Aaron Sheehan-Dean, "Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)

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Oct 12, 2025

Historian Aaron Sheehan-Dean from Louisiana State University dives deep into how 17th-century English history influenced the American Civil War. He reveals that both Northerners and Southerners interpreted the English Civil Wars to justify their positions, with Confederates aligning themselves with Cavaliers and abolitionists drawing from Cromwell. Sheehan-Dean discusses how these historical analogies shaped wartime strategies and narratives, offering a fresh perspective on the power of history in contemporary conflicts and cautioning against misleading parallels.

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INSIGHT

A Bipolar View Of The English Past

Americans saw the English Civil Wars in bipolar terms: royalists (hierarchy) versus parliamentary (liberty).
That binary let 19th-century actors map themselves onto Cavaliers or Cromwellians to justify political positions.

ANECDOTE

Cavaliers, Cromwell, And Real-Life Followers

Southern slaveholders long identified with royalist Cavaliers and invoked that past to defend hierarchy and order.
Radical abolitionists embraced Cromwell; John Brown famously carried a biography of Oliver Cromwell with him.

INSIGHT

History Bolstered Marches To War

Both Confederates and Northerners used 17th-century analogies to justify secession resistance or independence.
Those analogies helped legitimize military suppression of rebellion for Northerners and national autonomy for Southerners.

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Civil War Americans, like people today, used the past to understand and traverse their turbulent present. As Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean reveals in this fascinating work of comparative intellectual history, nineteenth-century Americans were especially conversant with narratives of the English Civil Wars of the 1600s. Northerners and Southerners alike drew from histories of the English past to make sense of their own conflict, interpreting the events of the past in drastically different ways. Confederates, for example, likened themselves to England’s Royalists (also known as Cavaliers), hoping to preserve a social order built on hierarchy and claiming the right to resist what they perceived as radicals' assaults on tradition. Meanwhile, conservative Northerners painted President Lincoln as a tyrant in the mold of English Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, while radical abolitionists drew inspiration from Cromwell and sought to rebuild the South as Cromwell had attempted with Ireland.

Surveying two centuries of history-making and everyday engagement with historical thought, in Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2025), Dr. Sheehan-Dean convincingly argues that history itself was a battlefront of the American Civil War, with narratives of the past exercising surprising agency in interpretations of the nineteenth-century present. Dr. Sheehan-Dean’s discoveries provide an entirely fresh perspective on the role of historical memory in the Civil War era and offer a broader meditation on the construction and uses of history itself.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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