[1] After his military service, he invested in the James River and Kanawha Canal and helped Thomas Jefferson establish the University of Virginia.

[1] John Hartwell Cocke II was born on September 19, 1780, at the Mount Pleasant plantation in Surry County, Virginia.

[4] The elder Cocke had married Elizabeth Kennon, who grew up on her parents' plantation named Mount Pleasant, in Chesterfield County, Virginia.

At the age of fourteen, Cocke enrolled at The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he stayed at the home of Colonel Champion Travis.

He moved with his family to Bremo Plantation, which he had built on the northern bank of the James River in Fluvanna County in the Piedmont.

[8] Cocke was noted for being a distinguished officer;[9] the strict discipline he enforced upon insubordinate soldiers was compared to that of Baron von Steuben.

[11] In 1819, Cocke completed construction of a large plantation mansion at Upper Bremo with the master builder John Neilson, who had worked with Thomas Jefferson on Monticello.

[2] The river traffic became an important part of the local economy in the following decades, but a series of floods and the American Civil War brought an end to this era.

[13] A devout Christian, Cocke participated in several efforts to reform different aspects of society, including temperance and gradual emancipation.

[14] Cocke expressed "continual hostility to slavery" and promoted using "education and skill training" to prepare slaves for freedom and colonization in Africa; as a result, he was once violently attacked by a pro-slavery neighbor.

Though it was unpopular with abolitionists and the black population in general in the United States, he supported the colonization project by sending books and supplies over the years.

[28] In keeping with the social demands for discretion among planters on such interracial liaisons, Cocke did not reveal his knowledge until years after Jefferson had died.

A few years later, he returned to the topic: "All Batchelors [sic], or a large majority at least, keep as a substitute for a wife some individual of the[ir] own Slaves.