The Specter of Oliver Cromwell in American Political Discourse, 1660–1860
Research Poster Arts & Humanities 2025 Graduate ExhibitionPresentation by William Hancock
Exhibition Number 14
Abstract
Oliver Cromwell never stepped foot on the North American continent, yet he cast a long shadow over colonial America and the early republic. This project takes up a key question: Why did Americans in the two hundred years following Cromwell’s death invoke his memory during moments of crisis? Cromwell continually reemerged in early American political discourse as a potent symbol—both of muscular captaincy and of despotic usurpation—at pivotal junctures in American history. These junctures were moments of explosive political violence: the Salem witch trials, the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the genocidal campaigns waged against Native Americans, and the conflicts over immigration and slavery in the tumultuous decades leading up to the American Civil War. Americans turned to the blood-soaked rise and fall of the Cromwellian project in England and discovered an idiom for articulating anxieties regarding liberty and tyranny. To investigate this phenomenon, I will engage in an interdisciplinary study that draws upon the methodologies of literary criticism, history, and cultural studies. I will analyze political discourses and political cultures through a set of texts representing a wide range of genres. These genres will include canonical literary texts alongside types of writing that are not traditionally regarded as literary (such as political oratory and newspaper editorials). By analyzing belletristic writing alongside political rhetoric, my dissertation will argue that Cromwell emerged out of Americans’ historical memory of the seventeenth-century English past as an avatar either of liberty’s violent defense or of its violent suppression.
Importance
A study of invocations of Oliver Cromwell in American political discourse will, I hope, make a significant contribution to the fields of American literary and cultural studies. I am seeking to further clarify the relationship between liberty and violence in the American social and political project. There is room in the scholarly conversation for a new study that is devoted solely to Cromwell’s American reputation, as my dissertation will constitute the first book-length study of Cromwellian phenomena in North America. On a public-facing level, my project aligns with some of the current discussions regarding the violent and authoritarian impulses embedded in the American psyche. In short, the recent illiberal turn in American politics warrants a renegotiation of Cromwellian ideology.