Charles Ingersoll dropped out of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, in 1799.[3] He then studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1802 and commenced practice in Philadelphia. He traveled in Europe, accompanied by Rufus King, the United States minister to the United Kingdom.[4]
He was a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 1830, and a member of the State constitutional convention in 1837. He was appointed secretary of the legation to Prussia on March 8, 1837. He was an unsuccessful candidate in 1837 for election to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Francis J. Harper in the Twenty-fifth Congress. He was again an unsuccessful candidate for election in 1838.[7]
In 1804, Ingersoll married Mary Wilcocks, the daughter of Alexander Wilcocks, and together had six surviving sons and 2 daughters.[11] His son Edward Ingersoll wrote on legal topics.
He also published numerous anonymous contributions to the Democratic Press of Philadelphia, and to the National Intelligencer of Washington, on the controversies with England before the War of 1812 (1811–15). He published several “Speeches” concerning that war (1813–15), a discourse before the American Philosophical Society on the “Influence of America on the Mind,” which was republished in England and France (1823), a translation of a French work on the freedom of navigation, in the American Law Journal of 1829, and many other literary and political discourses. At the time of his death, he was preparing a History of the Territorial Acquisitions of the United States.
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