Draper was born near Liverpool, England, on 5 May 1811, the son of Rev. John C. Draper, who had been disowned by his Roman Catholic family for converting to Methodism. His mother was Sarah Ripley, some of whose relatives had immigrated to Virginia before the American Revolution.
At the age of eighteen he matriculated at the University of London, where he studied under Prof. Edward Turner, a chemist who inspired him to investigate the chemical effects of light. Most of his scientific career was to be devoted to that endeavor. In a jurisprudence course he sat alongside John Stuart Mill and Edwin Chadwick and must have imbibed at the source the utilitarianism which influenced his later writings.
While yet a student he married Antonia Coetana de Paiva Pereira Gardner, half English and half Portuguese and said to have descended from two of Vasco da Gama's captains. The wedding took place 13 September 1831, shortly before the death of his father, which occasioned Draper's withdrawal from the university. The next year Draper, with his wife, mother, and three sisters, immigrated to Virginia.
They settled in Christiansville, Mecklenburg County, where the twenty-one-year-old Draper was to have had a post as instructor at the local Methodist college, but he found the position had already been filled due to a delay in the Drapers' arrival from England.
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