The Great Agnostic by Susan Jacoby Page A

Although his family moved away from Dresden when Robert was less than a year old, the social ferment for which the region was widely known—especially an ongoing conflict between abolitionism and those who favored continuing toleration of slavery in order to preserve the Union—certainly helped shape the outlook of his parents. The entire area was known as the “burned-over district,” because it was said that various religious revival movements, as well as secular dissident impulses, swept through the region like wildfires. A partial list of religious and political iconoclasts who either were born in the Finger Lakes region or were intimately linked to the area’s varied dissident impulsesincludes Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the founding mother of the nineteenth-century woman suffrage movement; Amelia Jencks Bloomer, the inventor and popularizer of the eponymous pantaloons and editor of the first American newspaper aimed specifically at women; Harriet Tubman, the heroic slave-rescuer known as the “Moses of her people”; and, at a distinctly different place on the religio-political spectrum, the Mormon founding father Joseph Smith, who walked into a forest one day and walked out with golden tablets, presented by the angel Moroni, upon which the Book of Mormon was supposedly inscribed.
    The original English-speaking settlers of the area came from New England and included both orthodox Presbyterians and Congregationalists and nonconformist Protestants, among them Quakers, Unitarians, and Universalists. Quakers were, of course, the most staunch religious opponents of slavery. One myth of American religious history maintains that most northern churches took a strong abolitionist stance on moral grounds long before the Civil War. In fact, the more religiously orthodox and socially conservative Protestant denominations, including Presbyterians and Congregationalists, were much more concerned in the 1830s and 1840s with maintaining the unity of churches in the North and the South than with limiting or abolishing slavery. John Ingersoll, however, was first and foremost a fiery abolitionist preacher. Hismessage did not always sit well in an area that, like much of New York State, was highly ambivalent about slavery. One of Lake Seneca’s tourist attractions today, just a fifteen-minute drive from Ingersoll’s native hamlet and the site of his father’s church, is the Greek revival Rose Hill Mansion, built by Robert Selden Rose, a Virginia planter who arrived in 1802 with twenty-six slaves. Rose’s slaves were freed only in 1827, when the “peculiar institution” was finally abolished in New York State. *
    The elder Ingersoll (also known, strangely for a Protestant, as Priest Ingersoll) was in the habit of describing the South as an “earthly Gehenna”—and that may not have pleased Dresden parishioners in the 1830s, given that they had tolerated an imported piece of that Gehenna just down the road throughout the first quarter of the nineteenth century. 1 Ingersoll’s mother also took a public abolitionist stand, not long after New York finally abolished slavery, by circulating a state petition to Congress that the practice be outlawed in the District of Columbia. At the time, women—especially not preacher’s wives expected to serve as models of Christian propriety—rarelytook such public action. According to one of Ingersoll’s early biographers, Mary Ingersoll’s behavior “aroused comment in New York that had been not always kind, for that state … admiring good women, none the less preferred them not overly intelligent and inaudible.” 2 Although Robert was too young when his mother died for him to remember her when he grew up, he was aware not only that she had been an abolitionist but that she had acted on her convictions at a time when it was considered scandalous for women to openly involve themselves in public affairs. This