An American lawyer and infidel writer and lecturer. He was born at Dresden, N. Y., August 11, 1833, the youngest of the five children of a Congregational minister of liberal views. The family removed to Illinois in 1845, and there Robert studied law, and was admitted to the bar, and entered politics as a Democrat. In 1857 he made his residence in Peoria, where he soon became recognized as an able lawyer, chiefly employed in railroad litigation. In 1860 he was nominated for Congress, but was defeated. In 1862 he went to the war as colonel of the Eleventh Illinois Cavalry, and was taken prisoner, but exchanged. He returned to citizenship a Republican in politics, and was appointed Attorney-General of Illinois in 1868. In 1876, at the Republican Presidential Convention at Cincinnati, he delivered a fervid and vigorous speech in favor of the candidacy of James G. Blaine, which won for him a national reputation, and from this time he was recognized as one of the foremost orators of the country. He soon after entered the lecture field, where the matter as well as the manner of his discourse excited public attention. He developed the views of a pronounced opponent to Christianity, and, adopting religious topics as his subjects attacked the Bible, the personal nature of the Deity, and the existence of a hell, with all the force of which he was capable, and with the advantage of splendid rhetorical powers. In matter his orations were much dependent upon Thomas Paine. Colonel Ingersoll was president of several railroad companies and counsel for large corporations. He died suddenly at Dobbs Ferry, N. Y., July 21, 1899. His published works include: “The Gods, and Other Lectures” (1876); “Some Mistakes of Moses” (1879); “Great Speeches” (1887); “Prose Poems” (1884). His complete works were published in New York, 1900, 12 vols. Consult the biographical sketch by Handford (Chicago, 1899).

Personal

  It is a dozen years since I first saw Ingersoll in a court room in Washington, and by his invitation spent an evening under his roof…. He was a man of generous instincts, who, if he did not quite come up to the Gospel rule to love all men, at least came half way; he loved his friends and hated his enemies. When he came to New York to live, our acquaintance was renewed; and I was a frequent visitor at his house, where I was made to feel at home…. There was no one whom he loved to talk about so much as Abraham Lincoln, whom he had known in his early manhood, when they were both at the bar in Illinois…. In all the years that I have known Ingersoll, I never saw him in a hurry. The crowd might rush by, but he never quickened his pace, but walked slowly as if in deep thought. When I met him in Broadway he was always ready to stop under an awning, or by a friendly door, and discuss the questions of the day. If all the wisdom that was exchanged between us had been preserved, possibly some might have been wiser, but alas, it has been blown away like the autumn leaves! The two gods that Americans worship are time and money. Ingersoll cared for neither. Money had no attractions for him except for the use he could make of it…. Though Robert Ingersoll was a captivating talker, he was far more than that; he was one of the greatest orators that our country ever produced. It was not by the fireside, but on the platform, facing thousands of men, that he showed all his power…. His intonations were varied, now soft and gentle, as if he were in conversation, with many a bit of pleasantry; then, straightening himself up to his full height, he gave such a burst that the thousands who heard him trembled at the thunder of his voice. Such rhetorical effects are like great symphonies, which ring through the arches of cathedrals, or rather like the sound of distant thunder, coming nearer and nearer till there is one last tremendous peal, that rolls majestically away. The tradition of such marvellous eloquence will live as long as this generation.

  Col. Robert G. Ingersoll was without doubt one of the greatest popular orators of the age. He never received the full credit due to his great success as an orator during his lifetime, as his vehement assaults on the Christian religion aroused so many and such powerful enmities. But without regarding his creed, judging him solely by his power as an orator, no nation can to-day produce his equal. There was poetry, wit, humor, sarcasm, and tenderest pathos in nearly every lecture he delivered, whether on religion or politics.

General

  Mr. Ingersoll is not, as some have estimated him, the most formidable enemy that Christianity has encountered since the time of Julian the Apostate. But he stands at the head of living infidels, “by merit raised to that bad eminence.” His mental organization has the peculiar defects which fit him for such a place. He is all imagination and no discretion. He rises sometimes into a region of wild poetry, where he can color everything to suit himself. His motto well expresses the character of his argumentation—“mountains are as unstable as clouds:” a fancy is as good as a fact, and a high-sounding period is rather better than a logical demonstration. His inordinate self-confidence makes him at once ferocious and fearless. He was a practical politician before he “took the stump” against Christianity, and at all times he has proved his capacity to “split the ears of the groundlings,” and make the unskillful laugh.

  To the orthodox, Mr. Ingersoll is the sum of all wickedness and depravity. They can see nothing good either in him or his purposes. His very name is a synonym of whatever is blasphemous and profane…. His style is vigorous, aggressive and powerful, abounding in epigrams, sparkling with wit, and not unfrequently bursting into sentences which, if they do not rise to the dignity of true eloquence, are at least full of pathos and power. If his speeches lack the eloquence and refinement that form so marked a feature of the oratory of Mr. Wendell Phillips, or the solid and substantial merit that belongs to all the utterances of Mr. Beecher and Robert Collyer, the deficiency, so far as the popular judgment is concerned, is perhaps more than compensated by peculiarities which distinguish him from all other orators of the age. His vivid imagination, his pungent wit, his terrible and withering sarcasm, his power of quick and telling repartee, his skill in turning even the most solemn and sacred subjects into ridicule, and, above all, his utter fearlessness, amounting at times even to recklessness of expression, are all characteristically his own. These qualities, aided by a fine manly presence and a countenance indicative of a general satisfaction with the part he has played in life, together with a vigorous and impressive delivery, make him what is very rare at this day—a great popular orator.

  Colonel Ingersoll certainly made no promise and entered into no pledge that he would respect Mr. Gladstone’s theories or be guided by his rules. He presented himself in his own person, with his known peculiarities of warfare, with his avowed disregard for the opinion of decorous Christian disputants. His raillery, his scorn, his ridicule, his humour, have never bowed in homage before Christian revelation, never quailed before the most solemn theme, never suffered bit or bridle to restrain them before any antagonist…. Colonel Ingersoll utters many noble sentiments in eloquent speech, but it is no disrespect to say that he did not first discover them. If I mistake not, every one of them comes down in a straight line of descent from that Magna Charta of human fraternity, the prayer which first taught that men were brothers and that forgiveness of offenses was a virtue.

  It may be said, and should be said, that Mr. Ingersoll’s life work has been to destroy degrading shams and superstitions. In this iconoclastic crusade he has kindled the fierce furies of bigots and won the implacable hatred of hypocrites, and he would long since have worn the jeweled crown of martyrdom, except for the enlightening influence of Truth…. I am tempted to turn to his published utterances and select gems of thought which everywhere abound, with which to embellish this imperfect tribute to his well-earned fame and to show the “mighty wrongs” he has assailed and the “petty perfidies” he has overcome…. To see Mr. Ingersoll on the rostrum when his aroused genius “courts the sunbeam’s fire,” when he wears his dagger in his mouth and the enemies of Liberty and Truth fall before him like shanties in the pathway of a cyclone, is to behold a revelation of power which bewilders the senses and in the presence of which exaggeration has no mission.

  He had a strong constitution and good digestion, and was without nerves except on the field of battle. His career as a soldier was very short; while his career as an anti-Christian lecturer was too long for the good of his own soul, and for the faith of the many half-educated people who listened to his speeches or read them in print, laughed at his jokes, and took his caricatures of Christian doctrines for solid arguments against them…. He had a tenth-rate intellect, much inferior to that of Tom Paine or of Voltaire, whom he affected to imitate. Ingersoll had some wit, a talent for turning pretty sentimental phrases, and for caricature. He had something of the caricaturist of the Nast and Keppler order, who by a stroke of the brush could change a smiling into a crying face, a pretty into a hideous countenance. That’s all. Nothing that he ever wrote or said will live a decade.

  For all his attacks on the faith of the people Colonel Ingersoll was a sort of a popular idol, and deserved to be. He had the full courage of his convictions and the faculty of indignation at what he believed to be wrong. It was a sight to see the delight with which a mighty audience of negroes in Cooper Institute listened to his eulogy on Frederick Douglass, peppered though it was with sarcasm on the Christian faith, in which most of them were believers. He had full command of the best treasures of oratory, whether passion, or wit, or imagination, or elocution, or gesture. A lecture of his was an intellectual treat for those who most opposed his views…. It is true that he declared himself an agnostic as to the existence of God. But he was no atheist. There might be a God, he said, only he did not find the sure evidence of a God or of a future life. He wished he might believe. What he actually disbelieved in was a God who damned people for sinning in conditions they could not help, who damned non-elect or unbaptized infants. To be sure, this damnable doctrine was once in the creeds and in our common Christian faith, but it was given up early in this century…. His appeals for freedom, for honesty, and his personal examples in favor of what is beautiful in domestic life have, I believe, of more permanent influence than his sometimes violent attacks on popular faith. Those who have heard him will remember longest his exquisite oratory, and will give him credit for the courage and the loyalty to truth which he possessed.

  For more than twenty years the name of Robert Ingersoll has been known to all his countrymen. On the day when, in the Republican Convention of 1876, he rose to urge the nomination of Mr. Blaine for the Presidency of the United States, his reputation ceased to be a merely local one, and in a short half-hour had become distinctly national…. Colonel Ingersoll delivered his attacks on Christianity before audiences made up in part, at least, of intelligent, serious-minded, influential men and women. The political partisan had won a hearing for the professional atheist. It is, indeed, as a professional atheist that Colonel Ingersoll is destined to be now remembered…. Colonel Ingersoll was in no respect a thinker. He had received a good professional training; he had read a reasonable amount of standard literature; and he possessed the oratorical temperament, with a liberal fund of wit and racy humour. But that was all. He had none of the scholar’s thoroughness and the scholar’s sobriety of thought. His controversial addresses when stripped of all their rhetoric, their pungent phraseology and their often rather unsavory jokes exhibit absolutely nothing that had not been advanced a hundred years before Colonel Ingersoll was born. His criticisms on the Bible were mainly taken from the writings of Thomas Paine; his “arguments” against the truth of revelation have been the common property of infidels for centuries. He added nothing whatsoever to the literature of the subject, nor to the strength of the agnostic position. All that can be styled his own is to be found in the bits of declamation, the flights of rhetoric, the neatness of expression and also in the gibes and jeers, the ludicrous similes, the irreverent stories and the pointed jests with which the old material was seasoned and made for the moment to appear original and startling.