Every revolution, once it has reached its zenith, looks back and measures its achievements against the standards set by those that came before. On the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, it’s the opportune time to look back at the influence the English Revolution of the 1640s had on it.
The foundations for such historical connections were laid in the earliest years of colonial New England. The Pilgrims were refugees fleeing religious persecution by the Stuart monarchy. Parliamentary supporters and Grandees were both advocates and financiers for the New England colonies. Hugh Peter, the powerhouse preacher for the Parliamentarians’ New Model Army, first lived and worked in Salem before returning to England in 1641; the family of Leveller leader Thomas Rainsborough married into that of John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts. And when the Stuart monarchy was restored in 1660, three regicides — Edward Whalley, William Goffe, and John Dixwell — fled to New England to escape the hangman’s noose. They were protected by the colonists and never captured by the new king’s agents.
But what was left of those connections more than one hundred years after the restoration of the English monarchy? The answer is embodied in the powerful legacy of Oliver Cromwell, whose memory loomed large in America even into the 1770s.
The Black Oliver Cromwell
The history of the English Revolution was sufficiently powerful during the American Revolution that mothers in the back roads of New England would frequently name their sons Oliver in memory of King Charles’s best-known adversary. But the habit must have predated the 1770s, for another Oliver Cromwell — the black continental soldier, not the Lord Protector — was born on May 24, 1752, near Burlington in the colony of New Jersey. That Oliver Cromwell lived to be 101, dying in 1853.
A year before that, on his one hundredth birthday, he told the Burlington Gazette of his remarkable service in the Revolutionary War. He had enlisted in the Second New Jersey Regiment and fought in practically every major battle of the conflict: Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, Monmouth, and Yorktown, “at which latter place . . . he saw the last man killed.” He told the Gazette details of the march from Trenton to Princeton and recounted “with much humor, that they ‘knocked the British about lively’ at the latter place.”
Cromwell claimed to have been with George Washington at the crossing of the Delaware River, and there is a suggestion that he may be one of two black men pictured in the boat in the famous 1851 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze, although this is a matter of contention among historians. Washington certainly personally signed Cromwell’s discharge papers in 1783, awarding him the Badge of Military Merit. Since he could not write, Cromwell signed the papers with a mark, a fact that was later used to deprive him of his pension.
Remarkable as the name and military service of the black Oliver Cromwell are, he was not alone in bearing that name into battle against the British years after the Lord Protector’s demise.