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

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Book Discussed: Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War (UNC Press, 2025)
Release Date: October 12, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode explores Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s new book, which investigates how Americans of the mid-19th century looked back to the English Civil War and the 17th-century British past to make sense of their own colossal national crisis—the American Civil War. The discussion reveals how both Northern and Southern Americans, including key policy-makers and influential public intellectuals, drew historical analogies and lessons from the English Civil Wars, shaping identities, justifying strategies, and wrestling with moral questions of legitimacy, rebellion, violence, and postwar peace.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins and Motivation of the Project

• Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s Background: Teaches U.S. 19th-century history at LSU. His prior book explored Civil War-era conflicts globally and sparked his interest in how Americans referenced Cromwell and the 17th century.
• Triggering Curiosity: Noted frequent references to Cromwell, particularly from Confederates criticizing Lincoln as a “military despot,” leading to the realization that both sides in the U.S. Civil War were drawing deeply from English Civil War analogies.
  • “What I discovered as I pulled on that thread was that... memories of and analogies to the English Civil Wars of the 17th century were threaded all throughout the American conflict.” — Sheehan-Dean [03:04]

2. How 19th-Century Americans Learned About the English Civil War

• Popular Historical Reading: Largely through widely-read works such as Macaulay’s History of England and Carlyle’s edition of Cromwell’s speeches.
• Cultural Saturation: The English Civil Wars were discussed in newspapers, reviews, and popular circles—not through formal education, but through adult reading.
  • “I was really surprised by the saturation that this conversation had among everyday Americans... They did actually come to know this history.” — Sheehan-Dean [04:56]

3. Americans’ Interpretations and Uses of English Civil War History

• Basic Dichotomy: Americans viewed the conflict as a struggle between royalist “Cavaliers” and anti-monarchist “Puritans” under Cromwell, but misread or simplified 17th-century allegiances to fit their own polarizations.
• Revisionism and Myth-Making: The parliamentary or Puritan side was recast as proto-democratic for Northern, progressive Americans and as a dangerous source of instability for Southern conservatives.
  • “19th-century Americans, I would say... sort of misinterpret...this history in ways to read the parliamentary forces as lowercase D democrats, which they are generally not.” — Sheehan-Dean [07:36]

4. Who Embraced Which Historical Identity?

• Mapping onto Sectional Identities:
  • Confederates (Southern slaveholders): Embraced the cavalier/royalist identity, valorizing hierarchy, tradition, and order, and began to openly reject Puritan/abolitionist “ultra-liberty men.”
    • “White southerners... attach themselves to the vision of the cavalier and to the hierarchy that royalism represents...” — Sheehan-Dean [10:52]
  • Northern Abolitionists: Embraced the Puritan/Cromwellian radical tradition, with figures like John Brown invoking Cromwell.
• Political Function: These identities justified both the Confederacy’s claim to distinct nationhood and the North’s claim to a righteous, reforming cause.

5. The Analogy’s Role in Escalation and Legitimacy Debates

• Past as a Guide—and a Goad: Comparison to the English Civil Wars fueled the logic of confrontation, with both sides seeing themselves as heirs to historic, irreconcilable conflict.
  • “Reading the past can lead us towards violence, not away from it.” — Sheehan-Dean [13:30]
• Debates Over Legitimacy:
  • Northerners compared the Confederacy’s rebellion to the illegitimate Irish Rebellion of 1641 (cast as barbaric and doomed), distinguishing it from the “virtuous” American Revolution.
  • Southern claims of legitimate resistance drew selectively from the same era.

6. Historical Analogy in Violence and Military Policy

• Abolitionist Radicalization:
  • Rhetoric referencing Cromwell and “hard war” tactics—invoking even Cromwell’s brutal campaigns in Ireland—as justifications for total war and emancipation.
  • “Abolitionists, the country’s only genuine pacifists before the Civil War, become leading proponents of hard war.” — Sheehan-Dean [22:21]
• Northern Moderates vs. Radicals: Lincoln and moderates navigated between radical precedent and conservative cautions about excessive executive power, often using the English past to frame policy.

7. Influence on Postwar Peace and Reconstruction

• Land Confiscation Controversy:
  • Radicals wanted to emulate Cromwell’s punitive land redistribution in defeated Ireland; moderates and conservatives cited the counterproof of perpetual Irish unrest to argue against vindictive settlement.
  • “Moderates like Lincoln are swayed... by these Macaulay-like arguments for a generous peace at the... end of the war.” — Sheehan-Dean [37:04]

8. Lessons for Historical Thinking Today

• Cautions on Analogy: Analogies shape not just our understanding of the past but also present-day decisions—and are always selective, distorted, and slippery.
  • “I want us to use analogies... carefully and... as clear-eyed about them as we can.” — Sheehan-Dean [42:38]
• Contemporary Relevance: The time span between the U.S. Civil War and the English Civil Wars is roughly the same as between today and the U.S. Civil War, highlighting ongoing challenges in using history to inform present politics.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On the Use—and Abuse—of Analogies:

“The ways that 19th-century Americans use the 17th century... analogies lead us, you know, almost invisibly into positions that we might not adopt... in the cold light of day.”
—Sheehan-Dean [42:38]

On Abolitionists’ Turn to Hard War:

“Abolitionists had been the country’s only genuine pacifists before the Civil War... becoming advocates of hard war... because they see that this war, if long and kind of vigorous enough, will require the emancipation of slavery.”
—Sheehan-Dean [22:21]

Lincoln as a Student of History & Cautious Moderate:

“Lincoln is working hard to navigate a kind of middle path between... a royalist [and] a Puritan inspired parliamentary radical.”
—Sheehan-Dean [28:36]

On the Relevance of Historical Process:

“Even if we like what the outcomes are now, figuring out a better understanding of how we got there is really key.”
—Host, Dr. Miranda Melcher [36:33]

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Important Segment Timestamps

• Introduction and Why the Book — [02:53]
• How Americans Learned About the 17th Century — [04:35]
• Who Claimed “Cavalier” and “Puritan” Identities — [10:41]
• The Analogies and their Political Consequences — [13:13]
• Legitimacy, the Irish Rebellion, and Northern Justifications — [16:58]
• Impact on War, Violence, and Radicalization — [22:21]
• Postwar Debates and the Example of Ireland — [37:04]
• Historical Lessons and Analogies Today — [42:38]
• Preview of Next Project — [48:47]

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Tone and Style

• Sheehan-Dean is thoughtful, deeply knowledgeable, and candid when discussing misreadings and “dangerous” uses of analogy.
• The host, Dr. Melcher, steers with curiosity and a desire for nuance, emphasizing the value—and complexity—of using the past to understand both itself and the present.

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Takeaways

• Both Confederates and Northerners invoked 17th-century English history for self-justification, identity, and strategy.
• Historical analogies, especially as wielded by politicians and public intellectuals, can reinforce divisions and help escalate conflicts.
• Recognizing the limits and transformations involved in analogical thinking is not just an academic concern, but an ongoing public necessity.
• Nuanced use of history—embracing complexity and specificity—remains vital for understanding both the past and our current choices.

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Looking Forward

Sheehan-Dean’s next project will extend the story, exploring how the legacies of war—on military power, civil liberties, the state, and the expansion west—shaped American society through Reconstruction and into the 20th century, possibly via the lens of the Sherman brothers’ divergent careers.

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Recommended: For listeners interested in history, politics, and the ethics of analogy, this episode is both a fascinating story of the past and a meditation on its ongoing power.

Transcript

[Podcast Host]

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[Podcast Host]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Aaron Sheehan Dean about his book titled Fighting with the how 17th century history shaped the American Civil War, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2025. This book takes us back in time twice in a way, because we're going to be talking about, obviously the US Civil War in the 1800s, but also about the English Civil War in the 1600s, and not just how we think of those things now, but how at the time in the 1800s, people looked back to the 1600s and what that mean and who was drawing for which thing and how that interacted with the ideas of the American Civil War, with even some of the like military battles and policy decisions. And it's a really interesting way, especially today, of looking back in history, to think about people looking back in history then. So we have rather a lot to discuss here. Aaron, thank you so much for joining me.

[Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Thanks for having me.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write the book? What questions are you asking in it? How did it develop from an initial idea to kind of where. Where we're at now?

[Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Sure. Thanks. So my name, as you said, is Aaron Shandeen. I teach history, US history at a 19th century, specifically at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge in the southern part of the United States. I wrote a previous book called Reckoning with Rebellion that tried to situate the U.S. civil War in the context of other civil and national conflicts. So things like the Sepoy Rebellion, the Polish uprising of 1863, the Taiping Civil War, the Taiping Rebellion or Civil War, depending on how you classify that, because Americans at the time did that. And so in reading the sort of newspaper conversations and public rhetoric, I started to see a lot of references to Cromwell. And I thought that's curious. And I just sort of bookmarked it mentally because that was a separate project. That book was published in 2020, but I knew when that finished that I wanted to turn to this and kind of pull on the Cromwell thread. And these were mostly Confederates complaining about Lincoln as a military despot and tyrant. And so that, that I knew enough about Cromwell to kind of make sense of that. But what I discovered as I, as I pulled on that thread was that in fact, memories of and analogies to the English Civil wars of the 17th century were threaded all throughout the American conflict. And so that then opened up a kind of larger research project to really try to figure out how did Civil War Americans use the past.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Always interesting to hear. Our project starts. Thank you for beginning our conversation with that. I think before we get into exactly what they were using the past for, we probably need to make sure we understand how Americans in the 1800s were learning about the English Civil War. Obviously they didn't have Wikipedia, so how were they getting this information about something that happened quite a long time ago?

[Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Yes, that's a good question. And they are getting it mostly through popular historical reading. So the, the, if you had gone even to a university in the United states in the 1840s or the 1850s, you would not have been exposed to English history sort of through coursework. What, what exposure to history or historical thinking there was, was through classical history, so Greek and Roman history, and there's a little bit of biblical history. But there is a huge amount of reading, particularly in the 1840s and 1850s. That is as Americans are moving closer to the start of the Civil War in 1861. Huge amount of popular writing on the British past, mostly by British writers, but sometimes by Americans. And all of the English publications, all the books published in the UK are sold in the United States. They are reviewed widely, they are discussed. So the example that, that I sort of came across over and over again is Thomas Babington McCauley who writes a five volume history of the English since James II. But the first 500 or the first 150 pages are really about the English Civil Wars. McCauley is enormously popular in the United States, so much so that all through the Civil War, the people who reference him just say, well, as you know, Macaulay wrote, you know, XYZ, that is, they don't have to say Thomas Babington McAuley, the British historian, they just simply say, as McAuley says, so they are learning about it as adults for the most part. That is, they are reading this history and it's a kind of, these are new history. So, you know, if there was a new books in history, you know, 19th century telegraph version, they would have covered these books and Americans would have known about them. I was really surprised by the saturation that this, that this conversation had among everyday Americans that they did actually come to know this history. Not, as you say, in a kind of an easily accessible way through Wikipedia and not through strictly academic writing, but it was also analytical history. This is the beginning of the historical discipline where you start to get people, authors identifying cause and effect and not just writing kind of long chronicles of things.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hmm, okay. That's really helpful to understand and especially not just kind of how they were learning it, but that it was so prevalent and that it was a very sort of adult thing. That's also really interesting. So thinking then about what these things were that they were learning and how they were talking about it, what were the key ways that Americans were conceptualizing this history going into what became the US Civil War.

[Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

So they are building on a kind of revisionism that actually begins in the UK in the 1840s with Thomas Carlyle while editing a collection of Oliver Cromwell's speeches and letters. Cromwell, you know, as the head of the, the parliamentary or maybe Puritan, depending on how you look at it. Side of the English Civil War and, and the one most responsible for the execution of King Charles I. And we can talk about some of this backstory. American audiences today are generally not well familiar with it. And I do try to provide kind of capsule summaries in my book so that people can make sense of the ways that Civil War Americans use this history. But they. The. The principal divide that Americans would have seen was between a parliamentary force led by Cromwell and a kind of royalist force led by King Charles the first. And when Carlisle, Thomas Carlyle publishes and edits those speeches, it begins a kind of revision that starts to reconsider Cromwell not as one of England's most nefarious villains, you know, who, after he. After the Restoration in 1660, his corpse is dug up and the bones are scattered. And, you know, there's sort of every effort made to. To kind of eradicate him from history. But there was a reconsideration of Cromwell and there was a reconsideration of really the whole parliamentary side. Macaulay is a good example of the kind of revisionism which reads the parliamentary side of the Civil wars as the beginning of a turn towards the kind of Whiggish ascendancy of liberalism and liberty in the English tradition, which the Americans then feel they inherit. And so Americans are seeing this in kind of very bipolar terms. There is a royalist side represented by King Charles and his. His royalist supporters, also called Cavaliers. And then there is a. What we would think of as politically progressive side represented by Cromwell, John Milton, the poet who is. Is part of Cromwell's administration. John Hampton, Sidney, a bunch of kind of legendary English figures, again, whose last names are sufficient to kind of summon up for American audiences people committed to, on the parliamentary side, as they see it, a defense of the rights of Parliament is against the king and perhaps even to something like individual rights. 19th century Americans, I would say, and this is something we can talk about, sort of misinterpret, slash, gloss this history in ways to read the parliamentary forces as lowercase D democrats, which they are generally not. And so that's one of the interesting questions here is how this history starts to change as you transpose it ahead 200 years. But certainly a kind of bipolar view of a royalist hierarchical. And then on the other side, a kind of progressive, more liberal parliamentary position.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And who was. Which of those in the 1800s, like who sort of said, yes, we are the Cavaliers. And that's great. I mean, was that the Northerners? The Southerners, or did it not map that exactly?

[Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

No, it maps pretty well I mean, that was one of the things I was surprised by, is that. And we've known this to a certain extent, that is white Southerners, slave holding Southerners, endorse the parliamentary side. They call themselves cavaliers, and they had done this from. From an early period, but beginning in the 1850s, they really sort of attached themselves to the vision of the cavalier and to the hierarchy that royalism represents, in their view. They, of course, live in a racially defined hierarchy of the most severe sort. And so for them, the conservatism, the order, the stability, the security represented by the monarchy and the royalist side is immensely appealing, and particularly in Southern journals, things like the Southern Literary messenger or Debose Review, the most famous commercial journal of the antebellum South. They denounce the Puritans, that is the parliamentary side, in the most intense language, precisely for its political progressivism, that is that the Puritans, that legacy has been absorbed or embraced by the abolitionists of the 1830s and 40s, as one of the editorials calls it. They are the ultra liberty men of the 19th century, as their ancestors were in the 17th. And it's true that abolitionists, in fact, endorsed the Puritan side. Famously, John Brown traveled with a biography of Oliver Cromwell sort of with him. And lots of people referred to John Brown, the. The man who led the attempted slave rebellion in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, in 1859. One of the things that touches off the very bitter presidential election of 1860 and eventually the war. The person that Melville called the meteor of war, John Brown, is sometimes referred to as the old Puritan. He's very much a kind of Old Testament figure. And for abolitionists who. Who embraced that puritanical legacy, that was in the best possible way that he would carry forward the kind of purifying zeal wedded to a social reform in the context of abolition that Cromwell and others had represented in the 17th century.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that does map pretty exactly. Does that have consequences then, with sort of raising tensions? I mean, if, for example, you're going, hey, we're like those guys, and you're like these other guys, and by the way, they had a war. Therefore, obviously, inevitably, we will.

[Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Well, I think what becomes inevitable, certainly from the Confederate side, that is the Southern. The white Southerners who then become Confederates in 1861, is that in the context of a people who define themselves as culturally distinct, which. The. The attachment to the Parliament, the. The royalist faction of King Charles does, is the necessity of national autonomy. And there are a lot of arguments for this, that Confederates Are making. There is a long history of southern nationalism. It's quite. To be fair, it's quite inchoate. In 1861 or 1860, that is, there have been firebrands, or fire eaters, as they were called at the time, white southerners, almost always slaveholders, arguing strongly for the distinctiveness of the south and the necessity of its national independence from the United States. But in almost every case, the argument for national distinctiveness sort of depended on slavery. And in a global context where confederates hope to attract the support of England, most importantly, but France, perhaps Russia or other European powers, Doing so by leading with slavery, something that had become quite unpopular in western Europe by this point, is not a good idea. And so by attaching themselves to a past that obscures the role of slavery, it instead emphasizes, as I say, hierarchy and stability and order and conservatism that the white southerners are able to kind of mask, to a certain extent, their reliance on slavery and make this sort of simple cultural appeal. We are a distinct nation, and ergo, we should have national independence. I would say on the other side, northerners, and not just those that would have identified as descendants of puritans, but even moderates, people like. Like Lincoln, who read. And Lincoln, it's important to note, read mccauley. He had a copy of mccauley's histories in his library, his law library in Springfield, Illinois, when he was a lawyer, and he checked those volumes out while he was president. The president in the 19th century got a lending card from the library of congress, and we have his library record. It's kind of quaint today to imagine that the president would go over to the library of congress and check out a book to help them. But such was the 19th century. Lincoln drew and. And northerners generally, I would say, drew a kind of strength from the example of the English resistance In the midst of what I'm calling. And what they called the English civil wars and plural. And these encompassed a whole range of conflicts in Scotland and England and Ireland. That the necessity of using military force to suppress unjust rebellion, which is how northerners conceptualized what the confederacy and what confederates were doing. That. That resisting that militarily was important in the English example, demonstrated the wisdom of that. So I would say in both respects, that is for both northerners and southerners, Their reading of history really bolsters their march to war. I think today we like, as historians, to imagine that our kind of. One of our primary goals is pointing out paths not taken in the effort to forestall the use of violence. And I think that's true in many cases. But it is also, I think, important for us to recognize that there are ways in which reading the past can lead us towards violence, not away from it.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that's definitely what, or at least part of what's happening here and definitely worth emphasizing, too. So thank you for doing so. If we're talking, though, about this point you mentioned just a minute ago, the idea of kind of legitimate rebellion versus not obviously a big part of the English Civil wars are questions of legitimacy. Right. Who gets to make decisions? Whose force is allowed? How did those discussions around legitimacy echo in the 19th century and how they were interpreting what happened in the 17th?

[Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Yeah, good, I think. Good question. I think. I mean, one thing to say here at this. I probably should have said this earlier. My sort of disclaimer is I'm not making an argument. I'm not trying to argue that Americans used what we would understand today as an accurate history of the English Civil Wars. They are relying on the best history of the time. But like all history, it changes over time as we gather more information and as we ask new questions. So there are a number of cases in which they make, that is Civil War. Americans make what I think historians today would consider quite questionable interpretations or just incorrect explanations about how the English past actually transpired. I would say I know enough about the 17th century to be very dangerous, like most Americans and in fact, like most of us today, that is, except for the professionals supposedly, who rely on the past to kind of make their decisions or to draw analogies about present, contemporary, you know, politics or things like that. So that's my disclaimer. But let me. Let me sort of turn to your question here, which is about questions of legitimacy. And one of the things that. That emerged, quite importantly, I think, for the north was the example of the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Most historians today date the beginning of the Civil wars, again, plural. They would generally refer to those today as the wars of Three nations, with the Scottish rebellion or the Scottish uprising of 1637. It's a protest over the King Charles's efforts to impose the Book of Common Prayer on Scotland, which preferred a Presbyterian structure and did not want what they saw as this nearly Catholic kind of episcopal structure being forced on them. The Archbishop, William Loud, is an ally of Charles and he aids this. And there is military conflict that develops in Scotland in 1637, and then in 1641, the Irish rebel. And they do so partly because they're looking at the Scots and seeing this is an opportunity that to it that England is destabilized. And if they can, the Scots can make this sort of effort, we can as well. And it's a very bloody and devastating conflict in 1641 in Ireland. And part of what emerges from that is a body of literature in the English popular press that emphasizes the kind of savagery and the injustice of how the Irish fought that war, that they were simply marauding, raping, executing, killing babies. The number typically given is 40,000 Protestants murdered by their Catholic brothers. And that language and that interpretation for 19th century Americans reinforced the necessity of vigorously suppressing rebellions when they are illegitimate. Americans had to kind of navigate delicately around this, I.e. northerners, because, of course, the United States is founded in a revolution, which first was a rebellion and then once successful. And this is part of the kind of the nomenclature that I think we need to clarify here. But, you know, Washington is a hero. And in fact, many people say at the time, Northerners say Washington, like Cromwell, is a hero because he's a virtuous rebel. Jefferson Davis is no such rebel. But Jefferson Davis and the rebellion of the Confederacy is illegitimate in the ways that the Irish rebellion of 1641 was illegitimate. And that was suppressed with, with tremendous vigor, especially by 1649, with Cromwell's invasion of Ireland and the dispossession of huge swaths of that territory from the Catholic landowners. And Americans knew that history very well, not least because of all the Irish immigrants that had come in recently, mostly in the 1840s and 50s, to the United States. So that question of legitimacy is sort of at the heart here. And that's part of why, in general, Americans can rely on the 17th century, because as they understood it, that too was a conflict over what is the right way to resist legal, but perhaps unjust authority in the 17th century. The case of King Charles I for Confederates, the case of Lincoln's election and what they imagined to be his impending liberation of the slaves.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

So this is all helpful to understand in terms of sort of raising of tensions and sort of what the identities are and kind of therefore assumptions of like what needs to happen or what should happen. And obviously, if that's where it stopped, if it was just about rhetoric, that would be interesting in and of itself. But you talk in the book that that's probably not all that we're talking about, that we actually can understand how these ideas about legitimacy and who is acting legitimate, legitimately, and who isn't also helps us understand some of the patterns of violence and the military tactics used. So can you Tell us about this aspect of it.

[Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Yeah, I mean, I was surprised, I'll be honest, the degree to which the analogies that Americans are drawing and they're kind of deep thinking about the past informs them all the way through the conflict. And so it allowed me as a Civil War historian to kind of comment on a lot of different aspects of the American Civil War. Because in all of those aspects, the kind of popular rhetoric drew these analogies in that people leaned on them. And one way you can see this is with the abolitionists use of the kind of Puritan example and their embrace of Cromwell and the military violence that Cromwell sort of led and manifested in England, even unto Ireland, as Wendell Phillips famously said. Wendell Phillips was one of the leading white abolitionists in the north through the war and probably one of the foremost, I would say, deployers of the analogy of the 17th century rhetoric. And Phillips is unabashed in his desire for a vigorous war, a hard war, and one that most importantly destroys slavery. Abolitionists are a tiny minority of the northern population at the start of the Civil War and sort of in general American terms, probably no more than 3 or 5% of the northern population. And they know that they are fighting an uphill battle to convince other northerners that the emancipation of slavery, the end of slavery, the abolition of slavery is necessary in order to, should be a byproduct at all of the war. Lincoln himself has to be kind of dragged to this position really by enslaved people and their self emancipation over 1861 and 1862. But Phillips goes back, uses the, the examples of the English Civil War to encourage a kind of radicalism in the Lincoln administration. So for instance, in 1648, at the conclusion of what was technically the Second Civil War, in the context of the English context there, there is a, there is a purge of Parliament called Pride's Purge, in which one of Cromwell's lieutenants effectively kind of rides into Parliament and then expels members who weren't going to be loyal to Cromwell. And the result is they have a very solid quorum. And then they immediately in 1649 are able to vote to execute King Charles I, the first and only execution of a monarch in English history. And for Confederates and for many northern conservatives, this is an example of just regicide of kind of a kind of tyranny masquerading as democratic action. But for, for Phillips and for the radicals, they, they see this as an, as an idea to emulate. That is, you have to purge the army, that is the US army of its old conservative Democratic generals most, many of the, the leading generals at the start of the Civil War are political conservatives, many of them capital D Democrats, the conservative party in America in the 19th century. And they want radicals, abolitionists if possible, who will take both an emancipatory war to the south and also a hard war. And this is a surprise, or it should be a surprise to us, because abolitionists had been the country's only genuine pacifists before the Civil War. And I was fascinated, I'm still fascinated by the sort of ideological transformation of abolitionists from pacifists to the leading proponents of hard war. And this happens because they see that this war, if long and kind of vigorous enough, will require the emancipation of slavery in simple military terms, which is how Lincoln frames the Emancipation Proclamation. And so Phillips returns time and again to the kind of sequence of the English Civil wars, of its radicalization. And he does this all the way through, as he says, even unto Ireland, meaning that the Northern administration, Lincoln's regime, should follow the example of Cromwell in echoing what. What, sorry, Lincoln's administration should follow Cromwell's example. In 1649, Cromwell's army goes to Ireland. There are two horrible massacres at Drogheda and Wexford that sort of establish military dominance. And then he dispossesses a huge number of the leading Catholic landowners to the west, priests who are executed. And it is a kind of wide scale land confiscation that for many Northern radicals is exactly what needs to happen in the American south in order to ensure there is no future rebellion, that you have to reduce the ability of the slaveholding elite to foment rebellion. And the way you do that is by taking away their property. And so certainly on the, on the left, I would say that is the side that we typically think of politically as the doves. This rhetoric through the course of the war fuels a endorsement of an increasingly hard war. And they're envisioning a kind of punitive end. And we can talk about this later, but I would argue they don't win that final aspect of it. That is they don't win the kind of punitive peace, but certainly through the war. The Lincoln administration endorses a hard war that brings a very destructive pattern against Confederates and, and Southern civilians. And obviously an emancipatory is war that eventually not just emancipates people, but ends slavery altogether.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, the link here is really quite direct, which I also found surprising. So I'm glad you did too, and thank you for explaining what it is you've obviously mentioned. Lincoln's rhetoric there, as well as his military tactics. There are also some instances of sort of political policies, I suppose, that also seem to have these really clear links. So for example, you talked a bit in the book about like attitudes of Lincoln's administration towards what to do with the Southerners once we win. Some of those things had links to the 17th century. So what were some of the other ways that kind of looking back on history was being used by his administration to think about the present in the midst of the war and plan for the future?

[Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Yeah, so. So Lincoln, I think, is working hard to navigate a kind of middle path between what I described as the bipolar view of either you are a royalist or you are a kind of Puritan inspired parliamentary radical. And in doing so, he's echoing most of the histories which while they are much more generous towards Cromwell, they don't necessarily lionize him the way that the, the abolitionists did, that the kind of Northern radicals did. And, and Lincoln is trying to find a way. Lincoln certainly is one of those Northerners who would have seen King Charles the First as a sort of typical Stewart or maybe the worst of the stewards. Prone to enhancing his own personal power. He had refused to call parliament for the 10 years preceding 1637. He's operating in a, in a, in a way that they see as not strictly unconstitutional. We're only at the point where we get a kind of coherent English constitution, I would argue, and it's never written down, so of course it remains quite contested. But he. So he sees the necessity of, of curtailing executive power in the form of the tyranny of the stewards. But he doesn't want to. He is not, I think, either congenitally or as he understands it, constitutionally empowered as the, as the executive branch leader to lead the kind of structural changes that Cromwell initiates. Cromwell eventually creates the parliamentary forces, create England's first republic. They sort of literally abolish the monarchy. That of course comes back in 1660 with the Restoration. So Lincoln is trying to navigate through this. The. What I found equally interesting was that Northern conservatives, mostly Democrats, but pro war Democrats, would use this history as a way to try to check Lincoln's excess. So for instance, the suspension of civil liberties, the. I mean, certainly the use of abolitionist generals, there aren't very many of those, but such as there are the, the curtailments on freedom of speech, that there were nearly as many references to Lincoln as Cromwell, as despit. As there were to among Northerners as there were among Southerners. And these are All Northern conservatives who are trying to. They endorse the. They oppose secession. They believe that the Lincoln administration should return kind of political order to the nation, but they do not support emancipation. And they want really as limited a war in terms of its constitutional effects as possible. And so in that, they are tacking towards this very gradual, moderate, dare I say wiggish, and I do repeatedly in the book Vision of kind of the slow growth of English liberty and then the slow growth of American liberty. And as you know, that sort of conflict really plays out over the course of the war in Northern politics. Many Northern papers kind of return to this over and over again as their way of trying to kind of remind Lincoln, because I think they too know that Lincoln knows this history and that he wants to sort of navigate between the shoals of either of these two kind of radical poles.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

This is really interesting to understand. So thank you for taking us through kind of how these different things are being used, because it's not just as simple as sort of the Confederates all are using it this way and the Northerners are using it this way. Like there is nuance within the different camps, of course, that also has to be navigated. So is there anything further we want to discuss on that in terms of what's happening during the war and the kind of factionalism within each side?

[Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

There probably is. It's terrible that I have to sort of remind myself of what I wrote. The. I mean, the factionalism in the north is to my mind, one of the things that Civil War historians have kind of under. Emphasized and certainly, I think in the popular mind, the. The. The understanding of the American Civil War as a conflict between north and south and that Northern victory determined an outcome and Southern defeat on the other side of that, it seems to me that, as I say, we have undervalued the degree to which the conflict among Northerners themselves. And there are really sort of, I argue, three communities. There are conservatives and moderates and. And radicals that are fighting over the course of the war about what the kind of boundaries of the conflict will be, where property can be confiscated, how slavery will be ended, whether it will be ended. That these things have as profound a consequence for the way the Civil War ends as the kind of core dispute between north and South. And that then requires us to parse very carefully in our histories. What are these different communities in the north, the conservatives, as I've said, mostly Democrats who are wanting a return to what they call the Constitution as it is, radicals who want to end slavery and understand that doing so will probably require constitutional change and that that constitutional change might have to come through extra constitutional or extra legal measures. And here too, the English Civil wars provide an example. And Philip says this famously. He sort of talks about Cromwell. He says, you know, old Noel would not have been. Would not have have been deterred by the fact that there wasn't a law preventing it. So, for instance, the execution of King Charles the first. Most English historians today will tell us that that doesn't happen under the law. It happens outside the law. I mean, the fact that Parliament passed this doesn't really make it legal. There wasn't a provision under which the king could be executed by Parliament. And yet that's what happened. And the, the kind of impatience that, that radicals in the north manifest, I think, has its analog there. And many of them, as I say, hearken back quite clearly to the parliamentary side and to the escalation there. And, and this is the problem of how we end up with the 13th and a 14th amendment in the U.S. constitution. And I'm not the first one to note this, that these are amendments passed through a kind of constitutional mechanism. States have to ratify them, but the states, let's be honest, aren't really given much choice that in order to return. The 14th Amendment is, of course, passed during the era of Reconstruction, and it's at a point in which Southern states don't have representation in Congress. And so what the US Congress says to places like Georgia and Louisiana is if you want to go back to having U.S. senators and congressmen seated in Congress and voting, you have to ratify the 14th Amendment. That's not the system that the founders intended when it came to passage of constitutional amendments. You can make a similar argument about the incorporation of the state of West Virginia, which was made a state during the Civil War. There's a constitutional form for creating a state out of an existing state. I think everybody at the time recognized that was not followed in the context of West Virginia. But Lincoln wanted another state and he wanted part of Virginia loyal, so he approved it. And. And on it went. And we now have a state of West Virginia, just as we have a 13th and 14th amendments. I want to make clear I'm very happy that we have a 13th and 14th amendment, but it, it behooves us to pay attention to how these things happen. Even. And I would say, especially if we agree with the outcome, that understanding that the process itself in a way happens outside the usual constitutional order, we should acknowledge that at the very least.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, I mean, acknowledging the nuance of history is really important. Even if we like what the outcomes are now kind of figuring out a better understanding of how we got there is really key. So that's, of course, what's happening in this kind of post US Civil War moment when the war is over and all these things are happening, all these amendments. The use of the English Civil War hasn't just kind of magically disappeared now that the conflict is done. So how do we still see the 17th century being drawn into these things you've just been telling us about in the 19th?

[Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Well, for abolitionists, as I say, it was very clear, which is that they saw particularly the Irish example, that they understood that the way, or they believe they understood that the way to fix this problem is to. Is to kind of emulate Cromwell's seizure of land and then the ensuing stream of emigrants that were brought from England to take over that land in Ireland. Some of the people who, just before the 1641 uprising would have been called the New English. There's a shift in English imperialism in Ireland beginning really in the early 17th century, as opposed to the much earlier Old English, as they were called, the people that came from the sort of 12th century forward who had largely assimilated into Irish patterns, spoke Irish and adopted Catholicism and intermarried with Irish land holding families. The abolitionists see in Cromwell's efforts to remake Ireland a model for how they can remake the south, that what we have to do in the south is repopulate it with white laborers and white Northern laborers, northern farmers, who can bring the ideology of free labor, can bring a kind of reforming zeal to make the south now look like the rest of America, meaning like the north and land confiscation was something that radicals began pushing, at least in rhetoric, aggressively in 1864 and 1865. And here I think they run into the kind of shifting dynamics of the Northern political landscape, which is the moderates, like Lincoln, actually side with the conservatives in this context, whereas for most of the war, the moderates sort of align with the radicals and endorse a escalation of the war in its kind of military policies and in terms of emancipation. But the moderates, as people who respect the rule of law and particularly respect the many, many ways that the American constitutional order, protected property, are very reluctant to redistribute, to seize and redistribute large swaths of land. And so there is a kind of, as I would say, pre existing reluctance to do that. And then the Northern conservatives draw the English Civil War Example in here, I think very effectively in 1865, to remind Americans that in fact, the result of Cromwell's seizure of land and the vindictive peace that he imposed on Ireland has only generated hundreds of years of resistance and, and discontent among the Irish. This is made most famously by a Ohio congressman named Cox, who uses the English Civil wars over and over again on. In his floor speeches throughout the conflict. He's a. He's a Democrat from Ohio. He's read the history very carefully. He often cites recent contemporary histories that he's read. And the example of a angry, rebellious Ireland is ready to hand. Of course, there's going to be a Fenian uprising in Ireland in 1867, just moments after the end of the Civil War. And there had been one earlier in the 19th century. And of course there's a sequence of later uprisings that culminate in Irish Independence in, or at least the road to Irish independence in 1921. 22. But the, for. For conservatives, the Irish example is precisely what not to do. Because a vindictive peace will bring only discontent. It transforms its victims into martyrs, and it kind of prolongs the war. And 19th century Ireland provides that example. It's one of the many places where we see, I think, the irony of the political alignments, because before the war, the radicals and the republicans in the north would have been very sympathetic to and were sympathetic to Irish republican claims to autonomy and resistance to the British Empire. But during the war, that sort of, that, that, that knob, I'm thinking of a kind of old, you know, receiver tuner. He's kind of turned that volume down. And you emphasize British sovereignty and the right of the British monarch and the British system to kind of restore order as against Irish rebellion here. So the lines, the kind of political, cultural lines get very confusing. But I think ultimately the moderates like Lincoln are swayed to a certain extent by these sort of Macaulay like arguments for a generous peace in the. At the. At the end of the war.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I think maybe this was the part I found the most interesting because they really could literally see sort of what was the impact of the policy. Right. It wasn't just sort of guesswork of like, well, if we do this, what could happen? They actually had the time to look back and go, well, this is what Cromwell did and this is what resulted. Now, does that map exactly onto what would happen in the U.S. of course not. But it's still really interesting to see kind of that this was such a key part of the debate, especially because the gap between where the US was in the Civil War with where the English Civil War was. That kind of amount of time between them is not like hugely dissimilar to where we are at today. Looking back to the US Civil War. So how might everything you've been telling us about kind of how history is used and thought about, how might that inform how we think about the US Civil War now?

[Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Yeah, I mean, this is really, this is the kind of, you know, shadow question in my book is that we as Americans and also I think globally, because the history of the American Civil War is a kind of global one. It's certainly a global story. We use the example recourse to the American Civil War frequently in our contemporary political rhetoric. It's been, this has been happening really. I mean, I've been teaching this history now for 20 something years and it's been, it's probably gotten more intense as our partisan divide has increased in the United States. I mean, one of the things that I hope readers will take away is the necessity of being very careful with analogies. And I, I don't want them to, to. I'm not trying to say we should not think analogically. In a way, all history is analogical thinking. That is, we go to the. We look at it as a way to understand what's happening in the present. If we go to the past strictly for a kind of curiosity, we wind up in a kind of antiquarianism in which the past is its own sort of sealed chamber and we are not able to learn anything from it. You know, the other side of this in the 20th or the 21st century is a reluctance to engage in what people denounce as presentism, that is making the history sort of so contemporaneous that it is, it's read as the same. And so I guess in this sense, I'm a kind of link only and moderate where I want people to, to make recourse and to use history. I am, after all, a history teacher, but I want them to do that with as much specificity and sort of caution as they can. I do think that analogies as a form of thinking and metaphorical language generally is quite slippery. And, you know, I think the examples that we see from the ways that 19th century Americans use the 17th century, I.e. abolitionists becoming advocates of hard war or Confederates becoming advocates of monarchy, which they nearly do in their sort of firm embrace of King Charles I and of the royalist position Jefferson Davis denounces, as he calls Northerners are. He says Northerners are a homeless race they have been since Cromwell summoned them from the bogs and fens of Scotland and Ireland. Right. Really kind of pejoratively characterizing not just Cromwell's people, but of course, the immigrants, the immigrants who settled, the English ones who settled in North America among whom there was no difference, north or South. He's inventing that, but, but very dangerously. He's endorsing a kind of aristocratic vision and one that leads him away from the, the kind of popular democratic base that he desperately needs in fighting a war. He's got 9 million citizens, 4 million of them are enslaved people. Of the 5 million white Southerners, there are a lot who are not, who are unionists as against 22 million northerners. So he can't really afford to kind of foment class division, which he does. So those are sort of quick examples of the ways in which analogies lead us, you know, almost invisibly into positions that we might not adopt if we sort of, in the cold light of day just said, do I want to endorse a hard war? Well, I'm a pacifist. So that's a kind of peculiar thing to do. So I want us to use analogies. I want us to use them carefully and I want us to be as sort of clear eyed about them as we can. So that's sort of one major takeaway, I think. The other is to think about, I like the way you introduced this, where you said we're going to actually do two pasts. The 19th century American past and the 17th century British past. You know, the, the narrative of my book, I tried to write it as clearly as possible, but at points, the, the moving backwards, it's quite braided. It has Americans of the 19th century talking about the 17th century and then some of the 17th century and then some of today. And it compelled on me an awareness that is the process of writing. It drew my awareness to the ways in which, in the process of making analogies, we change both those things. So when we today say the partisan divide in the United States is like the partisan divide of 1861, we transform what the Civil War was just a little bit, just as we are shaping how people understand or interpret what's happening in present day. And I could see this more clearly as Americans of the 19th century were interpreting 17th century English history and saying things like, Cromwell led the first Democrats, lowercase D. And I think most historians of the 17th century, I.e. people trained in this history, would be quite skeptical that what Cromwell wanted was democracy. Democracy is something that really enters later. I mean, it's the Cromwell established as the first republic, but in English history. But even the major republican thinkers, lowercase, are here, meaning classical republicanism. People like Harrington and Sidney, the writers of republican history in the English experience, really emerge later. And Americans sort of need the 18th century to kind of gestate on republican theory. So there are ways to draw connections over these long stretches of time. But we should be alert to the ways in which doing so alters the past as well as the present in which we're doing the interpreting, if that's not too kind of tangled.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I mean, it's nuanced, but we like nuance. That's the whole reason we do this. So thank you for helping us understand the key takeaways there and why we need history and how we should be using it and treating it. That's definitely really key. I do have to ask then, as a final question, what you might be turning your attention to next. It sounds like you're not done with history. Is it this history that you're continuing? Do you have any upcoming work you want to give us a brief sneak preview of?

[Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

No, I said, well, yes, I'm happy to do that and I appreciate you asking. I. There is one more part of this actually leads to what I'm now working on in thinking about the uses that Americans made of this past, which is Lincoln and moderates, Northern moderates, uses of the English past at the very end of the war as a way to make meaning out of the Civil War. And they were perhaps more successful than anyone, I think, in identifying a Whiggish tradition. And I mean that in the capital w English Whiggish tradition of the 18th century, that is, they saw America extending England's Whiggish liberty. And the trajectory went like this. The first moment of this was in the English Civil wars when Cromwell helped start a republic. It was then perfected in the Glorious Revolution later in the 17th century, when the rights of Parliament were really enshrined in the beginning of individual rights. It found the third jewel in the crown at the time of the American Revolution, when a true democratic republic was created. And then this crowning moment, the last jewel in this crown, comes with northern victory in the Civil War. Not a kind of a punishing peace or a vindictive win, but something that enshrined the preservation of self government itself. Lincoln had said this from the beginning of the war, that America represented the last best hope of earth because that's the last place where democracy and where republics are truly flourishing. After the 1848 revolutions in Europe had rebuffed the democratic movements in Germany and England and France and Italy and all those places. It's America alone that is still trying to manage this form of a republic. And that, for him, is why you oppose secession. And so northern victory confirms the kind of wisdom of a republic and I think rooting themselves in this longer, very Whiggish, very optimistic, we would say today, tradition of the kind of inevitability of human liberty, Lincoln is able to make Northern victory even bigger than it is. Obviously, the moral grandeur of emancipation is something to take pride in. And many Northerners, even those who had not necessarily entered the war as abolitionists, are able to take pride in emancipation. They can also take pride in this sort of global accomplishment that Lincoln sort of accounts for or explains, interpreting America as continuing the search for a. A future of kind of unrivaled liberty at the individual level that began in the 17th century in the bogs and fens of Ireland and Scotland with Cromwell's people, and extends all the way through to those virtuous night white Northerners who win. So that's a point from fighting with the past. And the connection is what I'm starting work on now is a book that really thinks more seriously about what the Civil War accomplished in American life. So something that will carry forward really probably to 1900. And thinking about the ways that these conflicts that we've been talking about, about the role of military power, about the nature of civil liberties, about the growth of the state and its kind of position that how these then manifest in the. The. The dilemmas of Reconstruction, of the growth of urban spaces, the huge new volume of immigrants that pour into the United states in the 1880s and the 1890s into the settlement of the American west, the white settlement, and as a requirement for that, the dispossession of the west from the control of indigenous Americans who, even long after the Civil War, communities like the Sioux and the Nez Perce and others who controlled huge spaces in the West. And I'm doing this, I think, through a kind of focus on the. The two brothers, William and John Sherman, who are at the center of the Civil War. William Tecumseh Sherman, we know most famously as the Northern general who led a hard war and captured Atlanta and then moved from Atlanta to Savannah on Sherman's march to Virginia. See, after the war, Sherman was the head of the US army, and he's the one who manages a lot of those Indian wars. His brother, John Sherman, about whom I would say there's less popular knowledge, was for 40 years a congressman, a senator and then a cabinet secretary, so all the way until 1900. And he is the one who probably more than anyone establishes a, the monetary policy and the kind of fiscal policy of the United States in the post war period. So all of the conflicts over currency and the gold standard. So the two of them are at the center of this. They are brothers who are very close, but they do not agree politically and they have a fascinating, rich correspondence. So I'm hoping that provides me an opportunity to kind of a window in, and hopefully in an interesting narrative window into the ways that the Civil War mattered and the kind of surprising changes that it brought and the surprising things that don't change. I mean, Lincoln, as I was trying to explain, is arguing ultimately, I think, for a kind of moderate victory in the Civil War, one that sees Northern victory not as revolutionary, but as building on this celebration of liberty in an English language and certainly in a tradition that Americans inherited from the English. Gone is all of the post colonial anxiety about differentiating themselves from the English culturally, and instead there's a very tight embrace of the English past as an American inheritance. Moderates like John Sherman and Northern conservatives like William Tecumseh Sherman present a different vision of what the Civil War means than the abolitionists and radicals upon whom we typically focus. And I'm not trying to gain, say, the importance of the kind of radical legacy of the American Civil War. There are elements there that are quite real. But I think in other respects it would, it would help us to pay careful attention to the ways in which, as I say, the moderates and the conservatives who represented the overwhelming number of Northern voters, the ways that they understood what the Civil War accomplished. So I can't probably articulate that with great specificity yet, but hopefully in a couple years I'll have that story and could get back together again with you, Miranda, and talk about that book.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That sounds like a great plan. Best of luck with the project. I definitely look forward to hearing more. And of course, while you are doing that, listeners can read the book we've just been discussing titled Fighting with the past, how 17th century history shaped the American Civil War, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2025. Aaron, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Great. It was my pleasure. Thanks for having.