Robert Bruce Mullin

Although the grandson of an important Revolutionary War era Episcopal minister, Samuel Seabury was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker (in 1815) when he was 14. In 1831 he wrote a series of letters (a literary style then popular) as an auto-biographical account of his brief apprenticeship, his self-education and his attempts to find a place in the new republic, where traditional class distinctions and the importance of family connections were eroding. (But still important, as he secured work in show more the Customs office and as an assistant schoolteacher through both.) The letters offer a look at the life of an apprentice, through the eyes of someone who was born in a more genteel tradition and clearly felt alien in that world. Apprenticeships were as much a means of social control as a training for a trade (a cabinetmaker was near the top of the tradesmen, but still regarded widely as an inferior sort by those raised in an Episcopal tradition), and Seabury chafed at both. The letters also remind us of the disruption caused by Thomas Paine and the Deists to established religions and colleges (Yale, Harvard) which were still in the grip of their religious sponsors.
The early letters dealing with his apprenticeship are fascinating, and the later ones dealing with his attempts to sort out theological issues can be skimmed. His accounts of his efforts to teach himself Latin and Greek, as well as his other reading (Locke, Gibbons, Addison and Steele, as well as many works of exegesis and apologetics) are self-congratulatory, but interesting. Equally valuable is the editor’s extended introduction covering the social and religious world of the period. show less

Church History