Origins: the son of a preacher
Robert Green Ingersoll was born on August 11, 1833, in Dresden, Yates County, New York, a small frontier town on the eastern shore of Seneca Lake. His father, John Ingersoll, was an itinerant Congregationalist minister who moved the family from pulpit to pulpit across New York, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, and Wisconsin. It was a peripatetic, often impoverished childhood.
His mother, Mary Livingston Ingersoll, died when Robert was two. He carried the loss all his life. His father's strict Calvinism — infant damnation, eternal punishment, divine wrath — produced not faith but questions. From an early age Robert could not accept what he was told he must believe.
“The minister of our church used to say that the road to hell was paved with the skulls of unbaptized infants. When I heard that, I did not think God was as good as my father.”
Largely self-educated, Ingersoll read voraciously: law books, history, poetry, Paine, Burns, Shakespeare. He taught himself the law and was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1854, at twenty-one.
The lawyer and the soldier
Ingersoll set up practice first in Shawneetown, then in Peoria, Illinois, which would be his home for years. He quickly became one of the most effective trial lawyers in the state — strong on cross-examination, persuasive in summation.
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Ingersoll raised and equipped the 11th Illinois Cavalry Regiment and was commissioned its Colonel. In December 1862, during Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry raid on Grant's supply lines, Ingersoll and his regiment were captured at the Battle of Lexington, Tennessee. He was paroled, and soon after resigned his commission.
The war hardened his convictions. He had seen enough suffering to be unimpressed by religious platitudes, and enough courage to take the dignity of the ordinary person seriously.
Illinois Attorney General
In 1867 Ingersoll was elected Attorney General of Illinois as a Republican. During his term he began to speak more openly about his heterodox religious views. He lost re-election in 1869, his freethought made him politically radioactive, and his refusal to hide it ended any electoral career. He never again sought public office.
But he had found his true vocation: the lecture platform. Beginning in 1869 with his celebrated oration on the great naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, and then in 1870 with his defense of Thomas Paine, he began a lecture career that would make him the most famous speaker in America.
The great orator
Before radio or film, public lectures were a primary form of entertainment and argument. Ingersoll was the country's best practitioner. He stood in front of audiences of thousands, in opera houses and theatres from New York to San Francisco, without notes, for two or three hours at a stretch.
His subjects ran across the whole of human experience: religion, science, politics, literature, love, death, nature, and the rights of the mind. He could be funny, moving, and razor-sharp inside a single sentence.
“He is the most brilliant speaker I ever heard, he could do more with words than any man I ever met.”
In 1872 Ingersoll delivered The Gods, his first and perhaps greatest freethought lecture, arguing that humanity must replace superstition with reason, and that honest acknowledgment of what we do not know is more moral than false certainty. The lecture was a sensation. Copies were printed by the millions. The name Ingersoll became synonymous with freethought in America.
Family and philosophy
In 1857 Ingersoll married Eva Amanda Parker. He insisted on a ceremony without the word "obey" and treated Eva as his intellectual equal — unusual at a time when wives were legally subordinate to their husbands. They had two daughters. The family was, by every contemporary account, close.
Ingersoll's view of family was inseparable from his philosophy. He thought happiness was the only true good, found in love, knowledge, work, and the ordinary pleasures of a life. His home became a gathering place for Twain, Whitman, Douglass, Edison, and others.
The Plumed Knight
In June 1876, at the Republican National Convention in Cincinnati, Ingersoll delivered the speech nominating James G. Blaine for President. The "Plumed Knight" speech, named for the metaphor Ingersoll used, made him the most famous orator in the country overnight, though Blaine did not win the nomination.
New York, fame, and the final years
In 1877 Ingersoll moved his family to Washington D.C.; in 1885 he moved again, to New York City, where he would spend the remainder of his life. His legal practice was enormously successful; his defense in the Star Route postal fraud cases of the 1880s was legendary.
He continued to lecture and write. In 1879 he published Some Mistakes of Moses; in 1881 The Great Infidels; in 1896 Why I Am an Agnostic. He supported women's suffrage, labour rights, civil liberties, and the separation of church and state, and argued against the death penalty — positions ahead of his time.
Death and legacy
Robert Green Ingersoll died on July 21, 1899, at his family home in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He was sixty-five. The cause was heart failure. Thousands filed past his body on Fifth Avenue. Newspapers that had attacked him for decades published tributes.
His complete works were published in twelve volumes between 1900 and 1902 as the Dresden Edition. He helped move American public life away from orthodox Calvinist severity toward a more humane and reason-based discourse, and he made freethought a public position that could be defended in plain English.
“Happiness is the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest.”