The famous Republican orator who nominated James G. Blaine for president in 1876 wanted a “slow death” because he had things he wanted to say at the end of his life. He didn’t get the chance.

Death came to Robert Green Ingersoll before he could get in the last word.

Not surprisingly for a man who made his name making speeches, he hoped he would be conscious as the end of his life approached because “I have some things I want to say.” Instead, according to the Chicago Tribune, he was stricken suddenly by heart failure on July 21, 1899, and death “came in the twinkling of an eye — instant transition apparently from good health to death.”

Even so, he appeared content with his fate as he passed. “The smile that started to mantle his features never was finished,” the Tribune wrote in its front-page story on Ingersoll’s death. “He died before his wife could seize his hand.”

The headline over the Tribune story declared “Col. Ingersoll Dies Smiling.”¹

In some ways, it is surprising that Ingersoll had anything left to say at the time of his death. Over the course of a career in public life that lasted more than 30 years, Ingersoll earned a reputation as one of the country’s most eloquent and prolific orators.

He delighted in denouncing the perfidy of the Democratic Party and tweaking the piety of 19th-century Christians. He made a career out of the former and earned notoriety for the latter. But he was capable of waxing eloquent on topics ranging from Moses and Shakespeare to the family and his vision of the future.

It was a golden age of oratory. In The Age of Acrimony, Jon Grinspan writes that “fame came from speechifying. Stump speakers and campaign hollerers were the ubiquitous talking heads of their day. American citizens were connoisseurs of their every gesture and flourish.”² The Chautauqua lecture circuit that flourished into the early years of the 20th century began in the 1870s in Upstate New York with sermonizing and hymn singing but eventually spread across the country and featured politicians like William Jennings Bryan.

Ingersoll was ideally suited for an era in which oratory mixed politics and entertainment. Born in 1833 in Dresden, N.Y, he was the son of an itinerant Congregationalist minister who served churches in New York, Illinois, and Wisconsin. The elder Ingersoll “occupied the pulpits of many churches, but invariably aroused opposition by expressing opinions at variance with the accepted theology of the time,” according to the New York Times.³

“Bob” Ingersoll inherited his father’s public speaking abilities and love for disputation without accepting his religious beliefs. Ingersoll became a lawyer and opened a law practice in Peoria, Ill., with his brother in 1858. Like many Americans in the mid-19th century, Ingersoll started out in life as a Democrat.

After the outbreak of the Civil War, he raised a cavalry unit and served as a colonel in the Union army. Ingersoll’s service in the conflict, which included capture by Confederates under the command of the infamous Nathan Bedford Forrest, turned him into an ardent supporter of the party of Abraham Lincoln.⁴

Ingersoll put his speechmaking talents to work for the Republican Party as early as 1866.⁵ He served as attorney general in Illinois under Gov. Richard Oglesby in the late 1860s. But Ingersoll did not come to national prominence until 1876, when Republicans gathered in Cincinnati to nominate a candidate for president.

Ingersoll arrived in the Queen City as a delegate supporting James G. Blaine, the former House Speaker and odds-on favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination. Blaine’s enemies included Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York and independent-minded reformers who believed Blaine had corruptly used his position in public life to enrich himself. But Blaine also had many supporters. Ingersoll numbered among the most ardent. “I have a very decided preference for Blaine as my first choice,” he told the New York Herald.⁶

That became evident when he stood before the convention to place Blaine’s name in nomination.

Republicans, he told the convention, demanded a presidential candidate who was sound (read “conservative”) on financial questions, well-versed in governance, and believed that the federal government should “protect every citizen at home and abroad.” Republicans wanted an honest man as their candidate, but — in a shot at congressional Democrats who had been investigating Blaine’s dealings with financiers backing an Arkansas railroad project — “they do not demand that their candidate have a certificate of moral character signed by a Confederate congress.”

Ingersoll was just warming up.

“Our country,” he said, “asks for a man worthy of her past and prophetic of her future; asks for a man who has the audacity of genius; asks for a man who has the grandest combination of heart, conscience, and brain the world ever saw. That man is James G. Blaine.”

Then came his peroration:

“Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine marched down the halls of the American Congress and threw his shining lance full and fair against the brazen forehead of every traitor to his country and every maligner of his fair reputation. For the Republican party to desert that gallant man now is as though an army should desert their general upon the field of battle. James G. Blaine is now and has been for years the bearer of the sacred standard of the Republican Party. I call it sacred, because no human can stand beneath its folds without becoming and without remaining free.”⁷

Frenzied cheering and demonstrations erupted when Ingersoll concluded. “Plumed Knight” became a Blaine nickname. Along with Roscoe Conkling’s nomination of Ulysses S. Grant at the 1880 Republican convention and Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech to Democrats in 1896, Ingersoll’s oration ranks among the greatest pieces of 19th-century convention speechmaking.

“In some ways, it was a great speech,” Blaine biographer Charles Edward Russell wrote, “in some ways the greatest speech ever heard on a convention floor. For the next generation schoolboys recited it.”⁸

Ingersoll’s reputation as a public speaker was made, but the speech proved more successful for him than for Blaine. Opposition to the “Plumed Knight” remained widespread. On the seventh ballot, Republicans turned to Rutherford B. Hayes, the favorite son candidate of Ohio Republicans. Ingersoll dutifully went to work to elect Hayes and proved a master of the “bloody shirt” rhetoric by which Republicans invoked the memory of the Civil War to stoke hostility to Democrats.

“Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine marched down the halls of the American Congress and threw his shining lance full and fair against the brazen forehead of every traitor to his country and every maligner of his fair reputation.” Robert G. Ingersoll, 1876

“Soldiers, every scar you have on your heroic bodies was given to you by a Democrat,” he declared to a gathering of Union Army veterans in Indianapolis. “Every scar, every arm that is lacking, every limb that was gone, is a souvenir of a Democrat. I want you to recollect it. Every man that was the enemy of human liberty in this country was a Democrat. Every man that wanted the fruit of all the heroism of all the ages to turn to ashes upon the lips — every one was a Democrat.”⁹

Not content to attack Democrats, Ingersoll turned his guns on organized religion. He accused Christians of narrow-minded bigotry but facetiously styled himself as a friend of the clergy who wanted to open their minds. “One of the first things I wish to do, is free the orthodox clergy,” he wrote in 1879. “They are not allowed to read and think for themselves. They are taught like parrots, and the best are those who repeat, with the fewest mistakes, the sentences they have been taught. They sit like owls on some dead limb of the tree of knowledge, and hoot the same old hoots that have been hooted for eighteen hundred years.”¹⁰

Two years later, Ingersoll sparred with Jeremiah S. Black in the pages of the North American Review regarding religion. Ingersoll claimed that “Thousands of most excellent people avoid churches, and, with a few exceptions, only those attend prayer meetings who wish to be alone. The pulpit is losing because the people are growing.”¹¹

It was one thing to demonize Democrats, quite another to challenge the authority of the clergy. Ingersoll’s eagerness to propound his controversial views made him, in the words of the New York Times, “the most noted of English-speaking infidels.” In Notes on Ingersoll, a response published in 1883 to the North American Review piece, the Rev. L.A. Lambert of Waterloo, New York dismissed the agnostic from Illinois as an ignorant blowhard.

“It has been well said by some keen observer, that whatever else a man writes, he always writes himself. This is conspicuously true of Mr. Ingersoll. His writings are a mere evolution of himself on paper. The glitter, the sophistry, the bad faith, verbal legerdemain, the pervading egotism, the assumed infallibility, and the brazen audacity of statement so conspicuous in his writings, are the full bloom and blossom of his character.”¹²

Politicians kept their distance for a while. But Ingersoll’s assault on organized religion did little to diminish his popularity as a public speaker, and the political class eventually made its peace with his iconoclastic views. In 1888, following the death of Blaine’s arch-foe Roscoe Conkling, Ingersoll delivered the eulogy at a memorial service in Albany.

Through it all, Ingersoll’s ability to touch audiences kept him in the forefront of American orators. “The human heart was his instrument,” the Times wrote at the time of his death, “and he played upon it with a master’s power.”¹³

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I am working on a book about the rivalry between James G. Blaine and Roscoe Conkling. My two previous books are Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age and Skirmisher: The Life, Times, and Political Career of James B. Weaver. Both are available at amazon.com.

---

1. Chicago Tribune, July 22, 1899, p. 1. ↩︎
2. Jon Grinspan, The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915 (New York, London, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), pp. 21. ↩︎
3. New York Times, July 22, 1899, p. 3. ↩︎
4. Ibid. ↩︎
5. Chicago Tribune, Aug. 24, 1866, p. 1. ↩︎
6. New York Herald, June 13, 1876, p. 4. ↩︎
7. Proceedings of the Republican National Convention, Held at Cincinnati, Ohio (Concord, N.H.: The Republican Press Association, 1876), p. 74. ↩︎
8. Charles Edward Russell, Blaine of Maine: His Life and Times (New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, 1931), p. 315. ↩︎
9. Robert Green Ingersoll, Political Speeches of Robert G. Ingersoll (New York: C.P. Farrell, 1914), p. 160. ↩︎
10. Robert Green Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses (Washington D.C.: C.P. Farrell, Publisher, 1879), p. 16. ↩︎
11. Robert G. Ingersoll and Jeremiah S. Black, “The Christian Religion,” North American Review, Vol. 133, No. 2, August 1881, p. 8. ↩︎
12. New York Times, July 22, 1899, p. 3; Rev. L.A. Lambert, Notes on Ingersoll (Buffalo, N.Y.: Buffalo Catholic Publication Co.), p. 13.
    ↩︎
13. New York Times, July 22, 1899, p. 3. ↩︎