by Susan Jacoby
A turning point in Ingersoll’s development was his discovery, in adolescence, of the classics of western literature and of the poetry and prose that sprang from the Enlightenment. Being raised “respectably,” Ingersoll said, meant that he was supposed to read “only such books as would start you in the narrow road for the New Jerusalem.”9 His acquaintance with Shakespeare began only in his teens, when he started traveling by himself and looking for work while his father was trying unsuccessfully to find an ecclesiastical home in Illinois. Ingersoll’s description of hearing Shakespeare read aloud for the first time is worth quoting in full, because it captures the thrill of discovery that is the essence of true learning and is so frequently smothered, or forgotten, in the course of a formal education that now takes place within institutions. Ingersoll was speaking in 1895, at the height of his fame as an orator, after a dinner in honor of Anton Seidl, conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
But one night I stopped at a little hotel in Illinois, many years ago, when we were not quite civilized, when the footsteps of the red man were still on the prairies. While I was waiting for supper an old man was reading from a book, and among others who were listening was myself. I was filled with wonder.
I had never heard anything like it. I was ashamed to ask him what he was reading; I supposed that an intelligent boy ought to know. So I waited, and when the little bell rang for supper I hung back and they went out. I picked up the book; it was Sam Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare. The next day I bought a copy for four dollars. My God! More than the national debt. You talk about the present straits of the Treasury! For days, for nights, for months, for years, I read those books, two volumes, and I commenced with the introduction. I haven’t read that introduction for nearly fifty years, certainly forty-five, but I remember it still. Other writers are like a garden diligently planted and watered, but Shakespeare a forest where the oaks and elms toss their branches to the storm, where the pine towers, where the vine bursts into blossoms at its foot. That book opened to me a new world, another nature. … That book has been a source of perpetual joy to me from that day to this; and whenever I read Shakespeare—if it ever happens that I fail to find some new beauty, some new presentation of some wonderful truth, or another word that bursts into blossom, I shall make up my mind that my mental faculties are failing, that it is not the fault of the book.10
What is striking about this description (apart from a lack of critical self-consciousness, which would prevent a speaker today from comparing a writer’s work to a mighty oak or a flowering vine) is its unabashed joy. The parallels with Lincoln, another self-educated devotee of both Shakespeare and Enlightenment reason, are equally striking. Ingersoll encountered religious writings in childhood, but Lincoln, born in 1809 to an illiterate father, was taught to read by his mother and had access in his early years to only the Bible and a rudimentary speller. Lincoln likely discovered Shakespeare through an edition of William Scott’s eighteenth-century anthology Lessons in Elocution, Or, A Selection of Pieces, in Prose and Verse, brought into the household by his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, when she married Abraham’s father in 1820. He did not acquire his own complete edition of Shakespeare until later in life, but Scott’s anthology contains fifteen dialogues and soliloquies from eight plays. Like Ingersoll, Lincoln related to Shakespeare as much through imagined sound as through the playwright’s characters and ideas. Only after he moved to Washington as a congressman in 1847 (for just one term) did Lincoln have the chance to see Shakespeare’s plays performed regularly, and he often said that he preferred the sound of Shakespeare in his own head to the lines as delivered by professional actors.
Although Ingersoll was twenty-four years younger than Lincoln, both men spent their childhoods in an America far removed from the proliferation of instruments of communication and entertainment that characterized the Gilded Age. When Lincoln and Ingersoll were children, there was little competition (unless you were devoutly religious and entranced by church services and clerical oratory) for the intellectual and emotional space occupied by the printed word. To grow up before routine use of the telegraph, before the rise of the mass-circulation newspaper, before photography, before railroads linked every part of the continent was the equivalent of growing up in the twentieth century before television and, later, before the personal computer. Lincoln lived (barely) into the new era of nineteenth-century mass communication; Ingersoll, however, was a master not only of oratory but of all the Gilded Age methods of publicizing the ideas he delivered in his lectures.
The spoken and written word were much closer to each other in the first than in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ingersoll’s and Lincoln’s favorite poet—the English-language poet most revered by late eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century freethinkers—was Robert Burns (1759–1796), whose lyrics were sung as often as they were read. Walt Whitman would later join Burns in Ingersoll’s personal pantheon of freethinking writers, but Burns was the poet who most influenced him in his youth. Between modern readers and Burns—to the extent that he is still read—stands a barrier created not only by his use of Scottish dialect but by the association of some of his best-known lyrics with songs so popular (Auld Lang Syne, My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose) for so many generations that the lyrics themselves now seem hackneyed. Ingersoll also appreciated Byron, Shelley, and Keats, who, like Burns, were embraced by other nineteenth-century freethinkers, but it is easy to see in retrospect why the son of the Scottish Enlightenment occupied a special place in both the hearts and brains of the religiously unorthodox. Burns was an erotic poet and a love poet, a celebrant of nature who appealed to both early nineteenth-century Romantics and late nineteenth-century advocates of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Last but not least, especially for freethinkers, Burns was a fiercely anti-clerical and anti-Calvinist thinker who accepted no distinction between satire and blasphemy. In “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” he offered a parody of Calvin’s theory of predestination and divine intercession that freethinkers in the next century, on both sides of the Atlantic, could (as Ingersoll sometimes did) recite word for word even if they could not reproduce the Scottish dialect.
I
O Thou that in the Heavens does dwell,
Wha, as it pleases best Thysel
Sends ane to Haaven and an’ to Hell
A’ for Thy glory,
And no for onie guid or ill
They’ve done before Thee!
II
I bless and praise Thy matchless might.
When thousands Thou has left in night,
That I am here before Thy sight
For gifts an’ grace
A burning and a shining light
To a’ this place.
IV
When from my mither’s womb I fell,
Thou might have plunged me into hell
To gnash my gooms, and weep, and wail
In Burning lakes,
Where damned devils roar and yell,
Chain’d to their stakes.
V
Yet I am here, a chosen sample,
To show Thy grace is great and ample,
I’m here a pillar o’ Thy temple,
Strong as a rock,
A guide, a buckler, and example
To a’ Thy flock!
Ingersoll’s reading of religious books in a minister’s household and his discovery of secular literature and infidel thought in adolescence were his formative intellectual influences. Outside of his reading, the most significant social and political influence on Ingersoll’s development was his coming of age at a time when the fatal flaw in the nation’s foundation, slavery, was becoming an unbridgeable chasm. Southern Illinois, where Ingersoll prepared for his career as a lawyer under the tutelage of older attorneys (as Lincoln had a generation earlier) was, in many respects, a crucible of the tensions and passions—involving race, religion, and social and economic mobility—that would soon explode into Civil War and would continue to ignite deba
te throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. When Ingersoll’s father took his ministry to Illinois in the early 1850s, he could hardly have picked an area of the country, outside the slave states of the Deep South, where an uncompromising abolitionist clergyman would be less welcome.
The slavery issue and the Civil War shaped the lifelong politics and passions of Ingersoll’s generation throughout the divided nation. Nowhere was this more true than in border areas just north and south of the Mason-Dixon line. Southern Illinois, like the southernmost counties of Ohio and Indiana, had many settlers who not only approved of slavery but had relatives in the South who owned slaves. The infamous Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required residents of non-slave states to assist slave owners attempting to recapture their fleeing “property” in the North, had considerable support in areas where members of the same family might, thanks to arbitrary state lines, live in different rooms of the house divided. In all of the counties where Ingersoll lived in his early twenties, gangs of “man-stealers,” as they were called by those who opposed slavery, were active in seeking out escaped slaves and returning them to their former owners for a handsome fee.
In 1854, the year Ingersoll and his brother, Ebon Clark, were admitted to the bar, the Kansas-Nebraska Act decreed that settlers of each territory could decide for themselves whether they wanted to legalize slavery. The area was as bitterly divided over slavery as neighboring Missouri and Kansas, where savage guerrilla warfare between northern and southern sympathizers would take the lives of thousands of civilians during the Civil War. In the town of Marion, where Ingersoll and his brother read law before their admission to the bar, young men joined together to ride over to Kansas and establish temporary homes so that they could cast their votes for a pro-slavery legislature. Ingersoll actually began his political life as a “Stephen Douglas Democrat”—someone opposed to slavery but willing to allow new states, like Kansas, to work out their own solutions through popular elections.* But as it became clear that the South not only would pursue its slaves if they tried to escape to the North but was bent on the extension of slavery into new American territory, Ingersoll came to agree with Lincoln that the nation could not continue to exist half-slave and half-free. During the 1860 election, when Ingersoll ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat for Congress—his first and only political candidacy—he sealed his fate by delivering a stinging attack on the Fugitive Slave Act at Galesburg, a station on the Underground Railroad. Ingersoll declared the law “the most infamous enactment that ever disgraced a statute book.” The act, he said, forced the entire American public to participate in a crime—that of treating their fellow men as property to be returned to owners.11
By the time Fort Sumter was attacked in 1861, Ingersoll no longer had a place in the Democratic Party. He joined the Union Army as a colonel (a title by which he was addressed for the rest of his life) and commander of the 111th Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Cavalry. Just a year later, Ingersoll was captured by the forces of General Nathan Bedford Forrest at Clifton, Tennessee, and paroled—allowed to return to the North—four days later. (At that point in the conflict, for reasons that belong in a military history of the Civil War, the release and repatriation of officers on both sides was a common practice.) In June of that year, Ingersoll resigned his commission and returned to his wife, Eva, whom he had married just after beginning his military service.
Ingersoll had not been an enthusiastic soldier, and it seems unlikely that he would ever have participated in a war that did not involve issues as important as slavery and the preservation of the Union. Shortly after the Battle of Shiloh, in a letter to his brother Ebon, he scoffed at exaggerated reports of military heroism. “I have seen flaming accounts of skirmishes in which I was engaged myself, and ninety-nine hundredths was a regular lie and the other hundredth stretched like damnation … if lying will get a name in the papers, there will be but few left out.”12 Years and even decades after Ingersoll’s death, when clerical enemies were still trying to sully his memory by claiming that he had been a coward on the battlefield, various publications sought out Confederate veterans to talk about Ingersoll’s four days in Confederate captivity. “Ingersoll made a good fight,” said one. “It was enough to make a Christian of him but it did not. His famous lectures years after show that while we did not convert him, he loved everybody during the rest of his life, and if he really believed there is no hell we convinced him that there was something mighty like it.”13
Shortly after the war, and long before he became a national figure, Ingersoll began to link slavery with retrograde religion in his public speeches. While giving full credit to devoutly religious abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, Ingersoll pointed out to his audiences that these men had been exceptions among their religious contemporaries in the North and that religious opponents of slavery had often been denounced by orthodox clerics as infidels. In a powerful speech titled “Address to the Colored People” and delivered in 1867 in Galesburg, Ingersoll declared that “the great argument of slaveholders in all countries has been that slavery is a divine institution, and thus stealing human beings has always been fortified with a, ‘Thus saith the Lord.’”14 Many defenders of slavery, Ingersoll noted, had rationalized the institution on grounds that it served to “Christianize” the Negro. He cited the Quaker abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier’s famous lines about a preacher who “Bade the slave-ship speed from coast to coast / Fanned by the wings of the Holy Ghost.”*
Although Ingersoll had already established a reputation as a brilliant courtroom orator while pursuing his political ambitions in the Illinois Republican Party, the Galesburg speech clearly demonstrated the connection between Ingersoll’s antireligious stance and his views on public policy. He refused to go along with the post-bellum rewriting of history, which maintained that northern religion was unified in its support for abolition and has survived to this day as the standard viewpoint in American elementary and secondary school history textbooks. “The word Liberty is not in any [religious] creed in the world,” Ingersoll told the Galesburg audience, which must have included many born into slavery. “Slavery is right according to the law of man, shouted the judge. It is right according to the law of God, shouted the priest. Thus sustained by what they were pleased to call the law of God and man, slaveholders never voluntarily freed the slaves, with the exception of the Quakers.”15
It is somewhat mystifying that both the content and date of the Galesburg speech have been largely overlooked by Ingersoll’s biographers, because it indicates that Ingersoll—even when he still had hope of holding public office—was unable or unwilling to take the politically prudent step of muting his antireligious views. Having been appointed state attorney general in 1867 by the Republican governor of Illinois, Ingersoll sought—and failed—to obtain the party’s nomination for the governorship in 1868. His reputation as a religious skeptic was already established in Illinois (though not yet nationally) because of remarks like those in his address at Galesburg. In 1882, Ingersoll would look back on his unsuccessful bid for the Illinois governorship in a series of interviews responding to the hostile commentaries of the Reverend Thomas DeWitt Talmage, a prominent Presbyterian minister second only to Henry Ward Beecher as a renowned clerical orator of that period. “Mr. Talmage says that Christianity must be true, because an infidel cannot be elected to office,” Ingersoll noted. “Now, suppose that enough infidels should happen to settle in one precinct to elect one of their own number to office; would that prove that Christianity was not true in that precinct?”16 Talmage had argued that the inability of any American who disavowed belief in God to be elected to high office proved the truth of Christianity, and he used Ingersoll’s defeat for the gubernatorial nomination as an example. To this Ingersoll replied:
I presume that Mr. Talmage really thinks that I was extremely foolish to avow my real opinions. … But I was an infidel, and admitted it. Surely, I should not be held in contempt by Christians for having made the admiss
ion. I was not a believer in the Bible, and I said so. I was not a Christian, and I said so. I was not willing to receive the support of any man under a false impression. … According to the ethics of Mr. Talmage I made a mistake, and this mistake is brought forward as another evidence of the inspiration of the Scriptures. If I had only been elected Governor of Illinois,—that is to say, if I had been a successful hypocrite, I might now be basking in the sunshine of this gentleman’s respect. … There are many men now in office who, had they pursued a nobler course, would be private citizens. Nominally, they are Christians; actually, they are nothing; and this is the combination that generally insures political success.17
It is worth noting that Ingersoll’s last observation remains true at the national level today, although nominal Jews have also entered the ranks of the politically acceptable. Only one congressman, Democratic Representative Pete Stark of California, is a self-acknowledged, unapologetic atheist, although there are now a fair number of legislators in the House and Senate who, practicing their own version of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” simply avoid discussing their religious beliefs in public. Ingersoll was not even willing to remain silent.
II
The Political Insider and the Religious Outsider
I believe that this realm of thought is not a democracy, where the majority rule; it is not a republic. It is a country with one inhabitant.
—RGI, “The Limits of Toleration”
The rejection of nominal Christianity as a cover for private agnosticism would shape Robert Ingersoll’s entire public life after his failure to obtain the Republican nomination for the Illinois governorship. From the perspective of twenty-first-century American politics, however, one of the most curious aspects of Ingersoll’s subsequent career was his success at building and maintaining national influence within the Republican Party even as his open disavowal of religion ruled him out both as a viable candidate and, later, as a suitable nominee for high appointive office. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, Ingersoll—not yet a national figure—began to deliver heretical lectures throughout the Middle West. This group of early speeches, which he would expand on throughout the nation at the height of his career in the 1880s and 1890s, included a tribute to German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1869), an homage to Thomas Paine (1870), an indictment of supernaturalism in all forms (1872), and an appreciation of heretics condemned by theocracies (1874). There could be little doubt about Ingersoll’s general stance on religion, including orthodox Christianity, when, in his 1872 lecture “The Gods,” he noted that man-created deities “have demanded the most abject and degrading obedience” and that to please such gods, “man must lay his very face in the dust.” Naturally, Ingersoll observed, the gods “have always been partial to the people who created them, and have generally shown their partiality by assisting those people to rob and destroy others, and to ravish their wives and daughters.”1