former gave the first hundred dollars. Within three months the first payment of $2,500 was made and the title deeds were handed the three, Payne, Mitchell, and Shorter, as agents of the A. M. E. Church. Bishop Payne was elected to its presidency, which made him the first Negro college president in the United States. Within eighteen months $5,000 more of the purchase-money was paid.

By a remarkable coincidence, on the day when the Nation was mourning the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, April 15, 1865, the main building was destroyed by fire, believed to be the work of an incendiary. Bishop Payne was then in Baltimore holding a conference.

In the sixteen years in which the bishop was president of Wilberforce his work was tremendous. As bishop he exacted of all applicants for the ministry that they should give considerable time to systematic study and lead exemplary lives; as an educator in this critical period, the first ten years of the Negro after emancipation and through the Reconstruction Period, he trained scores of young men and women to usefulness, both in the pulpit and the schoolroom. They and the result of their work are found all over the country.

Bishop Payne had frequently visited President Lincoln during the last two years of the Civil War. He had also visited Andrew Johnson while governor of Tennessee and among others had looked in the large schools for freedmen under the instruction of white teachers from New England and the West at different points of the South. Such a school was on the plantation of former Governor Henry A. Wise in Princess Anne County, near Norfolk, Va. But the greatest satisfaction of all was his return to Charleston, South Carolina, reaching there exactly thirty years to the day and hour from that at which he was forced to leave it by the laws of the State. He found a few old friends, preached with eloquence to the sons and daughters of those who knew him as their wonderful teacher of a gener

ation past, but the crowning work of this visit was the organization of the South Carolina Conference, May 15, 1865. From this as a center the A. M. E. Church was carried into North Carolina, to the remotest corner of the Palmetto State, and throughout Georgia, Florida and Alabama.

Service similar to that rendered by him twenty years before throughout the North and West, Bishop Payne now performed in the South. Bright-eyed boys and girls were encouraged through his influence to pursue their studies to the point where as teachers or preachers they could help lift burdens of ignorance and immorality in the way of the elevation and progress of their

race.

He twice visited Europe. In 1867, going out in the same steamer with William Lloyd Garrison, the American, and George Thompson, the English abolitionist. Both in England and France he received much social attention. Fourteen years later he was delegate to the First Ecumenical Conference of the Methodist Church, a world-wide federation that met in London, where his dignified, refined and consecrated manner, added to his splendid abilities, gave a very high place to the work of the A. M. E. Church. On the 17th of September, 1881, he presided over this body.

When he resigned the active management of the university he gave his principal energies to his religious work and his literary labors. Among his published works are, "Domestic Education," "Poems," "Education of the Ministry," "A. M. E. Semi-Centenary," "Recollections of Seventy Years" and "History of the A. M. E. Church."

The literary associations connected with the A. M. E. Churches throughout the country and indirectly the lyceums of other denominations is a part of the fruitage of the seed sown by Bishop Payne in his early years.

During the last ten years of his life his work as a bishop was comparatively nominal, as he gave much of his time to literary

work and spent his winters in Jacksonville, Florida. In no organization, not strictly denominational, was he more successful than in the establishment and fostering care of the Bethel Literary Association at the National Capital, whose reputation is world-wide.

In the World's Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in connection with the Columbian Exposition of 1893, Bishop Payne was a most striking figure. No one commanded more respect. At the celebration of the liberties of the American Continent, held September 22, the bishop presided, a fitting recognition of his eminence as a prelate and a representative of the "despised race" whose liberties had been but lately enlarged.

The bishop shortly afterwards left Chicago for his home at Wilberforce where he made his usual preparation for his fall and winter sojourn in Florida, but November 20, the day before the time fixed for his departure for Jacksonville, his spirit took its flight.

The appearance of Bishop Payne was that of chronic invalidism; thin almost to emaciation, below the average height; features sharp; keen, penetrating eyes; voice, sharp and shrill, but with an ample forehead indicating intellectual strength and refinement.

XXIII

HENRY HIGHLAND GARNET

THE Convention Movement developed a leadership among the American Negroes that exerted a wide influence upon the race throughout the North and on the Nation. Among the foremost stands Henry Highland Garnet, whose address to the slaves of the country, while it stirred the Convention held in 1843, at Buffalo, to a degree of enthusiasm unequaled by any other single deliverance in the thirty years of the Movement, nevertheless was so bold and aggressive that the Convention actually refused to adopt it. They feared the consequences of giving sanction to so revolutionary and radical a doctrine. Garnet, however, was not playing to the galleries. The same defiant, militant spirit exhibited when he learned on his return to New York fourteen years before, that slaveholders from Maryland, tracing the flight of the family to New York had dared to attempt to apprehend, seize and return them to slavery; the spirit which had actually taken the offensive against the New Hampshire mob that had closed the Academy at Canaan in which he, Alexander Crummell and Thomas S. Sidney were students this spirit before the chosen delegates of the freemen of the North threw down the gage to slaveholding America. It was a command for the slaves to rise in their might and strike a blow for freedom. Though the Convention refused to adopt the address, it was nevertheless published. John Brown, who sixteen years later led the insurrection at Harper's Ferry, published and circulated Garnet's address at his own expense.

No extract from this address can give a clear idea of its logic,