Ing: Ingersoll

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography.


INGERSOLL, Jared, 1749-1822, lawyer, argued legal case against slavery (Appletons, 1888, Vol. III; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 468; Locke, 1901, p. 127)

INGERSOLL, JARED (October 27, 1749-October 31, 1822), lawyer, was born at New Haven, Connecticut. His parents were Jared Ingersoll [q. v.], Loyalist, and Hannah (Whiting) Ingersoll. He graduated from Yale College in 1766, and upon his father's removal to Philadelphia to organize a vice-admiralty court, he was left in charge of the elder Ingersoll's affairs. Later he removed to Philadelphia, where he studied law. His father, in the midst of the controversies preceding the Revolution, advised him to go to England for the further study of law, and on July 16, 1773, he was admitted to the Middle Temple. During these years he abandoned the Loyalist views of his father. He went to the Continent in 1776, and two years later he secured passage from Paris to America. Soon after his return to Philadelphia, on December 6, 1781, he married Elizabeth, daughter of Col. Charles Pettit. He had been admitted to the bar in Philadelphia in 1773. After his return to America, a friend of the family, Joseph Reed, president of the newly created supreme executive council of Pennsylvania, invited him to look after the interest of Reed's clients at Philadelphia. With this auspicious beginning as a member of the Philadelphia bar, he soon became one of the most distinguished lawyers of the city in an age when Philadelphia boasted the finest legal talent of the country. He was attorney for Stephen Girard, merchant, and Senator William Blount, against whom impeachment proceedings were brought in 1797. He was admitted in 1791 to the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States During the next year he was counsel for Georgia in the case of Chisholm vs. Georgia (2 Dallas, 419), the first of a number of cases argued by him involving various phases of federal relations. In opposition to Alexander Hamilton, in 1796 he was an attorney in the first case involving the question of the constitutionality of an act of Congress (Hylton vs. United States, 3 Dallas, 171). He was also counsel in cases connected with foreign relations as affected by constitutional law and the jurisdiction of the courts, notably Mcllvaine vs. Coxe's Lessee (2 Cranch, 280, and 4 Cranch, 209).

Meanwhile Ingersoll had held many public offices. In 1780 he was elected a member of the Continental Congress and by 1785 he was taking an active part in the agitation for revising or supplanting the Articles of Confederation. He was a delegate to the Federal Convention of 1787, but took little part in its deliberations. William Pierce said of him: "Ingersoll speaks well, and comprehends his subject fully. There is a modesty in his character that keep s him back" (Max Farrand, The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 1911, III, 91). In local politics he was a member of the Philadelphia Common Council in 1789 and from 1798 to 1801 he was city solicitor. From 1790 to 1799 and again from 1811 to 1817 he was attorney general of Pennsylvania; for· a short time (1800-01) he was United States di strict attorney for Pennsylvania; and in 1811 he was nominated by Pennsylvania Federalists for the vice-presidency. From March 1821 until his death in 1822 he was presiding judge of the di strict court for the city and county of Philadelphia. In politics he was at first inclined toward democratic views but the events of 1801 seem to have been considered by him "the great subversion," and thereafter in so far as lie took part in politics it was as a Federalist. Bis main interest, however, was always the law. Of his three surviving children, one was Charles Jared Ingersoll [q.v.]. Another son, Joseph Reed Ingersoll, well known at the Philadelphia bar, was briefly minister to England in Fillmore's administration.

[For the early life of Jared Ingersoll, see the life of his father, L. H. Gipson, Jared Ingersoll: A Study of American Loyalism in Relation to British Colonial Government (1920). There are good accounts of the important constitutional cases with which he was connected in Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in U. S. History (1922), vol. I. See also: W. M. Meigs, The Life of Chas. Jared Ingersoll (1897);

[Horace Binney], Leaders of the Old Bar of Philadelphia (1859); Vital Records of New Haven,1649-1850, pt. I (1917), p. 295; F. B. Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Grads of Yale College, vol. III (1903); L. D. Avery, A Genealogy of the Ingersoll Family in America (1926); J. T. Scharf and T. Westcott, History of Philadelphia (1884), vol. II.]

W. B.


INGERSOLL, Robert Green (August 11, 1833-July 21, 1899), lawyer and lecturer,

INGERSOLL, ROBERT GREEN (August 11, 1833-July 21, 1899), lawyer and lecturer, was best known to his contemporaries as "the great agnostic." He was descended from Richard Ingersoll, who settled in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1629. His father, John Ingersoll, born in Vermont and a graduate of Middlebury College, was a clergyman who served in turn many Congregational and Presbyterian churches; in the manse of one of these, at Dresden, New York, Robert Green Ingersoll was born. His mother, Mary, daughter of Judge Robert Livingston, was no more than an ideal of sentiment to Robert, since she died in his infancy. John Ingersoll, orthodox in his belief, was unable to steer his son into the channels of mental regularity. While the latter was yet a boy the family moved to Ohio, to Wisconsin, and then to Illinois, where at the age of twenty-one he was admitted to the bar at Shawneetown. He spoke often in terms of respect for his father and veneration for his mother, but he rarely related the details of a childhood that seems to have been harsh and narrow. He was essentially a self-made man, finding companionship in his brother, Ebon Clark Ingersoll, with whom he practised law, later a representative in Congress from Illinois (1864-71), and in his wife, Eva Amelia Parker, as free a thinker as himself, whom he married on February 13, 1862. He had two daughters who, with grand-children and relatives, made him in his later years the center of a patriarchal group.

Ingersoll moved from Shawneetown to Peoria in 1857 and soon became a leader at the bar and a distinguished pleader before juries. His talents brought him the post of attorney-general of Illinois, 1867-69; but before he reached that dignity his career was interrupted by military service, He assisted in raising and became colonel of the 11th Illinois volunteer cavalry regiment, which was mustered into Federal service on December 20, 1861. His command saw duty in the Tennessee Valley campaign, at Shiloh and at Corinth, and was stationed in Tennessee in 1862 when on December 18 the Confederate raider, General Nathan B. Forrest, captured its colonel and some hundreds of its men (J. A. Wyeth, Life of General N. B. Forrest, 1899, p. 113). Ingersoll was soon paroled, and, having no hope of exchange, took his discharge from the army on June 30, 1863.

He was already marked as one who questioned the bases of the Christian religion. The scientific and theological storm that broke upon the United States in the decade after the publication of the Origin of Species found Ingersoll ready to welcome it as justifying his doubts. His personal charm and the correct demeanor of his life protected him from antipathies that might otherwise have pushed him outside the ranks of respectable society, but there were many social hazards in his position. He took to himself the word "agnostic" as soon as Huxley coined it, and assumed an aggressive free-lance against those who attacked him. His skill with juries made him a deadly debater. Soon he was on the platform explaining agnosticism, and here he developed a skill that attracted huge audiences, whether they accepted his teachings or not. "Splendidly endowed as he was he could have won great distinction in the field of politics had he so chosen. But he was determined to enlighten the world concerning the 'Mistakes of Moses.' That threw him out of the race" (Chicago Tribune, July 22, 1899). His friends believed that after his service as attorney-general he might have become governor of Illinois except for his heresy. He continued to practise law in Peoria, and to lecture on religion.

In politics Ingersoll was a Democrat until the call for troops in 1861. He was as unable to accept dogmatic orthodoxy in politics as in religion. As candidate for Congress from the 4th Illinois district in 1860, he was overridden by a Republican opponent who gained strength from the fact that Ingersoll attacked the dogmas of his own party on slavery and the Dred Scott · decision. He came out of the army a Republican and a nationalist, unable to draw any sharp line between his party and the nation. A delegate to the Republican convention at Cincinnati in 1876, Ingersoll was selected to present the name of James G. Blaine. His nominating speech (W arks, IX, 55-60) was the triumph of the convention. It failed to procure the selection of Blaine as candidate, for the forces of opposition were too powerful for any eloquence to override, but it fastened upon Blaine for life the epithet of "plumed knight." It brought Ingersoll recognition as one of the greatest of American orators and made him a national figure overnight. He performed an exhausting service speaking for Hayes during the campaign and was thereafter in constant demand at public celebrations and party rallies.

In 1879 he moved his home to Washington, and transferred his legal practice to the larger field of federal litigation. He received great fees and spent them; careless in accumulation, he was generous in the remission of obligations to himself. The most notorious of his cases ended in triumph for him, if not in the vindication of his clients. As chief counsel for former Senator Stephen W. Dorsey [q.v.] and others charged with conspiracy in connection with the "star routes" [see Garfield, James Abram], he procured, first a mistrial, and finally, on June 14, 1883, the acquittal of the two chief defendants. In 1885 he moved his home to New York, nearer to the great clients and the enthusiastic audiences from whom he drew his living and his repute.

Typical of his once-famous lectures on religious subjects were: "The Gods" (1872); "Some Mistakes of Moses" (1879); "What Must We Do to Be Saved" (1880); "About the Holy Bible" (1894); "Why I Am an Agnostic" (1896); "Superstition" (1898); "The Devil" (1899). Often engaged in religious controversy, he was commonly more clever than his opponents. He lectured also, among others, on Burns, Shakespeare, Humboldt, Lincoln, Thomas Paine, and Voltaire. In the campaign of 1896 he spoke often and effectively for the gold standard, but broke down partially in the late autumn and soon thereafter retired from practice, if not from the platform. Less than three years later he died at Dobbs Ferry, New York, of an affection of the heart.

[Ingersoll is fully displayed in the Dresden edition of The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll (12 vols., 1900, reprinted 1902, 1909, 1910). Here are his addresses, his lectures, and even many of the interviews which he gave freely to the press wherever he went. H. E. Kittredge, Ingersoll, A Biographical Appreciation (1911) is laudatory and inaccurate. There are excellent obituaries and editorials in New York Times, and Chicago Tribune, July 22, 1899. See also L. D. Avery, A Genealogy of the Ingersoll Family in America (1926).]

F. L. P.


Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.