The Great Agnostic (6 page)

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 admission. 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.

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

Ingersoll's views about religion were well known not only to his regional audiences but to national Republican leaders, who were acquainted with him through both his political speeches and his successful legal representation of many corporate clients, including railroads, with close ties to the party in the era of expanding industrial capitalism after the Civil War. Ingersoll had even stronger links to Republicans who had joined the party during the early years of its formation, in opposition to slavery and to southern secession. None of these associations, however, fully explain why Republican candidates who ostensibly respected
religion were eager for the endorsement of an antireligious orator.

First and foremost, Ingersoll's oratorical gifts, according to contemporary accounts, were incomparable. He was not a national figure until, in June 1876, he nominated James G. Blaine for the presidency at the Republican convention in Cincinnati. This became known as the “Plumed Knight” speech after Ingersoll declared, “Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine marched down the halls of the American Congress and thrust his shining lance full and fair against the brazen foreheads of the defamers of his country and the maligners of his honor. For the Republican party to desert this gallant leader now, is as though an army should desert their general on the field of battle.”
2
(As a member of Congress in the 1860s, Blaine had been associated with charges of corruption in the awarding of railroad contracts. No criminal wrongdoing was ever proved, but the lingering scent of scandal was enough to give Rutherford B. Hayes the nomination.) Ingersoll's speech, however, endowed the orator with a national prominence that he would never lose. The day after Ingersoll's nominating address, the
Chicago Times
described his oratory on behalf of Blaine as “the passionately dramatic scene of the day.” In the florid prose characteristic of contemporary press accounts of major public events, the newspaper declared
that Ingersoll “had half won his audience before he spoke a word” and delivered a speech more brilliant than any ever seen at an American political convention. “The matchless measure of the man [Ingersoll] can never be imagined from the report in type,” the decidedly non-objective article continued. “To realize the prodigious force, the inexpressible power, the irrestrainable fervor of the audience requires actual sight. Words can do but meagre justice to the wizard power of this extraordinary man. He swayed and moved and impelled and restrained and worked in all ways with the mass before him as if he possessed some key to the innermost mechanism that moves the human heart, and when he finished, his fine, frank face as calm as when he began, the overwrought thousands sank back in an exhaustion of unspeakable wonder and delight.”
3
You had to be there, I guess—especially since Ingersoll's oratory did not sway enough delegates to win Blaine the nomination.
*
But the newspaper was accurate in its description of the emerging consensus about Ingersoll as the most compelling orator of his era. As the authors of a definitive history of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American oratory would drily observe in 1943, “There was apparently an infectious quality in Ingersoll's eloquence that tinctured
even the reports of newspapermen who covered his speeches. … If even half the stories of his charm are true, it must have been very difficult for any audience that had fallen under the true spell of his geniality to disagree with him.”
4
Mark Twain, a much more shrewd and skeptical observer than any newspaper reporter of his era, fell under the Great Agnostic's spell in 1879 (the two had not yet met and become friends) when he first heard Ingersoll speak at a convention of veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic. “He was to respond to the toast of ‘The Volunteers,'” Twain would recall, “and his first sentence or two showed his quality. As his third sentence fell from his lips the house let go with a crash. … Presently, when Ingersoll came to the passage in which he said that these volunteers had shed their blood and perilled their lives in order that a mother might own her own child, the language was so fine, whatever it was, for I have forgotten, and the delivery was so superb that the vast multitude wrote as one man and stood on their feet, shouting, stamping, and filling all the place with such a waving of napkins that it was like a snow storm.”
5

A second, albeit also secondary, factor in Ingersoll's influence as a Republican mover-and-shaker was the presence of many more freethinkers—even if they did not publicly acknowledge their religious skepticism and remained nominal Christians—among Republicans than among
Democrats. The party of Lincoln was also the party most closely associated with respect for contemporary science, liberalizing trends within Protestantism, and the separation of church and state. Lincoln himself never joined a church, before or after becoming president, and he was so cagy about any public revelation of his religious views that nearly every American group of religious believers and religious skeptics has, at some point, tried to claim the martyred leader as its own.
*
In addition to his well-known admiration for such writers as Shakespeare, Byron, and Burns, all enshrined in the freethought pantheon, Lincoln was also influenced as a young man by Paine's
The Age of Reason
and the French Enlightenment philosopher Constantin Volney's
The Ruins.
†
A more persuasive argument on behalf of Lincoln as a religious skeptic than his reading were his repeated rejections, as president, of
demands that he call on divine authority as a justification for political decisions. The most explicit of these came in 1862, when Lincoln responded sardonically to a proposal from a mass assembly of Chicago Protestants that he issue a proclamation immediately emancipating slaves:

I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that I represent the Divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other is mistaken in that belief, and perhaps in some respects both. I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed that he would reveal it directly to me; for unless I am more deceived in myself than I often am, it is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence in this matter.
And if I can learn what it is, I will do it!
These are not, however, the days of miracles, and I suppose it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation. I must study the plain, physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible, and learn what appears to be wise and right.
6

It is unsurprising that Ingersoll would find a warmer reception in the party founded on the memory of a martyred president who had explicitly rejected divine revelation
as a policy justification than he would in the Democratic Party, which, by the end of the century, would choose as its standard-bearer the champion of revealed religion William Jennings Bryan. Ulysses S. Grant, who succeeded Andrew Johnson as president, was another Republican who not only refused to join a church but also suggested that it might be a good idea to eliminate property tax exemptions for religious institutions.