William Nelson Cromwell (January 17, 1854 – July 19, 1948) was an American attorney active in promotion of the Panama Canal and other major ventures.
He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised there by his mother, Sarah M. Brokaw, a Civil War widow. His father, John Nelson Cromwell, died in the Battle of Vicksburg.
He worked as an accountant for the attorney Algernon Sydney Sullivan, who paid for his education at Columbia Law School and made h...
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William Nelson Cromwell (January 17, 1854 – July 19, 1948) was an American attorney active in promotion of the Panama Canal and other major ventures.
He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised there by his mother, Sarah M. Brokaw, a Civil War widow. His father, John Nelson Cromwell, died in the Battle of Vicksburg.
He worked as an accountant for the attorney Algernon Sydney Sullivan, who paid for his education at Columbia Law School and made him a partner in Sullivan & Cromwell in 1879.
According to Stephen Kinzer's 2006 book Overthrow, in 1898 the chief of the French Canal Syndicate (a group that owned large swathes of land across Panama), Philippe Bunau Varilla, hired him to lobby the US Congress to build a canal across Panama, and not across Nicaragua, as rivals would have it.
On June 19, 1902, three days after senators received stamps showing volcanic activity in Nicaragua (although this was more the work of Philippe-Jean Bunau-Varilla), they voted for the Panama route for the...
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