Travelling in the Ministry | Oxford Quaker Forty-Three Newsletter

Richard SeeBohm

Liberating Matt Rosen to travel in the ministry reminded me of my own great-great-grandfather Benjamin Seebohm. With consent of his monthly meeting, he set off in 1846 for five years of ministry in the USA. Robert Lindsay was the Friend appointed to accompany and elder him. A relative provided two horses and a carriage.

Docking at Boston, they got to Philadelphia and radiating from there they visited almost every then state of the Union, ranging from Niagara Falls and into Canada then down to slave-owning Virginia. In Philadelphia they were welcomed but only guardedly. They were banned from visiting Friends – for ministry – in their homes. When we went to Arch Street Meeting in the year 2000, they found us the 1847 minute book, stored behind more recent volumes and it said, ‘We welcome our dear Friend Benjamin Seebohm…’ but there must have been more to it, hinted at in his diary. I have an 1847 letter (in photocopy) from a nearby Friend which says,

… The sorrowful accounts we have repeatedly heard of the unchristian treatment of our beloved friends Benjamin Seebohm and Robert Lindsay, have met with in that, once, city of brotherly love, can but excite the tender feeling & near sympathy of many who have never seen their faces …

Of course, American Friends were then deeply split between the Orthodox evangelicals, where Benjamin belonged, and Hicksite, a Quakerism very like ours here today, which he saw as ‘infidel views going far beyond the ordinary length’. He spoke of shared meeting houses with partitions where the ministry of the other party could be heard through the wall.

In their travels they took their horses downriver on steamboats, fitted their carriage with skis when the ground was frozen, and heard of a carriage driven over a frozen river when the ice broke and the carriage and horses vanished into the deep with the women inside – the men had jumped off.

But it was slavery that repeatedly distressed them. The post-independence constitution of 1787, to keep the slave states on board, had postponed the issue for 20 years. In 1807 Congress outlawed slave trading by sea. But no provisions for enforcement were made and internal slavery was up to the states. Pennsylvania had outlawed it in 1780 but with let out clauses.

Our travellers found themselves attending Virginian slave auctions and visiting ‘slave jails’ with up to 30 men, women and children waiting to be sold. They saw them as people, whilst buyers physically examined them as if they were carcasses.

Some dealers claimed to be regretting the financial commitment that kept them to the trade – a working slave was worth 900 dollars. They were told that the stridency of abolitionists deterred a gradual emancipation. Quakers tended to be caught up with Friends inheriting slaves and with problems in keeping freed slaves from being recaptured.

They met settler families emigrating westwards with all their possessions from slave states to free.

In 1851 the travellers came home. They had kept in touch by letter, but home life had not been plain sailing either.

Editors’ Note: Benjamin Seebohm’s original diary of his travels through America is held in the Haverford College Archives, Haverford, Pennsylvania.

Diary, 1846-1847, Volume: 1. Benjamin Seebohm diary, HC.MC-975-01-067. Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections.

https://archives.tricolib.brynmawr.edu//repositories/5/archival_objects/65899 Accessed June 20, 2023.

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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 531 • July 2023
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