Daniel Alexander Payne was born free in Charleston, South Carolina, ran a school for Black children until the state outlawed it, and went north to train for the ministry. As the sixth bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, he spent four decades insisting on an educated clergy, and in 1863 he led the church’s purchase of Wilberforce University in Ohio, becoming its president and one of the first African Americans to head an American college. His autobiography and his history of the AME Church remain foundational sources for nineteenth-century Black religious and educational history.
At a Glance
- Born
- 24 February 1811, Charleston, South Carolina
- Died
- November 1893 (sources differ on the day), Wilberforce, Ohio
- Known for
- Purchase and presidency of Wilberforce University (1863–1876); Recollections of Seventy Years (1888); History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (1891)
- HBCU ties
- Wilberforce University (Among its founders in 1856; led the AME Church’s purchase in 1863 and served as president until 1876)
- Fields
- Religion · Education
- Era
- 19th Century
Early Life
Payne was born on 24 February 1811 in Charleston to London and Martha Payne, free Black Methodists. His father died when he was about four and his mother when he was about nine, and he was raised by a great-aunt, Sarah Bordeaux. He studied for two years at the school of the Minors’ Moralist Society, an association of Charleston’s free people of color, and then with the teacher Thomas S. Bonneau. He was raised in Charleston’s Cumberland Methodist Church and formally joined the Methodist church as a teenager. He worked in turn for a shoe merchant, as a carpenter’s apprentice, and as a tailor, while teaching himself mathematics, natural science, Greek, Latin, and French.
In 1829 Payne opened a school for Black children in Charleston. It grew to roughly sixty pupils, most of them free, though some enslaved children were taught there clandestinely, and he taught subjects well beyond basic literacy. White South Carolinians, alarmed by abolitionist literature and by the example of Nat Turner’s 1831 revolt in Virginia, grew hostile to Black education. In December 1834 the legislature made it a crime to teach enslaved people to read or write and barred free people of color from keeping schools, and Payne was forced to close his school in the spring of 1835.
Life and Work
With letters of introduction from white clergymen, among them the Lutheran pastor and naturalist John Bachman, Payne sailed for Philadelphia in May 1835. He enrolled at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he studied under Samuel Simon Schmucker until failing eyesight cut his studies short in 1837. He was then ordained by the Lutheran Franklin Synod; sources give the date as 1837 or 1839. Finding no Lutheran congregation to serve, he ran a school in Philadelphia and in 1841 joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church, entering its ministry soon afterward. He was also active in the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, which aided people escaping slavery.
Payne quickly became the AME Church’s leading advocate of an educated clergy, a position that provoked resistance from ministers who regarded formal learning as unnecessary for preaching. In 1844 the church’s General Conference adopted his committee’s plan for a required course of study for ministers. In 1848 he was appointed the church’s first historiographer. After pastorates in Washington and Baltimore, he was elected bishop in 1852, the sixth in the church’s history and the first with formal theological training. His private life in these years was marked by loss: his first wife, Julia Ferris, whom he married in 1847, died in childbirth about a year later. He later married Eliza J. Clark.
In 1856 the Methodist Episcopal Church opened Wilberforce University near Xenia, Ohio, to educate Black students, and Payne was among its founders. The Civil War cut off much of its support, and the school closed during the war. On 10 March 1863 Payne committed the AME Church to buy the property for $10,000, though the church did not yet have the money, and he became president of the reopened university. Wilberforce became the first college in the United States owned and operated by African Americans. In April 1865 fire destroyed its main building; Payne raised money to rebuild and led the institution until 1876.
Payne also directed the church’s expansion into the South. In 1863 he sent AME missionaries to freed people in the Union-occupied Sea Islands, and in May 1865 he returned to South Carolina for the first time in thirty years to organize the church’s South Carolina Conference in Charleston. Over the following decade the AME Church grew rapidly among freed people across the former Confederacy. Payne traveled twice to Europe and in 1881 took part in the first Ecumenical Methodist Conference in London; that year he also founded the Bethel Literary and Historical Association in Washington, D.C.
Legacy
In his last years Payne wrote the works for which he is best known. Recollections of Seventy Years (1888) traced his life from Charleston through the Civil War, and History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (1891) set down the denomination’s early record from church documents and his own memory. In 1893 he spoke at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago. He died at his home at Wilberforce that November; sources give the date variously as 2, 3, or 29 November. He was buried in Laurel Cemetery in Baltimore.
Historian James T. Campbell has judged that, apart from Richard Allen, no individual did more to shape African Methodism. Payne helped turn a denomination built by self-taught preachers into one that expected its clergy to be educated and that sponsored colleges and seminaries. Payne Theological Seminary at Wilberforce and the former Daniel Payne College in Birmingham, Alabama, carry his name. His insistence that Black churches should produce trained leaders and keep their own history anticipated the institution-building of the late nineteenth century, and his two books remain indispensable sources for scholars of Black religion and education.
Payne believed that freedom required education, and he spent his life building schools — even after South Carolina made keeping them a crime. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 24 February 1811 Born free in Charleston, South Carolina.
- 1829 Opens a school for Black children in Charleston.
- December 1834 South Carolina outlaws schools kept by free people of color; Payne closes his school in 1835.
- 1835–1837 Studies at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
- 1841 Joins the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
- 1848 Appointed the church’s first historiographer.
- 1852 Elected sixth bishop of the AME Church.
- 10 March 1863 Leads the AME purchase of Wilberforce University; becomes its president.
- May 1865 Organizes the AME Church’s South Carolina Conference in Charleston.
- 1888 Publishes Recollections of Seventy Years.
- November 1893 Dies at Wilberforce, Ohio.
Sources and Further Reading
- Daniel Alexander Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years (Nashville: Publishing House of the A.M.E. Sunday School Union, 1888). Link
- Daniel Alexander Payne, History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Nashville: Publishing House of the A.M.E. Sunday School Union, 1891). Link
- South Carolina Encyclopedia, “Payne, Daniel Alexander.” Link
- Kayomi Wada, “Daniel Alexander Payne (1811–1893),” BlackPast.org, 2008. Link
- James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
- Josephus R. Coan, Daniel Alexander Payne (Philadelphia: A.M.E. Book Concern, 1935).
Related on Black-History.com
Cite this page
- MLA
- “Daniel Alexander Payne.” Black-History.com, 30 Sept. 2026, https://black-history.com/people/daniel-alexander-payne/.
- APA
- Black-History.com Editors. (2026, September 30). Daniel Alexander Payne. Black-History.com. https://black-history.com/people/daniel-alexander-payne/
- Chicago
- Black-History.com Editors. “Daniel Alexander Payne.” Black-History.com. September 30, 2026. https://black-history.com/people/daniel-alexander-payne/.
By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.