John Rogers Cooke (June 17, 1788 – December 15, 1854) was an immigrant from Britain's Caribbean colonies who became a prominent Virginia lawyer, as well as planter, author and politician.

[1] Born in Bermuda to physician Stephen Cooke and his wife Catherine Esten, his family emigrated to Grand Turk Island in the Bahamas before moving to Alexandria, Virginia in 1791, then further westward to Leesburg, the Loudoun County seat before 1801.

His younger brother Philip St. George Cooke became a career U.S. Army officer, author of its cavalry manual, and Union brigadier general during the American Civil War not long after this man's death.

[1] In 1807, at age nineteen, he served as an officer in the Frederick militia that marched to the seaboard when the USS Chesapeake (1799) was fired upon by HMS Leaopard.

[2] Cooke served at least several months in 1813 as a private in a Berkeley County volunteer artillery company attached to the 67th regiment Virginia militia which defended Norfolk during the War of 1812.

Cooke remained politically active and sought to reform the state constitution which heavily favored Tidewater Virginia.

In 1816 Cooke helped organize a political convention for western Virginia that met in Staunton, the gateway to the middle of the Shenandoah Valley.

Cooke was one of the seven members who drafted the new state constitution and was the only one of the reformers from the Shenandoah Valley and trans-Allegheny region to vote for the new document.

He argued that the Shenandoah Valley had fewer shared political interests with the trans-Allegheny region than with the western Piedmont counties where he had grown up.