The Life of Robert Green Ingersoll

Origins: The Son of a Preacher Man

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 his family from pulpit to pulpit across the frontier states of New York, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, and Wisconsin. It was a peripatetic, often impoverished childhood.

His mother, Mary Livingston Ingersoll, died when Robert was barely two years old. He would carry that loss all his life, and it may have informed his exquisitely tender feelings about women and family. His father's strict Calvinist orthodoxy — with its doctrines of infant damnation, eternal punishment, and divine wrath — instilled not faith, but questions. From an early age, Robert found himself unable to accept what he was told he must believe.

“I never passed through the religious period. 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 — in an era when formal schooling was irregular at best — Ingersoll read voraciously whatever he could find: law books, history, poetry, the works of Thomas Paine, Robert Burns, and William Shakespeare. He taught himself the law by reading, and was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1854, at age twenty-one.

The Lawyer and the Soldier

Ingersoll established a law practice first in Shawneetown, Illinois, and then in Peoria, which would be his home for many years. He quickly earned a reputation as one of the most gifted trial lawyers in the state — brilliant at cross-examination, devastating in summation, and almost magnetically persuasive before a jury. His legal career would make him wealthy, and his reputation as an advocate would attract some of the most important cases in the country.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Ingersoll raised and equipped the 11th Illinois Cavalry Regiment at his own expense and was commissioned its Colonel. He served the Union cause with dedication. 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 not long after he resigned his commission and returned to the practice of law.

The war confirmed and deepened many of Ingersoll's convictions. He had seen enough of human suffering and death to be unimpressed by comfortable religious platitudes, and enough of human courage and sacrifice to believe deeply in the dignity of the ordinary human being.

Illinois Attorney General — and a Growing Reputation

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 his bid for re-election in 1869 — his freethought views made him politically radioactive in some quarters, and his refusal to hide them made his electoral career effectively impossible. 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 passionate defense of Thomas Paine, Ingersoll began a lecture career that would make him the most famous and most sought-after speaker in America.

The Great Orator

At a time before radio, film, or recorded sound, public lectures were a primary form of entertainment and intellectual engagement. Ingersoll was the supreme master of the form. He stood before audiences of thousands — in opera houses, theaters, and lecture halls from New York to San Francisco — without notes, speaking for two or three hours with a command of language and argument that left his audiences stunned.

His subjects ranged across all of human experience: religion, science, politics, literature, love, death, nature, and the rights of the human mind. He could be mordantly funny, then profoundly moving, then razor-sharp — sometimes within the same sentence. Reporters struggled to capture the experience: the text on the page, they acknowledged, was only a pale shadow of the spoken performance.

“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 an honest acknowledgment of what we do not know is more worthy and more moral than false certainty. The lecture was a sensation. Copies were printed by the millions and distributed across the country. The name "Ingersoll" became synonymous with freethought in America.

Family and Philosophy

In 1857 Ingersoll married Eva Amanda Parker, and their marriage was, by all accounts, one of the great love stories of the age. In an era when women were legally subordinate to their husbands, Ingersoll insisted on a ceremony without the word "obey," and treated Eva as his full intellectual equal and life partner. He called her "the finest woman I have ever known," and she was the center of his world. They had two daughters, Eva and Maud, and the family was legendarily close and warm.

Ingersoll's love of family was inseparable from his philosophy. He believed happiness was the only true good, and that it was found not in prayer or penance but in love, knowledge, work, and the simple pleasures of life. His home became a gathering place for the great minds of the age: Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Edison, and many others came to visit and to talk.

The Plumed Knight

In June 1876, at the Republican National Convention in Cincinnati, Ingersoll delivered his famous speech nominating James G. Blaine for President. The "Plumed Knight" speech — named for Ingersoll's soaring metaphor — is still regarded as one of the greatest pieces of political oratory in American history. Though Blaine did not win the nomination, Ingersoll's speech made him the most famous orator in the nation overnight.

It was a rare display of his political talents, but Ingersoll always subordinated politics to principle. He remained a loyal Republican throughout his life, but he never allowed party allegiance to silence his freethought convictions, and he never stopped challenging his own party on issues of civil rights, separation of church and state, and human dignity.

New York, Fame, and the Final Years

In 1877 Ingersoll moved his family to Washington D.C. to take advantage of the legal opportunities of the nation's capital. In 1885 he moved again, to New York City, where he would spend the remainder of his life. His legal practice was enormously successful; he charged some of the highest fees of any lawyer in the country, and his courtroom performances — especially his defense in the Star Route postal fraud cases of the 1880s — were legendary.

But he continued to lecture, to write, and to speak. In 1879 he published "Some Mistakes of Moses," a meticulous and often hilarious examination of the historical and moral problems of the Old Testament. In 1881 he delivered "The Great Infidels," celebrating history's freethinkers from Bruno to Voltaire. In 1896 he published the definitive version of "Why I Am an Agnostic."

He was a supporter of women's suffrage, a defender of labor rights, and a champion of civil liberties. He argued passionately against the death penalty. He believed in the absolute separation of church and state. He used his platform to defend the rights of minorities and immigrants. In almost every respect, his moral positions were generations ahead of his time.

Death and Legacy

Robert Green Ingersoll died on July 21, 1899, at his family's home in Dobbs Ferry, New York, at the age of 65. The cause was heart failure. His wife Eva survived him.

His body was brought to his home on Fifth Avenue in New York for a public viewing, and thousands of people filed past to pay their respects. His death was mourned across the nation. Newspapers that had spent decades attacking him as a dangerous infidel now published warm tributes to his genius and his humanity.

Between 1900 and 1902, his complete works were published posthumously in twelve volumes as the Dresden Edition — named after his birthplace. The edition remains the definitive collection of his lectures, essays, poems, legal arguments, political speeches, and correspondence.

His legacy is difficult to overstate. He helped shift American culture away from orthodox Calvinist severity toward a more humane, tolerant, and reason-based public discourse. He made freethought respectable — not just as a private position, but as a public one that could be defended with eloquence, passion, and moral seriousness. He demonstrated that one could reject superstition and still be a good father, a good husband, a good friend, and a good citizen.

“Happiness is the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest.”