Robert Green Ingersoll

• Robert Green Ingersoll
• Born: August 11, 1833
• Died: July 21, 1899

Lawyer, freethinker, and agnostic, was born in Dresden, New York, the youngest of five children, three sons and two daughters, of John Ingersoll, a clergyman, and Mary (Livingston) Ingersoll, daughter of Judge Robert Livingston. His father’s Puritan ancestors had emigrated from England in the 1620s to escape religious persecution, settling in Salem, Massachusetts. John Ingersoll had been graduated from Middlebury College and was ordained in a Congregationalist church. In later years he became a Presbyterian. He was a fine orator, a democrat, and an abolitionist. Mary Livingston Ingersoll was an independent-minded woman who was active in the temperance and abolitionist movements. Robert Ingersoll did not really know his mother, for she died when he was two-and-a-half years old. His father remained a widower for more than seventeen years.

Robert Ingersoll was raised in a stern, orthodox Calvinist environment. Despite his later rejection of his father’s religious beliefs, Ingersoll loved and respected the older man. During his youth the Ingersoll family moved fairly frequently as John Ingersoll accepted pulpits in New York City, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Illinois. The family never prospered, but it was not impoverished.

Ingersoll did not attend school regularly and had comparatively little formal education; occasionally he was enrolled in grammar schools in Ohio and Wisconsin. He completed his education at a school run by Socrates Smith in Grenville, Illinois, which he attended from 1860 to 1862. His main education came from being tutored by his father in languages and classics and from extensive readings in his father’s library. Beginning with theological books, he moved on to the works of Byron, Shelley, Keats, Paine, Voltaire, and Socrates. He was particularly influenced by the writings of Robert Burns and William Shakespeare. His secular scholarly readings provided him with a basis for rejecting his formal religious upbringing.

Ingersoll began his professional career in 1852 as a teacher in a private school. He did not find teaching satisfactory, and after two years of working in schools in Illinois and Tennessee, he abandoned it for a legal career. He read law in the firm of Willis Allen in Marion, Illinois, and worked as a minor clerk in the circuit and county courts to support himself. At this time he became committed to the Democratic party and its political philosophy. On December 20, 1854, he was admitted to the Illinois bar; the following year he entered legal practice with his brother Ebon Clark Ingersoll in Shawneetown, Ohio. The brothers found that town too provincial for their tastes, and two years later they moved their firm to Peoria, Illinois. There Ingersoll developed a reputation as an articulate, shrewd, skilled lawyer; his practice grew steadily and he prospered.

At the age of twenty-seven, in 1860, Ingersoll ran for a seat in the United States Congress as the Democratic candidate for the Illinois fourth Congressional district. He lost substantially to his older Republican rival; it was his only attempt to run for national elective office. His legal and political career was interrupted by the Civil War. Shortly before Christmas of 1860 he became a colonel in the Illinois Volunteer Cavalry. He saw duty at the Battle of Shiloh and was promoted to chief of the cavalry of the sixth district. On February 13, 1862, while on leave Ingersoll married Eva Amelia Parker, daughter of an affluent Groveland, Illinois, family with a revolutionary ancestry. A well-educated young woman whose mother had been a disciple of Thomas Paine, Eva Ingersoll was like her husband a free thinker and a rationalist. Nine days after the wedding, Ingersoll was sent to Tennessee. In December 1862 he was captured by Confederate soldiers, but eventually he was paroled. In the summer of 1863 he resigned from the Army and returned to his law practice in Peoria.

The Ingersolls’ first child, Eva Robert, was born in September 1863, and a second daughter, Maud Robert, completed the family in October 1864. Ingersoll idolized his wife and children and became a firm supporter of equal rights for women and woman suffrage. A flourishing law practice supported a comfortable living for the family.

Shortly after his return from the war, Ingersoll became once again active in politics, this time as a Republican. In 1862 the Democratic party had split over the issues of slavery and the Civil War. A strong believer in abolitionism, Ingersoll followed his brother Ebon into the new Republican party, and took to the campaign trail when his brother ran for Congress in 1864. For the next two decades he actively participated in Republican campaigns on the local, state, and national levels and was the campaign manager for his brother from 1864 to 1871. His superb gift of oratory made him one of the most successful political speakers and lawyers of his day. In both his legal and political activities he was a pragmatist, rather than an idealist, with a factual, rational analysis of issues.

The Governor of Illinois appointed Ingersoll attorney-general for a two-year term in 1867. A year later he tried to run for the governorship, but was defeated at the party’s convention. Part of his defeat was due to his antireligious views, which he did not hide from the public. Ingersoll had delivered his first antireligious lecture, “Progress,” in Pekin, Illinois, in 1860. By the time he entered the Army his agnostic beliefs were firmly established. In the decades of the 1860s and 1870s his theological opinions were to appear in print in Humboldt (1869), Thomas Paine (1871), The Gods (1872), Individuality (1973), and Heretics and Heresies (1874). Because of his agnosticism, no party or officeholder could afford to name him as a candidate or appoint him to high office by the year 1876, although they made full use of his oratorical skills. Thus, at the Republican national convention of 1876 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Ingersoll placed the name of James Blaine into nomination for the presidency. Blaine did not win the nomination, but Ingersoll’s “plumed knight” nominating speech made Blaine a national figure. In the campaign Ingersoll supported the party’s candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, and traveled from Maine to Mississippi in his behalf.

Ingersoll’s campaign work of that year made him a much lecturer. He combined his extensive law and business interests with long cross-country lecture tours on religion and science, becoming a champion of science in its war against superstition and ignorance. Ingersoll was not an innovator or a pioneer in the free-thinking or agnostic movement of the late nineteenth century; he was, instead, a synthesizer, popularizer, and adopter of others’ ideas. As such he placed himself at the center of the religious and intellectual controversies of his age. Ingersoll had come to see religion as the spiritual equivalent of black slavery, controlling and bonding minds. He felt that only through a free, inquiring mind could one ultimately find salvation and that people had to rid themselves of superstitions, which religion fostered, in order to control and expand their destinies.

The key to the future, in Ingersoll’s opinion, was science, which was the only true religion and the only hope of humanity. Instead of the Christian Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, Ingersoll preached a trinity or religion of science based on reason, observation, and experience. Ingersoll wanted to see existing theology replaced by a religion of usefulness that maximized morals and emphasised love of family and the importance of the home. He angered clergymen of the period not only by stating that he did not know, but by implying that they did not know, either. For Ingersoll the Garden of Eden was a myth; the doctrine of original sin had no foundation; death was at worst a long sleep and at best was a future life with friends and family; and the supernatual could not and did not exist. In a period during which new scientific discoveries and theories—especially Charles Darwin’s ideas on the origin of species—were making society question traditional theological concepts of supernaturalism, Ingersoll was one of the leading publicizers of science and opponents of formal religion.

In the 1880s Ingersoll became involved in a number of literary confrontations with religious leaders, displaying a missionary zeal in his devotion to his beliefs. The most famous of these debates appeared in the pages of The North American Review. There he did written battle with the jurist Jeremiah Black, the Presbyterian Henry Field, the Episcopalian William Ewart Gladstone, and the Catholic Henry Cardinal Manning. Many of his lectures on religion were published separately, including The Gods (1872); Individuality (1873); The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child (1877); Some Mistakes of Moses (1879); What Must We Do to Be Saved? (1880); About the Holy Bible (1894); Why I Am An Agnostic” (1896); and What Is Religion? (1899).

For a brief period in 1879 Ingersoll began to think about establishing a third party that would separate church and state, and church and school, in American society. The movement had originated with the National Liberal League, a freethinking group that had formed three years earlier in Philadelphia. In September 1879, Ingersoll was elected vice president of the league, but within a few months he became disillusioned with its stress on “immorality” rather than on free thinking, and he resigned. After his flirtation with the National Liberal League, he rarely became involved with professional groups of freethinkers, preferring to work on his own, although he served for a short time in 1884-85 as president of the American Secular Union. The union urged taxation of church property, elimination of Army and Congressional chaplains, and the termination of religious instruction in public schools. In general, he rejected invitations to take part in national and international free thinking movements and congresses.

After becoming a national figure, Robert Ingersoll moved in 1879 to Washington, D.C., to establish with his brother the law firm of E.C. & R.C. Ingersoll. The partnership ended two years later, when Ebon died. During the years in Washington, Ingersoll concentrated on federal litigation, serving as defense counselor for former Senator Stephen Dorsey of Arkansas and other prominent Republicans who had been indicted for conspiracy to defraud the government in connection with postal routes in what became known as the Star Routes Case.

Ingersoll’s declining interest in politics in the early 1880s, and the growth of his corporate law practice, were major factors in his decision to move his family and law practice to New York in 1885. Although his legal work and his lectures brought substantial financial compensation, he was unable to amass a personal fortune, for he lived lavishly and gave away large sums to philanthropic and charitable causes and organizations.

Ingersoll suffered a mild stroke in 1896 while lecturing in Janesville, Wisconsin. Within a few months, he resumed his law practice and his lecturing and even campaigned for the Republican party’s platform on the gold standard. He continued to speak and write up until his death at the age of sixty-five from angina pectoris at Dobbs Ferry, New York, his summer residence. After a simple funeral service, without prayers or sermons, his body was cremated at Fresh Pond, Long Island. His ashes were originally kept in the home of Eva Ingersoll, and after her death, in the residence of their daughter Maud. In 1932 the remains were buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

Robert Ingersoll’s life had been dedicated to human freedom—freedom of both the body and the mind. He was a publicizer of the gospel of science, a political orator, and a religious skeptic. Through his oratory skills he caught the attention of the nation, and he used them to expound his free-thought ideology. He life reflects the awakening middle-class in interest in nineteenth-century science.

Ingersoll’s papers can be found at the Library of Congress, the Illinois State Historical Library, and the New York Public Library. His writings were collected in C. P. Farrell, ed., The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, 13 vols. (1912). See also The Letters of Robert G. Ingersoll (1951), collected by E. I. Wakefield.

The best accounts of his life can be found in C. H. Cramer, Royal Bob: The Life of Robert G. Ingersoll (1952); D. D. Anderson, Robert Ingersoll (1972); and R. E. Creely, ed., Ingersoll: Immoral Infidel (1977). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1932). Obituaries appeared in The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune, July 22, 1899.