For Seume, equality and freedom of movement were not just ideals, but personal issues. At the turn of the 1700s and 1800s, the value of a man depended - to quote Seume - "on church records, the weight of his father's purse and the orders of the court marshal." Seume's own childhood family had lost much of their property as a result of the famine and price rises that hit Germany in the 1770s. When his father, a tenant farmer and innkeeper, died in 1776, the 13-year-old Johann Gottfried's future was at the mercy of his benefactors. The boy had shown talent at the village school and was offered a patronage by Count Friedrich Wilhelm von Hohenthal, who paid for Seume's studies at Leipzig University on condition that he chose theology as his subject. Theology did not suit a young man of enlightened ideas, who detested the greed and arbitrariness of the church above all else. In 1781, Seume, aged 21, put aside his books and set off on a walk to Paris. Paradoxically, his quest for freedom led to the loss of freedom when he was captured by a Hessian recruiting force along the road - unofficial, destitute and untitled men were a desirable and valuable bargaining chip for the Prince of Hesse-Kassel, who sold 17 000 of his subjects to the English. The English needed reinforcements for the war against the colonies across the sea, known in the history books as the American War of Independence, and Seume was one of the victims of human trafficking sent by cargo ship to Canada to fight the colonial army. Fortunately, the war was over before the ship reached Halifax harbour. After the American episode, Seume reluctantly survived in a Hessian, later Prussian, camp, escaped the army twice and was sentenced to running the gauntlet - a punishment from which very few survived. But Seume was saved at the last moment: he was pardoned because he was giving language lessons to the daughter of a major-general who did not want to lose her tutor.

Seume then taught languages for a time in Leipzig, and became tutor to count von Igelström, whom, in 1792, he accompanied to Warsaw. There he became secretary to General von Igelström, and, as a Russian officer, experienced the terrors of the Polish insurrection (Kościuszko Uprising). In 1796 he returned to Leipzig and entered the employment of the publisher Göschen.

In December 1801, he quit his job as an editor and set out on his famous nine months' walk to Sicily, described in his Spaziergang nach Syrakus (1803). Some years later he visited the Baltic countries, Russia, Finland, Sweden and Denmark, a journey which he describes in his travel journal Mein Sommer im Jahr 1805. His health now began to fail, and he died on 13 June 1810, in Teplitz, nowadays Teplice, Czech Republic