Robert G. Ingersoll

Robert Green Ingersoll was born on August 11, 1833, in Dresden, New York, and died on July 21, 1899. An American lawyer, writer, and orator, he became one of the best-known public voices of the Golden Age of Free Thought. His nickname, “the Great Agnostic,” came from his open campaign in defense of agnosticism, a position that made him admired by some and sharply disliked by others.

Ingersoll grew up in a devoutly Christian household, but not a narrow one. His father, John Ingersoll, was a Congregationalist preacher with abolitionist sympathies, liberal opinions, and a gift for logic and speech. Those views often put the elder Ingersoll in conflict with parishioners and church authorities, forcing the family to move often. According to an 1890 account in The Elmira Telegram, the unfair and bigoted treatment of his father, especially during a church trial when Robert was nine, helped turn him first against Calvinism and later against Christianity in its other forms.

Before the law made his name, Ingersoll taught school in Illinois, including a term in Metropolis in 1853 and, at some earlier time, in Mount Vernon. Later in 1853 his family settled in Marion, Illinois, where Robert and his brother Ebon Clarke Ingersoll were admitted to the bar in 1854. He read law, worked as a deputy clerk, and began practice with his brother under the name “E.C. and R.G. Ingersoll.” After time in Shawneetown and Raleigh, the brothers moved to Peoria, Illinois, where they settled in 1857.

As a lawyer, Ingersoll took part in several major cases. He was involved in the Star Route trials, a large political scandal in which his clients were acquitted. He also defended a New Jersey man charged with blasphemy. Though he did not win an acquittal, his strong defense was considered to have discredited blasphemy laws, and few other prosecutions followed. For a time he also represented James Reavis, the “Baron of Arizona,” and pronounced Reavis’s Peralta Land Grant claim valid.

During the American Civil War, Ingersoll raised the 11th Regiment Illinois Volunteer Cavalry of the Union Army and took command of it. The regiment fought in the Battle of Shiloh. Ingersoll was captured near Lexington, Tennessee, on December 18, 1862, and paroled. Because parole kept him from performing his duties under his officer’s commission, he resigned as commanding officer on June 30, 1863. After the war, he served as Illinois Attorney General and became a prominent Republican, though he never held elected office. His 1876 speech nominating James G. Blaine for president did not secure the nomination, which went to Rutherford B. Hayes, but it showed the force of his public speaking.

Ingersoll married Eva Amelia Parker on February 13, 1862, and they had two daughters; the elder, Eva Ingersoll-Brown, became known as a feminist and suffragist. Across law, politics, war, and public argument, Ingersoll’s life was shaped by a dislike of intolerance and a confidence in open debate. That is why his words still carry weight on a quotations site: they come from a man who tested ideas in courtrooms, campaigns, and crowded halls, and who spoke plainly about belief, doubt, and freedom of thought.