Daniel Payne
Daniel Alexander Payne was born free in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 24, 1811, of African, European and Native American descent.
[2] 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Especially after expansion of the church following the end of the Civil War into and across the South, where different styles of worship had taken root and prevailed, there were some continuing tensions about the direction of the denomination.
Lewis Woodson (1806–1878) a sympathetic white minister and AME member and two other African Americans representing the AME Church, and 18 European-American representatives of the Cincinnati Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC), Payne served on the founding board of directors and which later purchased Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio in 1856.
It was named for the now deeply revered William Wilberforce, (1759–1833) who was a long serving British political and social leader, firm abolitionist and deep Christian believer in the Gospel, who worked tirelessly for his anti-slavery and abolishing the African trans-Atlantic slave trade causes for decades as a longtime member of the lower chamber of the British Parliament in the House of Commons.
[10] Among the trustees who supported the abolitionist cause and African-American education was Salmon P. Chase, previously Governor of Ohio, who was appointed in 1864 as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court by 16th President Abraham Lincoln after serving as U S. Secretary of the Treasury in Lincoln's cabinet for 3 years during the early American Civil War, to succeed longtime Chief Justice Roger B. Taney who had died.
[12] In one of the paradoxical results of slavery, by 1860 most of the college's more than 200 paying students were mixed-race offspring of wealthy southern planters, who gave their children the education in Ohio which they could not get in the South.
[12][13] The men were examples of white fathers who did not abandon their mixed-race children, but passed on important social capital in the form of education; they and others also provided money, property and apprenticeships.
In 1863, Payne persuaded his fellow ministers and lay members of the AME Church to buy the debt and take over the college outright from the Methodist Episcopalians of Cincinnati.
[16] In 1881, he founded the Bethel Literary and Historical Society, a club which invited speakers to present and speak on topics relevant to African-American life and a part of the flourishing "Lyceum movement".
