Robert Ingersoll never met Abraham Lincoln, though they were near-contemporaries who moved in overlapping worlds — both Illinois lawyers, both Republicans, both shaped by the frontier experience of self-reliance and self-education. Yet Ingersoll spoke and wrote about Lincoln with a reverence he accorded to almost no other figure, living or dead.
"Abraham Lincoln," Ingersoll said, "so far as I know, was the greatest man who ever wore the human form." This was not rhetorical excess; Ingersoll was not given to idle flattery. It was a considered judgment from a man who had measured himself against many of the great figures of the age.
What Ingersoll Saw in Lincoln
What Ingersoll admired in Lincoln was not primarily the political achievement — the preservation of the Union, the abolition of slavery — though he honored those immensely. It was Lincoln's mind: the quality of its formation, its independence, its courage.
Lincoln, like Ingersoll, had educated himself largely from books. Lincoln, like Ingersoll, had read Thomas Paine in his youth, and had been permanently marked by it. Lincoln, like Ingersoll, was constitutionally unable to accept propositions merely because they were traditional or convenient. Lincoln, like Ingersoll, had a frontier lawyer's contempt for elaborate theological constructions unsupported by evidence or reason.
Ingersoll believed — and modern scholars have largely confirmed — that Lincoln's religious views were far more heterodox than the pious mythology that grew up around him after his death. Lincoln never joined a church. He spoke of "the Almighty" and "Providence" in ways that might have described a deist or simply a pragmatic politician carefully navigating an intensely religious public. Ingersoll saw in Lincoln a kindred spirit: a man who might not have called himself an agnostic, but who arrived at his moral positions through reason and human feeling rather than through dogma.
The Vision of War
Ingersoll's most celebrated passage about Lincoln comes from his lecture "A Vision of War," delivered long after the conflict had ended. The passage describes a scene of carnage — the dead young men of the war — and then pivots to Lincoln:
"I have seen the tears run down the furrowed cheeks of the old, and I have heard the sobs of women, whose hearts were breaking as the darkness fell; and standing musing in the midst of such scenes, I have felt that there is nothing greater than to succor the sorrowing — to be as a star to those who have lost their way — to be as a lamp in the darkness — to be as dew to the parched and withering fields..."
The passage culminates in Ingersoll's famous tribute: "And the noblest Roman of them all — the great Republican President — the man who preserved this Union, and who freed the slaves — Abraham Lincoln."
It is one of the most moving passages in American oratory, and it reveals something important about Ingersoll: that his freethought did not impoverish his emotional life but enriched it. Without the consolations of orthodox religion, he felt the suffering of the world more acutely, not less, and honored human greatness more deeply.
Two Men of Principle
What Lincoln and Ingersoll shared most fundamentally was moral courage — the willingness to say what they believed and act on it at considerable personal cost. Lincoln paid the ultimate cost. Ingersoll paid in a different currency: the permanent foreclosure of his political career, the hostility of the powerful, the calumny of those who considered him dangerous.
Both men would, I think, have recognized and respected that in each other.
The frontier produces a certain kind of mind: direct, self-reliant, impatient with pretension, suspicious of authority for its own sake, deeply respectful of genuine achievement. Lincoln and Ingersoll were both products of that tradition — and both helped to define it for the generations that followed.