Royal Bob: The Life of Robert G. Ingersoll

This edition is published by Papamoa Press – www.pp-publishing.com

To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – papamoapress@gmail.com

Or on Facebook

Text originally published in 1952 under the same title.

© Papamoa Press 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

ROYAL BOB

THE LIFE OF ROBERT G. INGERSOLL

BY

C. H. Cramer

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

FOREWORD 4

ILLUSTRATIONS 6

CHAPTER I—We Shall Never See His Like Again 7

CHAPTER II—The Genesis of an Agnostic 11

CHAPTER III—Republican Convert 27

CHAPTER IV—The Vision of War 33

CHAPTER V—Peoria Days 42

CHAPTER VI—Centennial Election 53

CHAPTER VII—American Demosthenes 65

CHAPTER VIII—Science and Religion 85

CHAPTER IX—The Gospel of Humanity 100

CHAPTER X—Ingersoll vs. the Theologians 108

CHAPTER XI—Washington Days 126

CHAPTER XII—Campaign of 1880 135

CHAPTER XIII—Star Route 143

CHAPTER XIV—The Break with Blaine 151

CHAPTER XV—Lawyer and Entrepreneur 156

CHAPTER XVI—Politics Again 167

CHAPTER XVII—Death and Apotheosis of an Agnostic 181

ABBREVIATIONS USED IN FOOTNOTES 192

BIBLIOGRAPHY 193

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 204

FOREWORD

ARDENT FRIENDS compared him to Shakespeare and Lincoln. Bitter enemies wanted to transport him to the South Seas. Walt Whitman thought he was sent by heaven to save the race from itself. Worried opponents said the Devil had dispatched him to carry on the work of antichrist on earth.

The name of Robert Green Ingersoll was as well known in most American homes as the captains and the kings of his day. As a Republican he was the Big Voice of the party. As a lawyer he was frequently able to bend juries to his will. As an orator he amused, informed or disquieted auditors in almost every state in the Union. As a rationalist he preached salvation through science.

A half century after his death it is possible to look at Ingersoll in a perspective which has become more distinct with the passage of time. Much of the emotional turbidity which clouded the canvas in that day has been dissipated. It is clearly seen that many problems of the late nineteenth century—the bitter strife of party politics, the conflict of science and religion and the relationship of church and state—were not unique to his time.

Ingersoll has no counterparts, then or now. The savagely bitter Brann does not qualify. Perhaps the eloquent and melancholy Darrow comes closest, but he had little of Ingersoll’s gay optimism and joie de vivre. It was these qualities which brought from President James A. Garfield the sobriquet Royal Bob—for an Ingersoll who played his role in regal fashion.

I am grateful to good friends for wise counsel during the evolution of this biography. The encouragement given by Dean Carl F. Wittke of the Graduate School of Western Reserve University and of Paul M. Angle, Director of the Chicago Historical Society, was invaluable. The careful, critical commentary on the text by Professor Harvey Wish of Western Reserve University was most helpful. Harrison Platt and Robert J. Myer were kindly and understanding editors in bringing the manuscript down the road to publication. I am indebted to Mrs. Eva Ingersoll Wakefield for her suggestions, particularly on family history, and to Joseph Lewis for his generous permission to quote from the Dresden Edition of The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll. I wish to thank The Macmillan Company and Dodd, Mead & Company for permission to use material from their publications.

The staffs of several libraries contributed liberally of their time and effort. I am particularly obligated to the following individuals: Elizabeth G. McPherson of the Manuscripts Division at the Library of Congress, Paul North Rice of the Reference Division of the New York Public Library, Margaret A. Flint of the Illinois State Historical Library, Mrs. Alene Lowe White of the Library of the Western Reserve Historical Society, Margaret L. Peters of the Cleveland Public Library, and Xenophon P. Smith of the Peoria Public Library.

C. H. CRAMER

Cleveland

1952

ILLUSTRATIONS

Robert Green Ingersoll

Bob Ingersoll Lecturing on Hell

Every Man Rides His Own Hobby

Sly Bob: This Roasting Is As Good an Ad As I Want.

There Is Something in the Bible After All.

The Being That He Really Believes In

Bob Ingersoll’s Lecture

The Ingersoll Home in Peoria

North Side of Gramercy Park, Showing Robert Ingersoll’s House

The Plumed Knight

Garfield’s Tallyho—Selecting the Passengers

Where Next?

Put Not Your Trust in Presidents

Go! Proclaim It Everywhere!

Was It the Petticoat Plea That Softened the Hearts of the Jurors?

The Result of the Star Route Trials

Ingersoll in 1890

Ingersoll in 1897

Ingersoll in Flowers; His Family in White

CHAPTER I—We Shall Never See His Like Again

Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine marched down the halls of the American Congress and threw his shining lance full and fair against the brazen foreheads of the defamers of his country and the maligners of his honor.—Ingersoll’s Speech Nominating Blaine, 1876.

IT IS NOT OFTEN that an orator achieves national renown overnight. William Jennings Bryan, a Democrat and religionist, did it with a crown of thorns and a cross of gold at his party’s national convention in 1896. Two decades earlier Robert Green Ingersoll, a Republican and skeptic, turned the trick with a plumed knight and his shining lance.

As the years go by Ingersoll is remembered as the great agnostic who preached the gospel of science. Few recall that it was Ingersoll the political orator, and not Ingersoll the religious skeptic, whom the country first applauded. It was in the centennial year that he won, quite suddenly and dramatically, a national reputation and his initial national audience. They were achieved through a combination of oratorical skill and political good fortune. The stroke of luck derived from the invitation to make the presidential nominating speech on behalf of James G. Blaine at the Republican convention in Cincinnati. The skill was Ingersoll’s as his forensic thunder rolled over the convention hall and across the entire nation.

Prior to this oratorical tour de force Ingersoll had a local reputation which was largely confined to two states—his native Illinois and Maine. Many of the delegates to the Republican convention at the Queen City in 1876 were surprised when it was announced that an Ingersoll would place Blaine in nomination. If they had heard of the family at all the chances were they recalled Ebon Clark Ingersoll, the older brother of Robert, who had been a congressman and lawyer in Washington for more than a decade. In later years there was some speculation as to whether Blaine had even met the Illinois orator before the convention assembled. Actually they had been friends for several years and the congressman from Maine had firsthand knowledge of Ingersoll’s virtuosity as a speaker. In 1868 Ingersoll had stumped Maine for the Republicans. He had made an indelible impression on Mr. Blaine, on the people of the Pine Tree State, and on a reporter from Portland who wrote:

To an Eastern audience the manners of the Western Boanerges are startling. Mr. Ingersoll does not stand at all upon conventionalities. He takes off his cravat, rolls up his sleeves, and brings the more fastidious of his hearers to fear that he will presently take off his coat. A fine physical organization, a powerful voice, ready command of language, intense earnestness, and...unusual facility in the use of sarcasm enable him to put more life into a speech than perhaps any other man in the country....There is a breath of prairies in his statements....Take him all in all, we shall probably never see his like again.{1}

Eight years later, when Ingersoll finished his five-minute nominating speech at Cincinnati, delegates from every state were also ready to believe they would never see his like again. He held their rapt attention as he played on the patriotic significance of the nation’s centennial. As the tremendous periods fell in their measured flow from the Illinoisan’s smiling lips an enthusiastic reporter, obviously in something of a trance, noted that the overwrought thousands sank back in an exhaustion of unspeakable wonder and delight. Their languor was of short duration. Ingersoll brought his auditors out of their chairs with a smashing peroration:

Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine marched down the halls of the American Congress and threw 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 upon the field of battle.{2}

Delivered with the superb sense of time and rhythm which was to make him famous, those who heard the speech said it could have been set to music. The Cincinnati Enquirer achieved the ultimate in adulation; life and a sound currency might be transitory but Ingersoll’s oration was eternal:

Men may come and go; flowers may wither, and conventions may shrivel and pass into history....Blaine may be forgotten and the world may grow stale, but the eloquence of that smooth-faced individual from Peoria will live forever. Let that speech of Ingersoll’s be graven in letters of gold (standard value) and then placed inside the rotunda of the national capitol.{3}

Although astute political maneuvers kept the plumed knight from receiving the accolade of the convention in 1876, Ingersoll’s burst of eloquence has been known as the greatest nominating speech heard by an American political assembly. It gave Blaine a sobriquet that is always associated with his name (in spite of the fact that he did not like it—he was afraid some might read white feather for plume). Ingersoll’s political contemporaries, who had heard all the nominating oratory of their era, thought the speech was wonderful. A half century later commentators were not so sure. Matthew Josephson labeled the effort a stupendous galimatias—which became a children’s classic of unexampled bombast and rodomontade. Harry Elmer Barnes dismissed it as magnificent tommyrot.{4}

The argument cannot be resolved. Judgment depends on the major premise, i.e., whether one believes convention oratory should be aimed at the minds or at the hearts of the audience. Professor Harry Thurston Peck, the eminent Columbia University litterateur and critic who was a contemporary of Ingersoll’s, did not think oratory at political conventions should be directed toward the intellect at all. It was essentially rhetorical—an appeal to the emotions, to sentiment, to pride, to loyalty, to prejudice; its effectiveness was determined by its adaptation to the circumstances in which it was delivered. According to Professor Peck—and his opinion was shared by those who heard the speech—Ingersoll was perfect for the occasion.{5}

Although the oration did not put Blaine into the Presidency, it gave Ingersoll a national reputation and guaranteed him a large and dignified audience for his subsequent attack on revealed religion. The Republican delegates were still talking about the speech as they went home to every section of the country. Republican papers were eulogistic—some of them journals which in previous years had referred to Ingersoll as a poor, miserable, whisky-soaked, tobacco-bedaubed, illiterate, vulgar, blasphemous, red-faced atheist. Would his Christian Republican friends, who admired Ingersoll the Stalwart in campaign years, resort to billingsgate again when Ingersoll the Agnostic took the platform after the political canvass was over? Most of them found it impolitic to do so with the result that Ingersoll enjoyed a much better press after 1876. Solid Republicans who applauded his political speeches found it expedient to put in a token appearance when he appeared during off-election years to discuss science and religion on his regular cross-country tours. This gave Ingersoll’s audiences an aura of respectability normally denied to declaiming skeptics. It was a great boon to attendance. When he discussed religion in the East during 1878 the Baltimore American reported Bravos! for Ingersoll by steady-going men who were in business downtown. On the West Coast the crowds were swayed by his eloquence while society captivated by his intellectuality and social activities opened wide its doors and bade him a hearty welcome as a guest. In the Midwest the Ross County Register reported on the cultured audience which attended a lecture at Chillicothe, Ohio. There was an entire absence, the paper observed, of the peanut-eating ignoramuses or the giggling fools who think their own chatter of more importance than anything that the lecturer might say.{6}

For more than two decades after the plumed knight speech Ingersoll was the premier orator of the nation. He continued to serve the Republican party in campaign years, but the bulk of his time on the platform was devoted to the discussion of science and religion. Nevertheless it was Ingersoll the politician, and not Ingersoll the militant agnostic, who first caught the national eye. This situation made all the difference in the world. An orator who in campaign years was introduced in glowing terms by solid Republicans like Vice-President William A. Wheeler and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher deserved a hearing—even when he strayed from the hustings and began to talk on subjects other than politics. Professor Peck had this circumstance in mind when he observed shrewdly:

Those who had eagerly drunk in his eloquence as a political advocate could not refuse to take him seriously as a controversialist; those who followed him as a guide in matters of State felt bound to give him at least a hearing on the other topics that he chose to speak upon. Hence it came about that instead of declaiming to the sort of audiences that usually gather to applaud the wonted peripatetic infidel—a crowd of illiterate or half-educated men, of long-haired agitators and obscene fanatics—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 agnostic.{7}

CHAPTER II—The Genesis of an Agnostic

Call me infidel, call me atheist, call me what you will, I intend so to treat my children, that they can come to my grave and truthfully say: He who sleeps here never gave us a moment of pain. From his lips, now dust, never came to us an unkind word.—Ingersoll, Address on The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child.

THE CAREER of Robert Green Ingersoll presents a series of paradoxes. Here was the conservative politician who was dubbed Royal Bob by James A. Garfield. Here was the freethinker whose name, according to his adversaries, should have been Robert Godless Injuresoul. Here was the principal orator of his day who violated many of the rules worshiped by contemporary spellbinders. Here was the son of a Presbyterian divine who was the most prominent skeptic of his generation. Here was the Civil War Colonel who hated killing so much that he became an antivivisectionist. Here was the agnostic whose moral code was a model for Christians—his integrity unimpeachable, his family life idyllic, his philanthropy monumental. At first glance these contradictions seem puzzling and inscrutable. The evolution of the great rationalist brings them into focus.

The family surname was of Scandinavian and French origin. There was a twelfth-century Viking called Ingebar who invaded England with his Danish colleagues and settled in the vicinity of Middlesex. From this marauding Dane a number of English surnames have been derived: Inglis, Ingram, Inge (including the Gloomy Dean), Ingersoll. The last appears to be a variant of the original combination of Inge and the old French word sale meaning house.{8}

During the seventeenth century the Ingersolls, who were commoners and Puritans, found life unpleasant in England. Some of them emigrated. The first to come to America, the brothers Richard and John Ingersoll, arrived in Massachusetts in 1629 and became the ancestors of the American families which bear their name. The Ingersolls who made the dollar watch famous descended from John; the family of Robert Green Ingersoll traces its ancestry from Richard. The latter, according to the town records at Salem, was to receive a peny a tyme for the operation of a ferry. Six generations later his descendants were still living in New England where blacksmith Ebenezer Ingersoll was fighting on the colonial side at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Ebenezer sired eleven children, one of whom was John Ingersoll, the father of the son who was to be called the Great Agnostic.

The Reverend John Ingersoll, who was also known as Priest Ingersoll, was a peripatetic minister and scholar who was proficient in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. He studied for the ministry at Middlebury College, where he received a degree in the rudiments of ignorance, as his skeptical son later classified the sectarian education of that day. He was ordained in the Congregational Church but in his later ministry labored from time to time in the vineyards of the’ Presbyterians. In 1821 he married Mary Livingston, a collateral descendant of the Chancellor Robert R. Livingston who administered the oath of office to President George Washington and later participated in the purchase of Louisiana. She was a very tall woman (five feet eleven inches) with a mind of her own; shortly before her death she had the courage to write and circulate a petition demanding the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. The marriage was blessed with five children—three sons and two daughters. The youngest, born on August 11, 1833, at Dresden on Lake Seneca in New York, was named Robert Green. Two and a half years later Mary Livingston Ingersoll was dead, forspent at thirty-five. Her youngest child could not have remembered her well, but in later years he referred to her sentimentally: My mother died when I was but a child and from that day—and the darkest day of my life—her memory has been within my heart a sacred thing, and I have felt, through all these years, her kisses upon my lips. Later there was to be a stepmother, when widower John Ingersoll married Frances Willard, a schoolteacher, in 1852. The union was destined to be short-lived. The second Mrs. Ingersoll died less than a year after the marriage.{9}

Robert Green Ingersoll, who was to be called the Pagan Prophet, was raised in an atmosphere which was heavily theological. He was the son of one clergyman and received his middle name from another, both of them divines with strong antislavery views. The young boy rejected the religious tenets but clung tenaciously to their abolitionist principles, extending them to include intellectual bondage as well as chattel slavery. Ingersoll was to say later that he never saw the Reverend Beriah Green. All I know, he wrote, is that he lived, was a good abolitionist—gave up nearly all his superstitions in his old age, and that he is now dead. Peace to his ashes.{10}

Priest Ingersoll was one of the exhorting evangelists of his day, identified by a Presbyterian pair of eyes set in Calvinist sockets. It was fortunate that he had the frame of an athlete. Physical stamina was an essential prerequisite for the exhausting morning and afternoon sermons. The preaching lasted throughout the Sabbath with only a short intermission for lunch. Even so, according to local report Ingersoll’s congregation was so frightened by the vivid analysis of torment in the hereafter that they bolted their victuals at the midday intermission and ran back to the church for the afternoon exhortation. In the realm of mundane matters he liked to portray the slaveholding South as an earthly Gehenna, a figure of speech which displeased conservative parishioners who frowned on anything resembling an abolitionist.{11}

For a brief period in the 1830s the elder Ingersoll preached at the Broadway Tabernacle in New York City. It was directed by Charles Grandison Finney, an advocate of evangelical New School Calvinism, who later became President of Oberlin College. Finney had enjoyed considerable success in evangelistic labors throughout the Eastern states, but he had his critics. An Englishman reported that sermonizing like Finney’s would certainly not be accepted in the British Isles and in my opinion is not adapted to any place. There were many who felt the same way about the Reverend Mr. Ingersoll, whose forensic manners were patterned on Finney’s. Moves were frequent; after holding several pastorates in New York, Ingersoll took his family to a number of towns in Ohio’s Western Reserve (Oberlin, Ashtabula, North Madison, Rome) and in Illinois (Greenville and Marion). He also preached in the adjoining states of Kentucky, Indiana and Michigan and for a brief period in 1849 made an unsuccessful attempt to operate a grocery store in Wisconsin. Father intends to see the whole world before many years, wrote the youngest son, who was weary of the persistent roving.{12}

Two of the Reverend Mr. Ingersoll’s sons were iconoclastic in their religious views. Ebon Clark, later to represent Illinois in the Congress of the United States, shared Robert’s opinions. Brother John, who was destined to spend his life as a doctor at Prospect, Wisconsin, was orthodox. In later years Pagan Bob was frequently attacked with the moral charge that he had forsaken the faith of his fathers. Ingersoll did not agree, however, with the popular saying that the old-time religion, which was good enough for father, was necessarily the proper one for him. He was not sure that the orthodox would believe in the maxim in all circumstances. He used to tell a story about the cannibal who was on the point of making a meal of a remonstrating Christian missionary. The cannibal employed the argument, which struck the missionary as illogical and stupid, that the religion of his man-eating parents was good enough for him; the last time he had seen his old mother she was propped up against a tree eating cold missionary. On the other hand some liberal clergymen of Ingersoll’s day, who looked with disfavor on the Calvinist restraint under which many children were reared, had an explanation which was based on psychological rather than moral grounds. They said the agnosticism of the Ingersoll brothers was a natural reaction against stern parental discipline.

Robert Ingersoll denied that his father had anything to do with it. I cannot remember, he said, when I believed the Bible doctrine of eternal punishment. I have a dim recollection of hating Jehovah when I was exceedingly small. There is ample evidence, however, to indicate that the youngster did react against parental constraint. He achieved a national reputation at least partly as a result of the revolt against the Presbyterian theology of his father. He developed such a disdain for Calvinist discipline that in the nurture of his own children he completely eschewed the exercise of authority.{13}

George Ade, the Indiana humorist who was born a generation after Ingersoll, was reared under the same kind of spiritual regimen from pietists whom Ade identified as preachers, hard moralists and Sunday-school tyrants. As a youth, Ade would sneak Ingersoll’s lectures, which were printed in pamphlet form, out to the haymow. They gave him the goose pimples. He confessed a terrified admiration for the agnostic who was sassing the people who kept us locked up for so many pleasant Sabbaths. For his part, Ingersoll could never understand how the same people who were always talking about happiness in the hereafter could banish joy from the Sabbath day in the here and now. He wrote:

In the olden time, they thought some days were too good for a child to enjoy himself. When I was a boy Sunday was considered altogether too holy to be happy in....Nobody said a pleasant word; nobody laughed; nobody smiled; the child that looked the sickest was regarded as the most pious....Dyspepsia was in the very air you breathed....Then we went to church. The minister was in a pulpit about twenty feet high, with a little sounding board above him, and he commenced at firstly and went on and on and on to about twenty-thirdly. Then he made a few remarks by way of application; and then took a general view of the subject, and in about two hours reached the last chapter in Revelation....After the sermon we had an intermission. Then came the catechism with the chief end of man....The minister asked us if we knew that we all deserved to go to hell, and we all answered Yes. Then we were asked if we should be willing to go to hell if it was God’s will, and every little liar shouted Yes. Then the same sermon was preached once more, commencing at the other end and going back. After that, we started for home, sad and solemn—overpowered with the wisdom displayed in the scheme of the atonement. When we got home, if we had been good boys, and the weather was warm, sometimes they would take us out to the graveyard to cheer us up a little. It did cheer me. When I looked at the sunken tombs and the leaning stones, and read the half-effaced inscriptions through the moss of silence and forgetfulness, it was a great comfort. The reflection came to my mind that the observance of the Sabbath could not last always.

The same theme is repeated in a tribute to Henry Ward Beecher, delivered on the occasion of the death of the great minister. Although they differed on matters theological the two men had always respected each other, and their relations had been reasonably cordial. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Ingersoll was thinking as much about his own as of Beecher’s early days when he said:

Henry Ward Beecher was born in a Puritan penitentiary of which his father was one of the wardens—a prison with very narrow and closely-grated windows. Under its walls were the rayless, hopeless and measureless dungeons of the damned, and on its roof fell the shadow of God’s eternal frown. In this prison the creed and catechism were primers for children, and from a pure sense of duty their loving hearts were stained and scarred with the religion of John Calvin.{14}

On a well-remembered occasion Robert was repeatedly whipped in punishment for a transgression which he did not commit. When the youngster denied his guilt the father assumed that he was lying. To save his son from Eternal Torment the elder Ingersoll laid on with a will. At first Robert cried from the pain. As the whipping progressed he became stubborn and made up his mind that he would not give his parent the satisfaction of hearing a single groan. During the next rest period the son was again asked if he would admit his guilt, and made the reply: Yes, I’ll admit anything you please, but it isn’t so.... The lashing was resumed. Subsequently another boy confessed that he was the culprit. The father was penitent and ashamed. Robert was not.

My father felt very badly about it, and tried to speak of the matter with me. But I would not hear anything about it I never could bear to—and never did. And though I loved my father dearly, and never consciously did a thing in the world to hurt his feelings...I do not think I ever fully forgave him for that whipping or that I ever loved him quite as well as I might have loved him.{15}

This experience was reflected many years later in Ingersoll’s injunction to parents in his well-known lecture on The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child. He excoriated the government of lash, asserted that a tyrant father would have liars for children, and thanked Mother Nature that she had put ingenuity enough in the brain of a child, when attacked by a brutal parent, to throw up a little breastwork in the shape of a lie. He exhorted parents to be as honest with their children as they had been themselves:

When one of your children tells a lie,...tell him that you have told hundreds of them yourself. Tell him it is not the best way; that you have tried it. Tell him as the man did in Maine when his boy left home: John, honesty is the best policy; I have tried both.{16}

To Ingersoll the love of home and family was the height of all philosophy and beyond all religions. He stated his creed boldly:

I believe in the fireside. I believe in the democracy of home. I believe in the republicanism of the family. I believe in liberty, equality and love....

Call me infidel, call me atheist, call me what you will, I intend so to treat my children, that they can come to my grave and truthfully say: "He who sleeps here never gave us a moment of pain. From his lips, now dust, never came to us an unkind word.

He practiced this philosophy so happily that Clark E. Carr, the prominent Republican who was an old friend, summarized the common observation of everyone who knew the family: Whoever crossed the threshold of the home of Robert G. Ingersoll entered paradise. It was understandable, although ideologically quite startling,