The Great Agnostic Read Online Free

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 throughoutthe 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 joinedtogether 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. * 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. 11
    By the time Fort Sumter was attacked in 1861, Ingersoll no longer had a place in the Democratic Party. Hejoined 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