March 18, 2010
In 1836 R. J. Breckinridge took a sabbatical. He had been appointed the Presbyterian Church’s fraternal delegate to the Congregational Union of England and Wales. As soon as word got out that RJB was going to Britain, he received appointments from the American Colonization Society (devoted to ending slavery and sending the freed slaves to Liberia in west Africa), the Western Foreign Missions Society (at this point the Presbyterian church had no foreign missions board – this was the foreign missions organization of the Synod of Pittsburgh, and supported by Old School Presbyterians) and the American Protestant Association (devoted to maintaining and defending the truths of the Reformation against the Roman Catholic Church).
In those days such an appointment required several months: three weeks each way for the packet to Liverpool, another several weeks to attend the annual meetings of the various organizations to which he had been commissioned. He also visited the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly – at which point he got roped into a debate over slavery with George Thompson, a British Abolitionist. Breckinridge was devoted to ending slavery (only a year before he had signed a deed of emancipation that would set his own 20 slaves free after they had worked off their purchase price), but he did not believe that the immediate abolition of slavery would work – and he knew that any attempt to abolish slavery immediately would result in war (it didn’t take a genius to figure this out!).
So RJB and his wife, Ann Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge (“Sophy”), went together on this jaunt – leaving behind their three children, Mary (8), Sally (4), and Robert (2) with her mother in Abingdon, Virginia. Both RJB and Sophy had battled various illnesses, and they expected that the travel would improve their health. Sophy hoped that after spending some weeks in England, they would then return home – but since she was pregnant they decided to go to Paris, where she birth to Marie. They also toured Switzerland and southern France before returning home in the spring of 1837 (just in time for RJB to go to the famous General Assembly of 1837). Sophy told various people that she greatly preferred the Scots to the English, while RJB made some very good friends among the French Reformed churches of his day.
