Daniel Payne

Daniel Alexander Payne (February 24, 1811 – November 2, 1893) was an American bishop, educator, college administrator and author. A major shaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), Payne stressed education and preparation of ministers and introduced more order in the church, becoming its sixth bishop and serving for more than four decades (1852–1893) as well as becoming one of the founders of Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1856. In 1863, the AME Church bought the college and chose Payne to lead it; he became the first African-American president of a college in the United States and served in that position until 1877.

By quickly organizing AME missionary support of freedmen in the South after the Civil War, Payne gained 250,000 new members for the AME Church during the Reconstruction era. Based first in Charleston, he and his missionaries founded AME congregations in the South down the East Coast to Florida and west to Texas. In 1891 Payne wrote the first history of the AME Church, a few years after publishing his memoir.

Early life and education

Daniel Alexander Payne was born free in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 24, 1811, of African, European and Native American descent. Daniel stated later in his autobiographical writings "as far as memory serves me my mother was of light-brown complexion, of middle stature and delicate frame. She told me that her grandmother was of the tribe of Indians known in the early history of the Carolinas as the Catawba Indians." He also stated that he descended from the Goings family, who were a well known free colored/Native American family. His father was one of six brothers who served in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) and his paternal grandfather was an Englishman. His parents, London and Martha Payne, were part of the "Brown Elite" of free blacks in the coastal southern city."Daniel Payne"
''This Far by Faith'', PBS, 2003. Retrieved January 13, 2009. Both died before he reached maturity. While his great-aunt assumed Daniel's care, the Minors' Moralist Society assisted his early education. Payne was raised in the Methodist Church like his parents. He also studied at home, teaching himself mathematics, physical science, and the classical languages. In 1829, at the age of 18, he opened his first school in Charleston.

After the infamous and feared Nat Turner's Rebellion of 1831 in Virginia, South Carolina and other southern states passed legislation further restricting the rights and movement of free people of color and slaves. They enacted a law several years after the uprising on April 1, 1835, which made teaching literacy to both free people of color and slaves illegal and subject to fines and imprisonment for both whites and blacks. With the passage of this law, Payne had to close his school.

In May 1835, Payne sailed from Charleston north to Philadelphia in search of further education. Declining the Methodists' offer, which was contingent on his going on a religious evangelist mission to the Republic of Liberia in West Africa, (which was then being organized as a colony for free blacks and emancipated slaves from the United States), Payne instead studied at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg (founded several yeàrs earlier in 1826) in Gettysburg ( Adams County) in rural farming area of south-central Pennsylvania. The Gettysburg Seminary, only a decade old was the second Lutheran theological seminary in North America (the first was Hartwick Seminary in New York) and the current oldest in American Lutheranism. With then only a small number of theology students in one three-stories building capped by a cupola, later known as Old Dorm (now restored and renamed as Schmucker Hall and used by the Adams County Historical Society), then led by prominent, talented but controversial Evangelical Lutheran theologian and professor Rev. Samuel Simon Schmucker (1799–1873). Payne never was later called or served as a Lutheran minister, though but he was the first to be educated and ordained in 1835 by an American Lutheran church body – the General Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the USA, itself also recently organized 15 years before (1820–1917) as the third major Lutheran synod in America and first nation-wide confederation of regional / state synods and congregations, ancestor to the modern Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (formed by mergers 1988).

One source claims he had to drop out of school because of problems with his eyesight. Another source claimed no congregation called him and the leaders and other ministers in the General Synod of the Lutheran Church told him to work through the Methodist Episcopal Church (ancestor body from 1784 to 1939 of the current United Methodist Church), which had a number of "colored" / "Negro" congregations and very strong in Baltimore and Philadelphia, plus the recently organized off-shoot of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Marriage and family

Payne married in 1847, but his wife died during the first year of marriage from complications of childbirth. In 1854, he married again, to Eliza Clark of Cincinnati.

Career in AME Church

By 1840, Payne started another school. He joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) which had been organized in 1794, a decade after the first organized American grouping of " Methodists" at the famed Christmas Conference at the old original Lovely Lane Chapel off South Calvert and German (now Redwood) Streets in Baltimore Town in December 1784 following the teachings of British leaders George Whitefield (1714–1770), John Wesley (1703–1791) and his brother Charles Wesley (1707–1788) (both well-known musical authors and hymn-writers) who were active in the Church of England seeking to revive the Christian Protestant spiritual life in Anglicanism which they feared was becoming staid, stiff and hard. After being recommended by other ministers, seven years after his Lutheran General Synod ordination of 1835 at the Lutheran Theological Seminary under Rev. Samuel Simon Schmucker (1799–1873), in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Rev. Payne gravitated in 1842 towards the African Methodist Episcopal Church, then 26 years old as an organized functioning church denomination since 1816, with Richard Allen and Daniel Coker, centered in eastern cities of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, which had split off from the Methodist Episcopal Church (organized in Baltimore in December 1784 with its famous " Christmas Conference" / first General Conference ordaining first Bishop Francis Asbury (1745–1816), with famed traveling evangelist Robert Strawbridge and visiting German Reformed Church pastor Philip William Otterbein, 1726–1813). That new M.E. Church had a few integrated congregations usually with "Negro" members sitting in balconies or off-sides, but was generally mostly white. Payne with his extensive Evangelical Lutheran theological education at the Gettysburg Seminary agreed with A.M.E.'s founder of a congregation in 1794, Bishop Richard Allen (1760–1831), that a visible and independent black denomination was a strong argument against slavery and racism. Payne had always worked to improve the position of blacks within the United States; he opposed calls for their emigration from North America and resettlement to the proposed new nation of Liberia where a county was being set up in the proposed African settlement taking the name of "Maryland" or other parts of Africa, as urged by the American Colonization Society which had strong support among many white abolitionists (including future President Abraham Lincoln) and supported by some free blacks.

Payne worked to improve education for AME ministers, recommending a wide variety of classes, including grammar, geography, literature and other academic subjects, so they could effectively lead the people. In the ensuing decades' debates about "order and emotionalism" in assemblies and conventions/conferences of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, he sided consistently with order.

The AME's first task was "to improve the ministry; the second to improve the people".Campbell
''Songs of Zion''
1995, p. 38. Retrieved January 13, 2009 At a denominational meeting in Baltimore in 1842, Payne recommended a full program of study for ministers, to include English grammar, geography, arithmetic, ancient history, modern history, ecclesiastical