 April 1776 Cowper was elected to the fifth Revolutionary Convention, where he sat on the Committee of Privileges and Elections. The convention directed him on 17 June to report on proper places to erect defensive batteries on the Nansemond River. Cowper attended nearly every session of the convention until the last three days and was almost certainly present on 15 May when the convention unanimously voted for independence, on 12 June when it unanimously adopted the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and on 29 June when it unanimously adopted the first constitution of Virginia.
Cowper returned to Williamsburg in October 1776 as a member of the new House of Delegates and was again named to the Committee of Privileges and Elections. He won election to a full one-year term in the spring of 1777 and during the next session served as one of the commissioners to ascertain the losses of Norfolk citizens whose property had been burned on 1 January 1776.
On 15 January 1778 in Chowan County, North Carolina, Cowper married the twice-widowed Christian Gregory Granbery Doeber. They had no children. He resigned from the Suffolk Parish vestry later that year and about that time moved to Portsmouth. Cowper attempted to revive his trading company and after the end of the Revolutionary War began construction of a large new residence. In addition to 1,120 acres of land he owned, in the summer of 1783 he obtained title to 100 acres of escheated land of his former neighbor, friend, and shipping competitor John Goodrich, one of Nansemond County's most obdurate Loyalists, as well as land in Norfolk that had belonged to another Loyalist when the Revolution began. William Cowper wrote his will on 24 January 1784 and died, probably in Portsmouth, before he completed construction of his new house and before 26 October of that year, when an entry in the lost Wills, Cowper and Company daybook recorded the first dated payment to his estate.
Sources Consulted:
Albert Wallace Cowper, The Cowper Family (1983), 6, 8, 42, 65, 78, 85, citing evidence from records no longer extant, including lost will mentioned in deed dated 13 Feb. 1797; Joseph B. Dunn, The History of Nansemond County, Virginia (ca. 1907), 40–43; William J. Van Schreeven, Robert L. Scribner, and Brent Tarter, eds., Revolutionary Virginia, the Road to Independence: A Documentary Record (1973–1983), 2:314, 6:349, 355–356, 7:24, 61, 338, 534, 682, 748–749; second marriage in North Carolina Historical and Genealogical Register 1 (1900): 244; Virginia State Land Office Grants, H:95–96, 109–110, Record Group 4, Library of Virginia (LVA); Land Tax Returns, Nansemond Co., 1783, Auditor of Public Accounts, Record Group 48, LVA.