The Great Agnostic Read Online Free Page A

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.” 12 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 aboutIngersoll’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.” 13
    Shortly after the war, and long before he became a national figure, Ingersoll began to link slavery with retrograde religion in his public speeches. While giving full credit to devoutly religious abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, Ingersoll pointed out to his audiences that these men had been exceptions among their religious contemporaries in the North and that religious opponents of slavery had often been denounced by orthodox clerics as infidels. In a powerful speech titled “Address to the Colored People” and delivered in 1867 in Galesburg, Ingersoll declared that “the great argument of slaveholders in all countries has been that slavery is a divine institution, and thus stealing human beings has always been fortified with a, ‘Thus saith the Lord.’” 14 Many defenders of slavery, Ingersoll noted, had rationalized the institution on grounds that it served to “Christianize” the Negro. He cited the Quaker abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier’s famous lines about apreacher who “Bade the slave-ship speed from coast to coast / Fanned by the wings of the Holy Ghost.” *
    Although Ingersoll had already established a reputation as a brilliant courtroom orator while pursuing his political ambitions in the Illinois Republican Party, the Galesburg speech clearly demonstrated the connection between Ingersoll’s antireligious stance and his views on public policy. He refused to go along with the post-bellum rewriting of history, which maintained that northern religion was unified in its support for abolition and has survived to this day as the standard viewpoint in American elementary and secondary school history textbooks. “The word Liberty is not in any [religious] creed in the world,” Ingersoll told the Galesburg audience, which must have included many born into slavery. “Slavery is right according to the law of man, shouted the judge. It is right according to the law of God, shouted the priest. Thus sustained by what they were pleased to call the law of God and man, slaveholders never voluntarily freed the slaves, with the exception of the Quakers.” 15
    It is somewhat mystifying that both the content anddate of the Galesburg speech have been largely overlooked by Ingersoll’s biographers, because it indicates that Ingersoll—even when he still had hope of holding public office—was unable or unwilling to take the politically prudent step of muting his antireligious views. Having been appointed state attorney general in 1867 by the Republican governor of Illinois, Ingersoll