The Great Agnostic (5 page)

After the opening sermon “came the catechism with the chief end of man. We went through with that. The minister asked us if we knew that we all deserved to go to hell if it was God's will, and every little liar shouted ‘Yes.'” When the service, which lasted nearly all morning, was finally over, the Ingersoll children were allowed to go home, and “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.” Ingersoll cited a well-known Protestant hymn that looks forward to an afterlife
where congregations ne'er break up / And Sabbaths never end.
He concluded, “These lines, I think, prejudiced me a little even against heaven.” Ingersoll's audiences would laugh uproariously at his description of playing in the graveyard as a Sunday treat.

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.”
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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.
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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 debate 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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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