Daniel Payne

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Bishop Daniel A. Payne. Cover picture for Recollections of Seventy Years (1888)

Daniel Payne , full name Daniel Alexander Payne (born February 24, 1811 in Charleston, South Carolina , † November 2, 1893 in Xenia (Ohio) ), was an American bishop , educator , college administrator and author . He was the sixth bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME, more common English abbreviation: AME Church) (1852-1893) and a major designer of the same in the 19th century, emphasizing the training and preparation of clergy and the introduction of a better church order. He was one of the founders of Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1856. In 1863 the AME bought the college; when he was appointed director of the college, Payne was the first African American college president in the United States. He held this post until 1877.

By quickly organizing the AME's missionary support for freedmen in the southern states after the Civil War , Payne gained 250,000 new members for the AME during Reconstruction . Initially stationed in Charleston, South Carolina , he and his missionaries founded AME congregations in the southern states along the east coast of the United States to Florida and west to Texas . In 1891 Payne wrote the first history work on the AME, a few years later he published his memoir .

Early years and education

Daniel Payne was born in Charleston on February 24, 1811, a free person, not a slave . His ancestors were of African , European, and native descent. Payne noted, “As far as I can rely on my memory, my mother was light brown in complexion, of medium stature and of delicate build. She told me that her grandmother was from the Native American tribe known as the Catawba Indians in early Carolinian history. ”He also noted that he was descended from the Goings family, who were a well-known free colored respectively the Native American family acted. His father was one of six brothers who fought in the American Revolutionary War, and his paternal grandfather was English . His parents, London and Martha Payne, belonged to the so-called "brown elite" of free Afro-Americans in the cities. Both died before their son grew up. While his great-aunt was raising him, the Minors' Moralist Society supported his early upbringing. Like his parents, Payne grew up in the Methodist Church . While studying at home, he also taught himself mathematics, physics and classical languages. In 1829, at the age of 18, he opened his first school.

After Nat Turner - slave revolt enacted South Carolina and other Southern states laws limiting the rights of free people of non-European descent and of slaves. So a law was passed on 1 April 1835 that the literacy classes stated for the mentioned groups of people for illegal and covered with penalties up to imprisonment. After this law was passed, Payne had to close his school.

In May 1835, Payne sailed from Charleston to Philadelphia in order to be able to enjoy further training. Turning down a Methodist offer to serve as a missionary to Liberia , a country established as a colony for released African-Americans, Payne studied at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg , Pennsylvania . Payne never worked as a Lutheran minister. One source justifies this with the fact that he had to leave school due to poor eyesight. Another source gives the reason that no congregation called him, so that the Lutheran Church suggested that he work for the Methodist Episcopal Church.

marriage and family

Payne married in 1847; his wife died of complications during childbirth in the first year of their marriage. In 1854 he married again; his second wife was named Eliza Clark and was from Cincinnati .

Career in the AME

In 1840 Payne began further training at another school. He joined the AME in 1842. He agreed with its founder Richard Allen that a visible and independent African-American denomination was a strong argument against slavery and racism . Payne always worked to improve the situation of African Americans; he contradicted calls for their emigration to Liberia and other parts of Africa, as required by the American Colonization Society and supported by some free African Americans.

Payne worked to improve the training of clergymen in the AME, recommending a wide variety of classes including grammar, geography , literature, and other academic subjects so that they could guide people efficiently. In the debates of the following decades about "order and emotionality" in the African Methodist Church, he made a clear decision in favor of order.

The first task of the AME was to "promote the clergy; the second to promote the people". At a denominational meeting in Baltimore in 1842, Payne advised that a full study program for clergy should include English grammar, geography, arithmetic, ancient history, contemporary history, church history, and theology. At the general conference of the AME in 1844, he called for a "regular course for prospective ordinates" in the hope that this would enable them to better promote their parishioners. In 1845, Payne set up a short-lived AME seminar and managed to gradually raise the training necessary for clergy to a higher level.

Payne also made reforms in musical style, introducing trained choirs and instrumental music into church practice. He followed the opinion that clergymen should not be illiterate . Throughout his career, Payne continued to build the organization of the Church by establishing literacy and historical societies, and by promoting order. At times he came into conflict with those who wanted to ensure that ordinary people could ascend in the Church. Especially after the expansion of the Church in the southern states, where there were different worship practices, there was persistent tension over which direction the denomination should take.

Bishop and College President

In 1848, Bishop William Paul Quinn named Payne historiographer for the AME. In 1852 Payne was elected and ordained the sixth bishop of the AME. He held this post for the rest of his life.

Together with Lewis Woodson , two other African-American representatives from the AME Church and 18 Euro-American representatives from the Cincinnati Methodist Episcopal Conference , Payne served on the founding board of directors of Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1856. Among the commissioners responsible for the cause of abolitionism and the promotion of Representing African American education included Salmon P. Chase , the future governor of Ohio, who was appointed president of the US Supreme Court by President Abraham Lincoln . The denominations jointly sponsored Wilberforce in 1856 to provide college education for African Americans. It was the first of the historic Afro-American colleges that Afro-Americans were involved in founding.

Wilberforce was set up in a place called Tawawa Springs, which was popular with summer vacationers. The patrons were people from Cincinnati; among them were abolitionists as well as many Euro-American plantation owners from the southern states, who often brought their lovers of non-European descent and their "natural" (ie illegitimate) multiracial children with them for extended stays.

One of the paradoxical results of slavery was that in 1860 most of the college's 200 paying students were multiracial descendants of wealthy southern plantation owners who trained their children in Ohio with education they could not have received in the southern states. The men were examples of Euro-American fathers who did not give up their multiracial children, but passed on important social capital in the form of education; they and others also provided money, property, and apprenticeships.

During the Civil War, the plantation owners recalled their sons from college, and the Cincinnati Methodist Conference deemed it necessary to use their resources for war purposes. The college had to close temporarily because of these financial difficulties. In 1863, Payne convinced the AME to take over the entire debt and college itself. Payne was selected as president, the first African American college president of the United States. The AME had to invest more money in the college two years later after a southern sympathizer damaged the buildings by arson. Payne helped raise funds and rebuild. Euro-American sympathizers donated large sums of money, including individual donations of $ 10,000 from board member Salmon P. Chase and a Pittsburgh supporter, as well as a donation of $ 4,200 from a Euro-American. The US Congress approved a $ 25,000 grant for the college to aid rebuilding. Payne ran the college until 1877. Payne made two trips to Europe, where he consulted with other Methodist clerics and studied their educational programs.

In April 1865, after the Civil War, Payne returned to the southern states for the first time in 30 years. With his experience of building an organization, he went to Charleston with nine missionaries and worked with others to build the AME there. He organized missionaries, boards of directors and teachers to bring the AME to the freedmen. A year later, the Church in the southern states had grown by 50,000 believers.

By the end of the Reconstruction period, in 1877, there were AME congregations from Florida to Texas and more than 250,000 new followers had joined the Church. Although the Church had a northern center, it was greatly influenced by its expansion into the southern states. The incorporation of many believers with different worship practices and traditions and musical styles helped shape a national church. It now reflected more the African American culture of the southern states.

In 1881 Payne founded the Bethel Literary and Historical Society , a society that invited speakers on current topics in African American life, and was part of the Lyceum movement .

Payne died on November 2, 1893, after serving the AME Church for more than 50 years.

Works

  • 1888, Recollections of Seventy Years , his memoir.
  • 1891, The History of the AME Church , the first church history of the AME.

Legacies and Honors

Historian James T. Campbell wrote of Payne in his Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (1995), translated here: "No single individual, perhaps with the exception of Richard Allen himself, has more on this helped shape the path and tone of American Methodism. "

further reading

  • Howard D. Gregg, History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church: (The Black Church in Action) , AMEC, 1980
  • Rhondda R. Thomas & Susanna Ashton (Editor): The South Carolina Roots of African American Thought. , Columbia: University of South Carolina Press 2014, "Daniel Payne (1811-1893)", pp. 17-28

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Daniel Alexander Payne: Recollections of Seventy Years , Publishing House of the AME Sunday School Union, Nashville (Tenn.) 1888
  2. ↑ a b c d "Daniel Payne" , This Far by Faith , PBS, 2003, accessed January 13, 2009
  3. ^ Payne, Daniel, Recollections of Seventy Years , Ayer (reprint), 1991, pp. 11-15
  4. ^ Payne, Daniel. Recollections of Seventy Years (1888) Ayer (reprint), 1991, pp. 27-28
  5. ↑ Campbell, James T., Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa , New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, page 37, accessed January 13, 2009
  6. ↑ CH Yellow Erding: Life and Letters of WA Passavant , DD, Illinois Historical Society, 1909, online at [1] on page 529f
  7. Jump up ↑ Campbell, James T., Songs of Zion , New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 39, accessed January 13, 2009
  8. ^ A b Campbell, James T., Songs of Zion , New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 38, accessed January 13, 2009
  9. ↑ Campbell, James T., Songs of Zion , New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, pages 43-47, accessed January 13, 2009
  10. ↑ James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion , New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 259-260 and 263, accessed January 13, 2009
  11. ^ Payne, Daniel, Recollections of Seventy Years , Ayer (reprint), 1991, p. 226
  12. ^ A b c Campbell, James T., Songs of Zion , New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, pages 259-260, accessed January 13, 2009
  13. ^ Talbert (1906), Sons of Allen , p. 267
  14. ↑ Smith, Jessie Carney (Ed.): Black Firsts: 4,000 Ground-Breaking and Pioneering Historical Events , 3rd. Edition, Visible Ink Press, Detroit 2013, ISBN 978-1-57859-369-9 , p. 132.
  15. ^ Horace Talbert, The Sons of Allen: Together with a Sketch of the Rise and Progress of Wilberforce University, Wilberforce, Ohio , 1906 , p. 273; Documenting the South , 2000, University of North Carolina, accessed July 25, 2008
  16. ^ Campbell, James T., Songs of Zion , New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 53-54, accessed January 13, 2009
  17. ^ Elizabeth McHenry : Forgotten readers: recovering the lost history of African American literary societies . Duke University Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0-8223-2995-4 , pp. 141-185.
  18. ^ Daniel Payne: History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church , Charles Spencer Smith, Nashville (Tenn.) 1891
  19. ^ "Daniel Alexander Payne (1811-1893)" , Pennsylvania Historical Markers , waymarking.com
personal data
SURNAME Payne, Daniel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Payne, Daniel Alexander; Payne, Daniel A.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Methodist bishop and educator
DATE OF BIRTH February 24, 1811
PLACE OF BIRTH Charleston, South Carolina , United States
DATE OF DEATH November 2, 1893
Place of death Xenia, Ohio, United States