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| Daniel Alexander Payne Historiographer and Bishop of the A.M.E. Church First President of Wilberforce College (now University) |
The Tradd Street school, however, didn't last long, as Payne found that he couldn't make a living with just a few students. So he closed the school and pondered what to do next. No sooner had he closed the school, however, than he something of a spiritual awakening: he perceived that his callings to learn and to teach were in a strong sense sacred callings that he could not abandon without betraying himself and his students, whether enslaved or free.
Payne reopened his school and soon found that his problem had inverted: he had so many students that there was no longer enough room for them. He moved the school once and quickly outgrew those premises as well.
It was at this point that Robert Howard built a school for Payne in his--Howard's--back yard at 80 Anson Street. Howard is himself an interesting study: freeborn in 1807 to Jacob and Dorilla Motte, he seems to have taken the name "Robert Howard" as a _nom de commerce_. Name change or no, Howard was a rip-snorting success in business: note well that when he built the school for Daniel Payne, Howard was himself still only 23 years old, yet he already owned a house with enough space in the back yard for a school, which he could also afford to build. (I am not exactly a disinterested party here: Robert Howard is Jane's 3rd great-grandfather.)
Payne reveled in his new building and the time and space to teach and to learn. He bought a Greek grammar, lexicon, and Greek New Testament and began to teach himself Greek. He did the same with Latin. He studied botany and found a mentor in Dr. John Bachman, a naturalist and Lutheran minister in Charleston who had also assisted John James Audubon with his research. He studied zoology by dissecting almost every creature he could find. He then stuffed and mounted them as specimens for his students. The meat would all go into his soup pot when he was done, except for toads and snakes, which he found that he could not bring himself to eat. He even made his students do physical exercises and play sports and led them himself.
Of course Payne's school aroused concern in the white population, as the education of persons of color was seen as a profound threat to the worldview and personal safety of slaveowners and their families. And it was finally Payne's own native curiosity and zeal for knowledge for its own sake that led to the sad end of not only his school but all schools for children of African descent in South Carolina, whether those children were enslaved or free.
Here is how it happened: during the summer of 1834, Payne wanted a "highland moccasin" snake for his zoology class to examine because he wasn't sure if it was truly a member of the rattlesnake family or of some other family. So he made arrangements with a slave he knew for three of his students to go out to a plantation to collect a specimen. While his students were at the plantation with their glass specimen bottle in hand, the "planter" and his son happened by and inquired of the boys what they were doing. They answered that they were collecting a snake specimen for their classes under Schoolmaster Payne on Anson Street. The boys were further asked about the topics of their studies and other questions about their curriculum. According to Payne's memoir, they answered them all except one—but Payne doesn't specify which question they didn't answer. At the end of the cross-examination, the planter and son were convinced that Payne's school constituted a serious threat to the "social order" and needed to be shut down.
And now an interesting development emerges: in my last post, I listed the possible neighbors to Payne's first school at the home of Caesar Wright on Tradd Street. One apparent next door neighbor to Wright was a lawyer named Kennedy. As it turns out, the slave with whom Payne had made arrangements to collect the snake specimen was enslaved on Lawyer Kennedy's plantation outside of Charleston, and it was Lawyer Kennedy himself along with his son who encountered and cross-examined Payne's students while they were at the plantation. Payne makes this connection quite explicit in his memoir:
"[Lawyer Kennedy and his son] knew me and knew the boys' parents...."
The suggestion is almost irresistible that Payne and Lawyer Kennedy had encountered each other on Tradd Street while Payne was teaching school there. Lawyer Kennedy was one of the magistrates who had presided over the Denmark Vesey trial, which had quite literally set parts of Charleston on fire. Now the fire had been lit that would raze this effort to educate Charleston's children of African descent.
By December, 1834, the South Carolina legislature had passed a bill prohibiting Free Persons of Color from operating schools. Payne says he was led to believe that the authors were two legislators from Charleston. Whoever the authors were, Payne was forced to close his school, and it broke his heart. He left Charleston on a steamboat in May, 1835, bound for New York. His last view of his beloved city was the spire of St. Michael's:
"I SAILED from Charleston the 9th of May, 1835, about four o'clock Saturday, in search of a field of usefulness as a teacher of children and youth, for such was the work to which I was conscious God had been training and was still training me. Numerous were the dear friends who followed me to the steamer, who bade me adieu with many a hearty shake of the hand and sincere wish for prosperity, while they stood weeping. As for me, almost blind with tears, I stood at the steamer's side, also weeping, and gazed till distance placed them out of my sight and till, like a flying bird, the tall spire of St. Michael's Church faded amidst the glories of the setting sun...."
Payne would not return to Charleston until thirty years later, when the War was over, and he was a Bishop and the president of Wilberforce.
The link here is to the online version of Payne's memoir on which my account here is based.
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