William Nelson Cromwell was born on January 17, 1854 in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He was the son of John Nelson Cromwell and Sarah M. (Brokaw) Cromwell. The family soon moved to Peoria, Illinois and in 1861 his father, a colonel with the Forty-seventh Illinois Volunteers, left for war and later was killed during Grant's advance on Vicksburg.
The family returned to Brooklyn, where he attended public schools. Cromwell attended Columbia Law School.
Cromwell worked for several years as an accountant in a railroad office, to support a younger brother and his mother. In 1874 he secured an accounting job with the New York law firm of Sullivan, Kobbe and Fowler.
He was admitted to the bar in 1876. When Kobbe and Fowler withdrew from the firm, Sullivan invited Cromwell, just twenty-five years old, to become his partner, with a one-third interest in all fees. When Sullivan died in 1887, Cromwell became senior partner. Under Cromwell's leadership the firm prospered and grew, employing twelve lawyers and six stenographers by 1902. Specializing in business law, Sullivan and Cromwell excelled at supplying legal advice to increasingly complex organizations that were trying to reach rapidly expanding markets. One of the most resourceful legal technicians in the country at the turn of the century, Cromwell was wizardly with figures, as befitted a former accountant. He was no orator, perhaps for lack of a college education, but he had a taste for facts, an aptitude for realistic economic analysis, and a flair for fast-talking argument. He was thus well equipped to manage such protracted and intricate affairs as the consolidation of sixteen of the largest American tube-manufacturing concerns into the National Tube Company, completed in 1899 and capitalized at $80 million, and E. H. Harriman's two-year proxy battle against Stuyvesant Fish for control of the Illinois Central Railroad Company, brought to a successful conclusion in 1908. Cromwell was more interested in efficient results than in legal doctrine.
For the sake of economic rationality, he urged corporations to make full public disclosure of their assets, to "win and hold the confidence of the investing public. "
The Cromwell plan was originally developed in 1891, to save the failing New York brokerage house of Decker, Howell and Company, whose liabilities were in excess of $10 million; subsequently it was applied to other kinds of enterprise, including a group of large jewelry importing houses in danger of ruin during the panic of 1907. Cromwell's practice also had an international dimension. Representing various European banks and bond syndicates, he played a part in stimulating the flow of European capital to the United States before World War I. Such was the scope of his international business that he was said to aspire to become secretary of state, a position that eluded him despite his generous support of the Republican party and his cultivation of Republican presidents.
His one dramatic achievement in the diplomatic arena was for the benefit of a client, the New Panama Canal Company of France, which first engaged him in 1896 and on whose behalf he tried to take advantage of what he called the "influences and relations" of Sullivan and Cromwell with "a considerable number of public men in political life, in financial circles, and on the press".
After World War I, Cromwell retired from active legal practice, residing for long periods in France.
He devoted himself to various charitable enterprises, among them fund-raising to aid the blind and efforts to restore the hand-lace industry in France. For all his involvement in the new industrial order, he had never been personally comfortable with modernity.
He gave almost $5 million to law schools, bar associations, and legal research centers. Appropriately, for one whose law practice had been so outsized, it was the largest sum ever bequeathed by an individual to the legal profession.
To promote efficiency, he made his most important contribution to the practice of American business law, the so-called Cromwell plan, for salvaging enterprises in distress, from which he acquired a reputation as "the physician of Wall Street, " adept at "rescue operations". The essence of the Cromwell plan, which was especially well adapted to the fluctuating economic conditions of the late nineteenth century, was to arrange a voluntary agreement of creditors within the framework of the New York state insolvency laws, whereby a firm in difficulty could reorganize itself in order both to continue in business and to fulfill its obligations without a sacrifice sale of slow assets or of assets the value of which was temporarily depressed as a result of financial crisis.
In the course of some eight years of intensive lobbying, negotiating, and public relations work, Cromwell was instrumental in persuading influential Republican politicians to abandon support of a Nicaraguan canal and promote a plan by which the Colombian government would agree to allow the New Panama Canal Company to sell its Panamanian property to the United States and the company itself would agree to the sale at a price of $40 million.
According to one hostile observer, he was "the man whose masterful mind, whetted on the grindstone of corporation cunning, conceived and carried out the rape of the Isthmus".
His very appearance was flamboyantly reminiscent of a previous age, featuring as it did shaggy white locks and a Buffalo Bill mustache.
Characteristically, he liked to conduct business not in his office on Wall Street but in his midtown Victorian home, crammed with paintings and statuettes.
Quotes from others about the person
"It profoundly irritated him, to be told . .. that there was no effective legal solution to a difficult economic problem".
He married Jennie Osgood Nichols on December 24, 1878. He was childless and his wife had died in 1931.
