Daniel Payne

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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 Coke, centered in eastern cities of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond which had split off from the Methodist Episçopal Çhurch (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. Rev. 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". 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 history, and theology. At the following 1844 AME General Conference, he called for a "regular course of study for prospective ordinees", in the belief they would lift up their parishioners. In 1845, Pastor Payne tried to establish a short-lived AME seminary, and succeeded in gradually raising the educational preparation required for its ministers.

Payne also directed reforms at the style of music, introducing trained choirs and instrumental music to church practice. He supported the requirement that ministers be literate. Payne continued throughout his career to build the institution of the church, establishing literary and historical societies and encouraging order. At times he came into conflict with those who wanted to ensure that ordinary people could advance in the church. 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.

In 1848, fourth Bishop William Paul Quinn (1788-1873), named Payne as the historiographer of the AME Church. In 1852, Payne was elected and consecrated as the sixth bishop of the AME denomination. He served in that position for the rest of his life to 1893.

Together with the Rev. 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 (M.E.C.), 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. 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. The denominations jointly sponsored Wilberforce in 1856 to provide collegiate education to African Americans. It was the first historically black college in which African Americans were part of the founding.

The town of Wilberforce was located at what had been a popular summer resort, called Tawawa Springs. It was patronized by people from Cincinnati further south on the Ohio River, including abolitionists, as well as many white planters from the South, who often brought their mistresses of color and "natural" (illegitimate) multi-racial children with them for extended stays.

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. 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.

With the outbreak of Civil War in the Spring of 1861, the planters withdrew their sons from the college, and the Cincinnati Annual Conference of the M.E, Church (which was generally white-only) felt it needed to use its resources to support social efforts related to the war. The college had to close temporarily because of these financial difficulties. In 1863, Rev. 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. Payne was then selected as president, becoming the first African-American college president in the United States. The AME had to reinvest in the college two years later, when a southern sympathizer damaged buildings by an arson fire. Payne helped organize fundraising and rebuilding. White sympathizers gave large donations, including $10,000 donations each from founding board member Salmon P. Chase and another supporter from Pittsburgh, as well as $4200 from a white woman. The United States Congress, then dominated by Radical Republicans passed a $25,000 grant for the college to aid in its rebuilding. Payne led the college until 1877. Payne traveled twice to Europe, where he consulted with other British Methodist clergy there and studied their several colleges and education programs.

In April 1865, after the Civil War, Payne returned to the South for the first time in 30 years. Knowing how to build an organization, he took nine missionaries and worked with others in Charleston to establish the AME denomination. He organized missionaries, committees and teachers to bring the AME Church to freedmen. By only a year later, the church had grown by 50,000 congregants in that part of the South.

By the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877, AME congregations existed across the South from Florida to Texas, and more than 250,000 new adherents had been brought into the church. While it had a northern center, the growing AME Church was strongly influenced by its expansion in the South. The incorporation of many congregants with different practices and traditions of worship and music styles helped shape the national AME Church. It began to reflect more of the African-American culture of the South.

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".

Bishop Payne died on November 2, 1893, having served the African Methodist Episcopal Church for more than 50 years.

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