Robert Green Ingersoll: Great American Infidel
September 16, 2018
Jane R. Shoup
Robert Green Ingersoll became the most celebrated advocate of free thought, rationalism, and women’s rights in 19th century America. Like Thomas Paine, whose legacy he championed, Ingersoll was way ahead of his time. He is too little remembered today, yet he was the foremost orator and political speechmaker, indeed perhaps the best-known American in the post Civil War era.
Biographical sketch
Robert Green Ingersoll, the last of 5 children of Mary Livingston Ingersoll and the Rev. John Ingersoll, was born on Aug. 11, 1833, in the tiny village of Dresden, NY, on Seneca Lake about halfway between Rochester and Syracuse.
The Finger Lakes Area of upstate NY was known as the “burned over district” in the early 19th century because of the wide diversity of social and religious ferment which swept through the area at the time. Famous figures associated with the region include Harriet Tubman, the African American abolitionist; Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, who walked into the forest one day and walked out with golden tablets bestowed upon him by the angel Moroni; and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who with Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott organized the first women’s rights convention in 1848 in Seneca Falls, just an hour’s drive from Ingersoll’s birthplace.
The most prominent conflict in that period was that between abolitionists and apologists for slavery. Settlers in the area included both orthodox Presbyterians and Congregationalists most of whom were much more concerned about maintaining the unity of churches in the North and South than about limiting or abolishing slavery.
Robert’s father, the Rev. John Ingersoll, was a Presbyterian minister in the anti-slavery camp – a stern uncompromising abolitionist who preached fiery sermons. Rev. John Ingersoll was kicked out of several congregations because of conflicts with his views on slavery. It was an era of considerable religious enthusiasm – talk of hellfire and damnation – and the Ingersoll children were exposed to a lot of religious books in addition to the Bible.
Like his father, Robert’s mother Mary Ingersoll, was also a public abolitionist – but this was a time when it was considered scandalous for women to involve themselves openly in public affairs. She died at age 36 when Robert was barely 2 years old. In the following years the widowed Rev. John Ingersoll and his 5 young children moved frequently, living in various communities in NY, OH, and WI, largely a result of the Reverend’s liberal views on slavery, often a source of conflict with narrow-minded parishioners. Consequently, Robert Ingersoll received little formal education, but he had an active mind and read widely, particularly admiring Burns and Shakespeare. He last saw the inside of a conventional schoolroom at age 15 when his family was living in Waukesha, WI.
At age 19, Robert began teaching school in several locations in IL and TN. During this period several Baptist ministers conducting a revival in the neighborhood were staying at the Ingersoll boarding house. One day at dinner they asked Robert what he thought of baptism. Reluctantly, he replied, “Well I’ll give you my opinion: with a little soap baptism is a good thing.” After that he was forced to resign his position at the school.
Eventually the family settled in Shawneetown, IL, on the Ohio River and Robert and his brother Ebon Clark Ingersoll apprenticed themselves to attorneys (much like Abraham Lincoln had done some years earlier). Eventually Robert and Ebon were admitted to the IL bar, and they set up a prosperous law practice in the city of Peoria. (Incidentally, last summer a refurbished 14-ft. statue of Ingersoll was rededicated in Peoria. This project was orchestrated by several groups, chief among them Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation. This national organization leads the fight for separation of church and state, along with the Freethought Society, the Center for Inquiry, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. You might want to take note of pictures of the rededication event in a recent issue of Freethought Today on the table in the lobby.)
In 1862 Robert Ingersoll married Eva Amelia Parker, like himself a rationalist and fearless atheist whose parents were devotees of Voltaire and Thomas Paine. Ingersoll described his wife as “a woman without superstition”. Together they raised two daughters, Eva and Maud, and by all accounts enjoyed a supremely happy marriage and family life. In an 1870 letter to his wife he wrote, referring to their two daughters, “Tell them [you and] they are my Holy Trinity comprising the only deity I worship.”
In one of his most popular lectures, after a passionate plea for equal rights for women, he would remark, “… do you know that it is a splendid thing to think that the woman you really love will never grow old to you. Through the wrinkles of time, through the mask of years, if you really love her, you will always see the face you loved and won. And a woman who really loves a man does not see that he grows old; he is not decrepit to her; she always sees the same gallant gentleman who won her hand and heart.”
In 1862 Robert Ingersoll helped organize the 11th Illinois Voluntary Cavalry Regiment and was awarded the rank of Colonel. His regiment fought with distinction in the fierce Battle of Shiloh. During this time he began in his thinking to link slavery with retrograde religion. He had witnessed the sale of slaves when he was teaching in TN. Although he gave full credit to religious abolitionists like Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Ingersoll realized that these men were exceptions among their religious contemporaries in the North. After all, the Bible condones slavery – as well as the suppression of women. Moreover, religious opponents of slavery were often denounced as infidels.
After the war Ingersoll built a solid reputation as a brilliant trial lawyer and speechmaker, and in 1867 he was appointed the first Attorney General of Illinois – the first and last public office he ever held. In 1868 he was considered for the Illinois Republican gubernatorial nomination but was passed over because he would not agree to stop making speeches on controversial subjects such as women’s rights and religion. He placed principles, and his determination that Americans not forget the secular side of their history, above his political ambitions – something that no aspirant to high office in U.S. history has been willing to do ever since! Ingersoll refused to engage in religious hypocrisy to further his political career.
He moved his family to Washington,D.C., in 1878, where he and his brother continued their prominent legal practice. In 1885, he moved to New York City where he lived with his extended family for the rest of his life.
He became the best-known political orator in 19th century America, traveling across the continent and receiving fees as high as $7000. Between 1875 and 1899 he spoke to packed lecture halls in all but three states – once reportedly to an audience of 50,000 in Chicago. By all accounts he had a magnificent, spellbinding speaking voice. His lectures, usually 3 to 4 hours long – and usually without notes! – ranged on a variety of topics like Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Thomas Paine, but the largest crowds came to hear him support women’s rights, the sanctity and refuge of the family, and denounce the Bible and organized religion.
Col. Ingersoll held opinions that we might consider somewhat contradictory. He was a staunch conservative Republican who upheld the gold standard, but he had strong humanistic inclinations and was outspokenly sympathetic to labor issues. He was venerated by contemporary leaders in all walks of life – among them, Pres. James Garfield, poet Walt Whitman (who considered him the greatest orator of his time; Ingersoll delivered the eulogy at Whitman’s funeral). Other friends and admirers were Gen. and later Pres. Ulysses S. Grant, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, socialist labor leader Eugene Debs, writer Mark Twain, Wisconsin’s progressive leader Robert Lafollette, nurse Clara Barton, feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, preacher Henry Ward Beecher, and inventor Thomas Edison, who once remarked, “I think Ingersoll had all the attributes of a perfect man, and in my opinion, no finer personality ever existed.”
Although he remained active to the end of his life, Robert Ingersoll was afflicted with heart disease for many years. In his last months he lived in Dobbs Ferry, NY, at the home of his elder daughter, along with his wife and his sister-in-law and her husband. He wanted his family to bear witness to his utter rejection of the idea of immortality and the afterlife. He denounced the supernatural even in the face of death. He died of heart failure at age 65 on July 21, 1899. As was the case with the death of Charles Darwin nearly 20 years earlier, there were widespread rumors of a deathbed conversion but, as with Darwin, there were no recantations of his agnostic/atheistic views. At his request he was cremated; this was very unusual at the time, frowned upon and even forbidden by almost all Christian denominations and Judaism. His wife Eva kept his ashes in an urn on the mantel, and after her death in 1923 they were buried together in Arlington.
At the time of Robert’s death in 1899, the publisher of the Atchison (KS) Daily Globe wrote,
“The death of Robert Ingersoll removed one of America’s greatest citizens. It is not popular to admire Ingersoll but his brilliancy, his integrity and patriotism cannot be doubted. Had not Ingersoll been frank enough to express his opinions on religion, he would have been President of the United States. Hypocrisy in religion pays. There will come a time when public men may speak their honest convictions in religion without being maligned by the ignorant and superstitious, but not yet.” Still not yet!!!
The messages of Robert G. Ingersoll: Rights of Women
Robert Green Ingersoll was a lifelong advocate of equal rights for women, a cause that received considerable lip service from male freethinkers but was rarely a top priority to them. It may have been partly Ingersoll’s awareness that his own mother had acted on her abolitionist convictions at a time when women were expected to remain sequestered in the home. Ingersoll was way ahead of his time, realizing that suffrage alone was not enough to achieve women’s equality. And only he and a few others, notably Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed that patriarchal religion should be brought down in order to achieve equal rights for women – economic, educational, and social.
Stanton herself was alienated by the suffragist movement when she published The Women’s Bible in the early 1890s, which excoriated organized Christianity for its role in the subjugation of women. Ingersoll also rejected the argument that Christianity had elevated the status of women. He noted that “Jesus said not one word about the sacredness of the home, the duties of the husband to the wife – nothing calculated to lighten the hearts of those who bear the saddest burdens of this life.”
Ingersoll’s rejection of the idea that women are, by nature, intellectually inferior to men, was another of his characteristics as a humanist freethinker. It was widely known that Ingersoll was a family man who adored his wife and daughters. Ingersoll believed that the right to vote was necessary but not sufficient to liberate women who wished not to be mere helpmates to men, but masters of their own lives In this he resembled feminists of the late 20th century more than suffragists of his own time.
Long before there were reliable means of contraception, Ingersoll spoke out about birth control as a precondition for women’s escape from subordination – a remarkable position in its time. He said, “Science must make woman the owner, the mistress of herself… must put it in the power of woman to decide for herself whether she will or will not become a mother… This frees woman. The babes that are then born will be welcome. They will be clasped with glad hands to happy breasts. They will fill homes with light and joy.” This statement is a genuine reflection of Ingersoll’s own marriage and family life.
Ingersoll was well aware that women as a group were more religious than men, but he attributed feminine religiosity to their lack of education and opportunity, and their total economic dependency on their husbands. Nineteenth century American women were expected, by law, to stay in a marriage even if they were regularly beaten by their husbands. In an interview in 1888 Ingersoll spoke up for the right of a woman to divorce and for child support in cases of domestic violence – this was considered shocking in a society in which marital violence was rarely even acknowledged.
The common thread in all of Ingersoll’s thinking about social issues was secular humanism and its emphasis on promoting happiness in this world. The underlying idea that women had a right to control their own lives and bodies derives from older Enlightenment values. Ingersoll was an intellectual heir to the Enlightenment tradition, which by the late 19th century had been expanded by the embrace of science. He understood the deep materialism of Darwin’s theory as an extension of Enlightenment ideals. Darwin had challenged the godliness of man. The Creator, the deity God, was now replaced by a scientifically explained natural process, evolution by natural selection. Moreover, inalienable rights were not limited to men, or to whites, or to those at the top of the economic pyramid.
Agnosticism/atheism and the separation of church and state
Robert Ingersoll openly rejected belief in a God and in all religion. He said, “All religions are inconsistent with mental freedom…I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. [But] If they hold thought to be dangerous – if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men.” He made no distinction between the terms atheism and agnosticism. He was asked by an interviewer in 1885, “Don’t you think the belief of the agnostic is more satisfactory to the believer than that of the atheist?” Ingersoll replied, “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.”
Ingersoll wrote further: “In most of the states of this Union, [as an atheist] I could not give testimony. Christianity has such a contemptible opinion of human nature that it does not believe that a man can tell the truth unless frightened by a belief in God.”
We must remind ourselves that we are all born without religion, we are all born atheists – a-theism, literally “without theism” or belief in a god. But thousands of different theisms are inculcated into the minds of children, only to result in a gigantic patchwork of competing “isms” around the world, spawning a host of conflicts today.
As Susan Jacoby in her 2013 biography of Ingersoll points out, “The critical point remains a source of both confusion and willful distortion in American discourse, in large measure because the word ‘atheist’ has a much harsher sound to American ears than the word ‘agnostic’. Indeed, the more equivocal, bland tone of the word ‘agnostic’ is no doubt the main reason for its invention in the late 19th century [by Thomas Henry Huxley], since atheism and atheist had long been considered extreme pejoratives.” And then, as now, the incorrect idea that an atheist or agnostic believes nothing is an all-too-common misunderstanding.
Ingersoll frequently pointed out that the labels “atheist” and “infidel” had generally been used as epithets to anyone who refused to accept biblical stories as scientifically plausible. A century earlier that had happened to Thomas Paine, who was called a “Judas, a mad dog, a louse”, and later, by none other than Pres.Theodore Roosevelt “a filthy little atheist”.
Ingersoll did a great deal to restore the reputation of Thomas Paine to American audiences. You will recall Paine’s indispensable rhetorical contributions to the American revolutionary cause in Common Sense (1776) – “these are the times that try men’s souls”. However, Thomas Paine’s reputation began to change with the publication fifteen years later, of The Rights of Man, a defense of the French Revolution and critique of hereditary privilege and all forms of monarchy. And then inThe Age of Reason (1795) Paine went far beyond that and attacked all religious beliefs at odds with science and rational thought. Paine declared that the sacred books of all religions were written by human beings, not by any deity, an astonishing idea that created many enemies for him in America and Europe. Paine, then living in France was imprisoned by the leaders of the French Revolution when he opposed the execution of King Louis XVI, and ultimately he died destitute and unmourned in New York.
Like his predecessor Thomas Paine, Robert Ingersoll was a champion of reason and secular government. He pointed out that the framers of the American Constitution established the first secular government that was ever founded in this world. They deliberately denounced theocracy, leaving out any acknowledgment of a God as the source of government power. And this was at a time when every government in Europe was still based on union between church and state. Our founding fathers, Ingersoll said, “had the genius to know that no church should be allowed to have a sword… They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping, or in the keeping of her God, the sacred rights of man. They intended that all should have the right to worship, or not to worship; that our laws should make no distinction on account of creed…”
Moreover, to 19th century freethinkers, like their Enlightenment predecessors, intellectual and material progress went hand-in-hand with the abandonment of superstition. In contrast, strong ties between government and religion amounted to state-endorsed superstition. Ingersoll wrote, “Who can overestimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to elevate, enlighten, and civilize mankind?”
Ingersoll and other freethinkers rejected the Judeo-Christian guilt trip, the idea that religion is the foundation of morality, and that there can be no morality without religion. They recognized that we can be “good without God”. Religions only serve to provide supernatural explanations for interactions between humans and nature.
He would surely be amazed to witness the outcry of religious fundamentalists of the 21st century who insist that the framers intended to establish a Christian nation. He could never have imagined an America in which a contender for a major party’s presidential nomination would declare on national TV that the very idea of absolute separation of church and state was enough “to make you throw up” (Republican Rick Santorum, Feb. 2012). What would Ingersoll think of the religious overtones, the incantations of 6 pious clergy at the inauguration in 2017 of a somewhat less than saintly figure! And what about those troublesome cabinet members – evolution deniers, proponents of God in the classroom, climate disruption deniers who promote prayer for rain?
I think Ingersoll would have enjoyed a good chuckle with outspoken atheist and lesbian Greta Christina. Her 2012 book – rather outrageous, over-the-top – is Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless. Here is her #68: (pp. 31-32)
i#68 “I’m angry that when people run for political office in the United States, it’s considered legitimate to grill them about their employment background, their positions on legislation, their positions on social issues, the taxes they’ve paid, even their sexual history… but it’s considered invasive and intolerant to ask if they believe in talking snakes, demonic possession, magic underwear, magic crackers that turn into the flesh of their god, an Earth that was created 6000 years ago, or a god who put himself on Earth in human form and then sacrificed himself to himself to atone for sins that other people committed and to save humanity from the punishment he himself was planning to dole out. If someone is going to make decisions about science funding, emerging medical technology, our educational system, and so on… I think it matters if they believe any of that shit, and I bloody well want to know about it.”
In a time when most people traveled very little, Ingersoll spoke to packed lecture halls across the country – and he spoke to supporters and critics alike. He was a master at reaching people who did not necessarily agree with him or who were downright hostile. He was interested in creating a bridge between freethought and those religions that were willing to make room for secular knowledge and humanism, in particular secular Judaism and liberal Protestants like 19th century Unitarians, just as Unitarians had responded to Enlightenment ideas in the 18th century.
But now, while these issues are still with us, new, more alarming and immediate concerns including survival itself confront us. It is interesting to speculate how a 21st century Robert Ingersoll might respond to contemporary public discourse. Would he be successful in reaching out across the cultural divide, the extreme polarization we experience on the “hot button” issues today – in an era where everyone is talking and it seems no one is listening?…
To my mind it is troubling to note that in recent years the UUA has drifted away somewhat from the humanism it was instrumental in championing a century ago. There were certainly some nonbelievers like Ingersoll who embraced Enlightenment ideas and the Darwinian revolution, but it fell to religious liberals, especially Unitarians, to develop a modernist world view – a non-theistic, naturalistic, scientific world view emphasizing reason.
But since the merger with Universalists in 1961 it seems to me the UUA has moved to embrace all theologies uncritically. According to a 2013 book by Michael Werner, titled Regaining Balance: Evolution of the UUA, emphasis on reason gradually has been supplanted by, in his words, “indiscriminate pluralism and radical tolerance”. He describes it as a bias toward relativism and anti-intellectualism – “who am I to judge?”, “it’s all relative”, “anythingism”, squishy spiritualism, post-modernism, and moral ambiguities – these often un-critical attempts to spread the tent so to speak, in an effort to grow the membership. Tom Flynn, editor of Free Inquiry, has referred to these retreats from rationalism and expressions of compromise as essentially deceitful, or, as he dubs it, “woo woo”.
But in fact that goal (increased UU membership) has not been achieved. At its peak in 1968 the UUA had more than 177,000 members in the U.S., but currently membership has declined to less than 153,000. At the same time, U.S. population grew by more than 50% over this last half-century, so the UUA has not only lost actual membership but market share: down from almost 1% to just less than half of 1% today. Perhaps trying to be “all things to all people” has become a goal higher than pursuit of truth or reason?? I would offer this as food for thought in a time when recent polls indicate that secularism is sweeping the country; the “nones”, those who subscribe to no faith, are the fastest growing “religious” group in the U.S., especially among younger people. According to Pew’s 2014 Religious Landscape Survey, 36% of younger millennials (b. 1990-1996) identify as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular.
Robert Green Ingersoll, the Great Infidel, remained a well-known, frequently cited historical figure into the 1920s, partly because many of his friends and enemies were still alive and because many of his writings were provocative and controversial. But in the years since he has dropped off our radar screen.
We might ask, Why has there been a resurgence of fundamentalism in the 20th and 21st centuries? Perhaps it was the fear and disillusionment that came with the failure of the Great War (WWI) – “the war to end all wars”, the rise of fascism, the great depression, WWII, the Cold War, continuing threats of terrorism and nuclear annihilation, and now the existential threats we face: climate disruption which is really the ultimate tragedy of the commons; the hard reality of a world overburdened with humanity bringing on the 6th (Anthropocene) Mass Extinction, and the inevitable chaos of widespread famine and migrations of environmental refugees. The 21st century wars for dwindling resources have already begun.
In his time Ingersoll didn’t have to worry about these things. In the late 19th century we were in the full throes of manifest destiny and the heady prospect of inevitable progress. Only a few back then (John Stuart Mill being the most prominent) recognized the inherent insanity of endless growth on a finite planet. Today, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, both major parties and corporate America incessantly lobby for and proclaim the necessity of continual growth. What could possibly go wrong?
How might the rationalist and enthusiastic progressive Ingersoll respond to the chilling progress traps of mindless growth in the 21st century, of the human enterprise run amok in a vastly overpopulated world? It is of course impossible to know, but I have little doubt that Ingersoll would have applied reason and critical thinking skills – rather than comfortable myths, lovely lies, and convenient superstitions to support an ideological and existential dead end. Homo sapiens, thus far, has proven himself to be clever, but alas, seldom wise.
The late Carl Sagan wrote something prescient about how we fall back on irrational habits in his book The Demon Haunted World:
“Religions are the nurseries of pseudo-science. I worry that, … pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place or purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us – then habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”
Conclusion
Were it not for the efforts of Ingersoll, Thomas Paine’s vital contribution to the cause of the American Revolution and his subsequent fight for freethought and the rights of man might have been forgotten. But unfortunately, Robert Green Ingersoll, despite his fame and notoriety in the 19th century, is ignored in standard American history texts. Alas, no champion arose in the 20th century to do for Ingersoll what Ingersoll did for Paine. In a country less reverential toward religious institutions Ingersoll might occupy the historical position of a Voltaire, to whom he was frequently compared by his contemporaries. In the current climate of hateful political rhetoric it would be refreshing to hear his tempered, rational voice once again.
Ingersoll left a priceless legacy not only to atheists and agnostics but to secularists who recognize that it is up to humans to solve earthly problems through our own reason. First, he championed the meaning and value of science as a system of inquiry whose tentative conclusions are always open to modification in the light of new evidence. Second, he made the connection between repressive religion and the injustices it sanctioned, especially its denial to women of access to education and control of their own bodies. Finally, he reminded us of the wisdom of the founding generation that had explicitly rejected theocracy as the basis for government.
We Unitarian-Universalists should consider it our special duty to work to restore the memory of this old American freethinker, this Atheist/Agnostic, this Infidel Robert Green Ingersoll.