Robert Ingersoll

Robert Ingersoll

Robert Green Ingersoll was born in Dresden, New York, the youngest of five children of John and Mary Livingston Ingersoll: Ruth, John, Mary Jane, Ebon Clark and Robert. Shortly before Robert's birth, Mary Ingersoll circulated a petition to Congress that slavery be abolished in Washington, D.C. Robert's middle name, "Green", was in honor of Reverend Beriah Green, a reformer and abolitionist. The family called him "Bob". 

The family moved to Illinois in the late 1840s. Bob had very little formal education. He last saw the inside of a conventional schoolroom as a youth of fifteen while his family was residing in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Later, he would say that his real education began while he was waiting at a cobbler’s shop, when he chanced to pick up a book of the poetry of Robert Burns. At 19, Bob began teaching school, working primarily at schools in Illinois, although he also had jobs in Pennsylvania and Tennessee. While teaching in Waverly, Tennessee, he witnessed the sale of slaves. In a letter to his family he wrote: "People here ask me if I think slavery wrong and I tell them I do and that I believe it is wrong enough to damn the whole of them, and they take it in good part. "

At one time, several Baptist ministers and elders who were conducting a revival in the neighborhood were also staying at Bob's boardinghouse.  They were discussing religion at table; the young teacher took no part in their discussions.  One day he was pointedly asked what he thought about baptism. He hesitated to speak, but they insisted. He said: 

"Well, I'll give you my opinion: with soap, baptism is a good thing."

The brethren were shocked, and his remark went from gossip to gossip.  The feeling against him became so strong that he was obliged to abandon his position at the school.

Ingersoll joined the Union Army on September 16, 1861 and with Colonel Basil D. Meek, a Peoria judge, began to help recruit volunteers from Peoria to serve in a cavalry regiment. He was commissioned Colonel of the Eleventh Illinois Cavalry Regiment. 

Nine days after his wedding, he returned to duty with his regiment; less than two months later, the Eleventh Illinois fought in the Battle of  Shiloh. Colonel Ingersoll's regiment was under the direction of General Prentiss at Pittsburgh Landing; they were engaged in the fight on April 6 & 7.  Ingersoll wrote to his brother Ebon Clark, 

“The Rebels rushed us with the fury of Hell and our soldiers disputed every bloody inch with more courage and more dauntless desperate heroism than I before imagined possessed by men. . . .The rain fell all night, slowly and sadly, as though the heavens were weeping for the dead. All night long I stood with my blanket around me, drearily by the side of a dead tree watching the shells of the gunboats. Every fifteen minutes would come a flash like heat lightning—then the boom—then the bluish line bending over the distant wood—then the roar of the bursting, and then last of all the double echo dying over the far hills.”

On December 2, 1862, Ingersoll was appointed Chief of Cavalry on the staff of General Jeremy C. Sullivan. His regiment was stationed at Jackson, Tennessee. Sullivan, having been advised that Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, was crossing the Tennessee River at Clifton with a large force, ordered Ingersoll to proceed toward the river. Ingersoll left Jackson on the evening of December 16th, taking with him two hundred of his own regiment and two guns of the Fourteenth Indiana Battery. About daybreak of the 18th, a few miles east of Lexington, the advance pickets of the enemy were sighted. Forrest's two thousand men began pouring in from all directions. Ingersoll dismounted and stood by the guns, encouraging his men, and personally directing their fire, until the cavalry charge was transformed into a hand-to-hand encounter. Twenty-two Union officers and men were either killed or wounded, and one hundred and forty-eight others, including Ingersoll, were taken prisoners.

Three days after his capture, Ingersoll was paroled by General Forrest, and sent to St. Louis to command a camp of other paroled prisoners. He waited months be be exchanged so he could re-enter active service, but eventually resigned his commission and was discharged in June 1863. He was released on his promise that he would not fight again, which was common practice early in the war.

“War is horrid beyond the comprehension of man. It is enough to break the heart to go through the hospitals and see gray-haired veterans with lips whitening under the kiss of death—hundreds of mere boys with thoughts of home—of sister and brother—meeting the dark angel alone, nothing but pain, misery, neglect, and death. ...to see death around you, everywhere nothing but death—to think of the ones far away expecting the dead to return and hoping for one more embrace—listening for footsteps that never will be heard on earth—it makes one tired—tired of war.” 

~ Robert Ingersoll

On May 14th, 1866, at the age of 33, that Ingersoll gave his first iconoclastic speech, "Progress" in Peoria. He spoke of his budding abhorrence of superstition and concluded with a plea for the continuation of progress in thought.

"The Golden Age of Freethought," which stretched roughly from 1875 until the beginning of the First World War, divided Americans in much the same fashion, and over many of the same issues, as have the culture wars of the present. The argument over the proper role of religion in civil government was a subsidiary of the larger question of whether the claims of supposedly revealed religion deserve any particular respect or deference in a pluralistic society. The other cultural issues that divided Americans in Ingersoll’s time are equally familiar and include evolution, race, immigration, women’s rights, sexual behavior, freedom of artistic expression, and vast disparities in wealth. In the 19th century, however, the issues were newer, as was the science bolstering the secular side of the arguments, and the forces of religious orthodoxy were stronger.

To the question that retains its politically divisive power to this day—whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation—Ingersoll answered an emphatic no. The marvel of the Framers, he argued in an oration delivered on July 4, 1876, in his hometown of Peoria, was that they established “the first secular government that was ever founded in this world” at a time when every government in Europe was still based on union between church and state. “Recollect that,” Ingersoll admonished his audience.  A government that had “retired the gods from politics,” Ingersoll declared the United States' 100th birthday, was a necessary condition of progress.

“The first secular government; the first government that said every church has exactly the same rights and no more; every religion has the same rights, and no more. In other words, our fathers were the first men who had the sense, had the genius, to know that no church should be allowed to have a sword.” 

In 1878, Ingersoll moved his family to Washington, D.C., where he again created a law practice with his brother, Ebon Clark. His brother had been living in Washington since he was elected to Congress in 1864. When Robert Ingersoll moved to Washington, D. C, at age forty-five, his reputation as a trial lawyer, lecturer, and political speaker was well established.

Though dubbed"The Great Agnostic", Ingersoll himself made no distinction between atheists and agnostics. In 1885, he was asked by an interviewer for a Philadelphia newspaper, “Don’t you think the belief of the Agnostic is more satisfactory to the believer that that of the Atheist?” He replied succinctly,

The Agnostic is an Atheist. The Atheist is an Agnostic. The Agnostic says: “I do not know, but I do not believe there is any god.” The Atheist says the same. The orthodox Christian says he knows there is a God, but we know that he does not know. The Atheist [too] cannot know that God does not exist.

Ingersoll also pointed out that the labels “atheist” and “infidel” had generally been applied as epithets to anyone, religious or not, who refused to accept biblical stories that were scientifically impossible. Among those included were the devout Quaker, suffragist, and abolitionist Lucretia Mott, and Thomas Paine, who was also called a Judas, reptile, hog, mad dog, souse, louse, and arch-beast by his religiously orthodox contemporaries.  Ingersoll subtitled his standard lecture about Paine, “With His Name Left Out, the History of Liberty Cannot Be Written.” He made it one of his missions not only to remind citizens in America’s second century of Paine’s indispensable rhetorical contributions to the revolutionary cause, but also to link those ideals to Paine’s fierce defense of liberty of conscience and the separation of church and state.

In tour after tour, Ingersoll crisscrossed the country and spoke before packed houses on topics ranging from Shakespeare to Reconstruction, from science to religion. In an age when oratory was the dominant form of public entertainment, Ingersoll was the unchallenged king of American orators.  Ingersoll delivered more than 1,300 lectures and was heard by more Americans than any other person before the invention of the radio.  At the height of Ingersoll's fame, audiences would pay $1 or more to hear him speak, a high sum for his day. “Standing Room Only” was often displayed at the entrance of the hall or theater where he was to speak. In a trip West at one time his fees for speaking amounted to more than fifty thousand dollars in one month. Two or three thousand dollars for a single lecture was not an unusual sum; one assembly in Chicago yielded seven thousand and one dollars. Ingersoll spoke in every state except Mississippi, North Carolina, and Oklahoma.

He influenced Americans of his own generation with his arguments and young admirers who lived into the 20th century, making critical contributions to American politics, science, business, and law and becoming leaders on behalf of civil liberties and international human rights.  The list of his admirers includes Mark Twain, Clara Barton, Luther Burbank, Eugene V. Debs, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Walt Whitman and Thomas Edison.  

Robert Ingersoll died on Friday, July 21, 1899 from congestive heart failure.  He was 65 years old.

While I am opposed to all orthodox creeds, I have a creed myself; and my creed is this. Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy to be here. The way to be happy is to make others so. This creed is somewhat short, but it is long enough for this life, strong enough for this world. If there is another world, when we get there we can make another creed. But this creed certainly will do for this life. 

~ Robert Ingersoll, 1882