biography
| name: |
Ingersoll, Robert (Green)
|
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1833–99)
|
| biography:
| Lawyer and orator, born in Dresden, New York, USA. The son of a Congregational minister, he had little formal education, but read law on his own and was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1854. He commanded a volunteer cavalry regiment during the Civil War, and served as Illinois attorney general (1867–9). He then took to the lecture circuit to promote a secular religion of scientific rationalism that Thomas H Huxley called ‘agnosticism’. Many of his lectures, such as ‘Superstition’, were widely reprinted. He was also active in the Republican Party, and at the 1876 convention he nominated James G Blaine as ‘the Plumed Knight’. He moved to Washington, DC (1879) and then to New York City (1885), continuing to practise law and propound his social views until his death. |
|
|
