The Great Agnostic by Susan Jacoby Page B

awareness may well have contributed to Ingersoll’s lifelong advocacy of equal rights for women—a cause that received considerable lip service from but was rarely a priority for male freethinkers.
    Throughout Robert’s childhood, his father’s outspoken abolitionist views were a major factor in the peripatetic nature of his clerical career. Frequent moves suggest that Priest Ingersoll must have encountered trouble with the vestrymen in one congregation after another, because this was an era when successful clergymen often remained in one parish for life. He left Dresden in 1834 to take up the post of assistant pastor at a new Presbyterian church on Broadway in New York City, but that job lasted less than a year. The problem in New York was definitely Ingersoll’s unrestrained abolitionism. When the Broadway church had been under construction, an angry crowd set fire tothe partly built structure because “they had heard that miscegenation was about to be championed.” 3 When one considers that slavery had been outlawed for less than a decade, it is not surprising that New Yorkers would fail to take kindly to a preacher who told them that they had only recently been engaged in committing a grievous sin. So the die-hard abolitionist moved back the town of Cazenovia in upstate New York, where his wife died in 1835, leaving five children behind. Mary’s death, at age thirty-six, was not at all unusual for a mother of her generation, in which the physical complications attendant upon repeated childbearing prevented many women from living long enough to raise their families.
    What little we know about Ingersoll’s childhood comes from his own recollections in speeches and later family correspondence. Because of Priest Ingersoll’s frequent moves in search of new congregations, the family was always economically insecure. Robert’s older sisters, Ruth and Mary, were expected, as was customary in such families, to fill in for their dead mother by looking after the younger children. Robert was closest to his brother, Ebon Clark, who was just two years older. After their mother’s death, Robert and Ebon—who was always called Clark by his brothers and sisters—became inseparable; they shared a special, intimate language (a phenomenon more common in twins) that no one else could understand. Ebon,who grew up to become a congressman from Illinois, was the only one of the Ingersoll children who would share his brother’s antireligious views in adulthood. His other brother, John, and his sisters—with whom he remained on good terms throughout his life—were, as the family correspondence indicates, orthodox in their religious beliefs.
    The theological cast of the Ingersoll home, coupled with a catch-as-catch-can exposure to formal education necessitated by his father’s wandering ministry, had the opposite effect on the two younger boys. Robert and Ebon were rarely enrolled in school for any length of time—a background they shared with many other American auto-didacts, including Abraham Lincoln, who lived in small towns or rural frontier areas in the first half of the nineteenth century. They were, however, exposed to a surfeit of religious reading. Their father, who had prepared for the ministry at Middlebury College in Vermont, kept mainly religious books in the house—the King James Bible, naturally; Foxe’s famous, gory
Book of Martyrs;
Richard Baxter’s
The Saint’s Everlasting Rest,
William Paley’s
Moral and Political Philosophy
and
Evidences;
the eighteenth-century Methodist theologian Richard Sibbes’s interestingly titled
Believers’ Bowels Opened;
John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress;
and the works of John Milton. As an adult, Ingersoll underestimated Milton, who was far too great a poet not to make Satan the most unforgettable characterhe ever met. The Great Agnostic could not see beyond the Puritan to the genius of the