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 logic and reason would have it.

In 1902, after having run into a 10-cent Nicaraguan postal stamp produced in the US by the American Bank Note Company erroneously depicting a fuming Momotambo volcano (which was nearly dormant and lay more than 100 miles from the proposed Nicaraguan canal path), and taking advantage of a particularly volcanic year in the Caribbean, he planted a story in the New York Sun reporting that the Momotambo volcano had erupted and caused a series of seismic shocks. He thereafter sent leaflets with the above stamps pasted on them to all Senators as witness to the volcanic activity in Nicaragua.

On June 19, 1902, three days after senators received the stamps, they voted for the Panama route for the canal. For his lobbying efforts, he received the sum of $800,000.^[1]

One of his main pro bono activities was in the founding of "The Society of Friends of Roumania" in 1920 under the patronage of Her Majesty Queen Marie of Roumania, granddaughter of Queen Victoria of England. The New York-based Society under his tutelage promoted numerous exchanges between the two countries and published the distinguished "Roumania ? A Quarterly Review".

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