Robert Paine was an American clergyman. He served as bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
Background
Robert Paine was born on November 12, 1799 in Person County, North Carolina, United States. He was the son of James and Nancy (Williams) Paine and a descendant of Dr. James Paine, who emigrated from England in 1699 and settled in Person County, North Carolina, where Robert was born. In 1814 his parents moved to Giles County, Tennessee.
Education
Robert Paine was sent to the best private schools of the region and was ready to enter the sophomore class of Cumberland College, Nashville, Tenn. , when, on October 9, 1817, he had a vital religious experience and became convinced of a call to preach. Within a month after conversion he was traveling a circuit, and in October 1818 was admitted on trial to the Tennessee Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
Career
On November 11, 1821, Robert Paine was ordained deacon, and on November 26, 1823, elder. His rise was rapid; at the age of twenty-four he was sent as a delegate to the General Conference, and he attended every session of that body for the next twenty years. In 1830, when LaGrange College, Franklin County, Alabama, was founded under the patronage of the Tennessee and Alabama conferences, Paine was selected to be its first president, although for four years, out of modesty, he refused to accept the title of president, preferring to call himself superintendent. He had a difficult task directing the affairs of a college which lacked endowment and equipment, but he gave sacrificial service to the institution. For a number of years he contributed more than half of his annual salary to the school. He found the work of a college executive irksome and preferred to be in the pastorate, but for sixteen years, out of a sense of duty to his denomination, he remained as president.
Paine was closely connected with the formation of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. He was a delegate to the General Conference of 1844, which marked the schism in the Methodist Episcopal Church, and was chairman of the committee that prepared the Plan of Separation, providing for a peaceable division of the Church. He attended the convention at Louisville, Kentucky, May 1845, where the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was formally organized, and at its first General Conference, May 1846, he was elected bishop, which office he held for thirty-six years.
After his elevation to the episcopacy he made his home at Aberdeen, Mississippi. He was not a participant in partisan politics. For thirty years prior to the Civil War he did not even vote in presidential elections for fear that such action might harm his moral and religious influence. Because of this attitude, President Buchanan invited him to the White House in November 1860, in order to secure, as Buchanan said, an unbiased statement in regard to the Southern states.
As his episcopal duties were hampered during the Civil War, Paine preached in the Confederate camps, secured chaplains for the army, and made his home an asylum for wounded soldiers. When at times the Federal troops came into the vicinity of Aberdeen, it was necessary for the bishop to go into temporary exile in order to avoid capture. He was sixty-five years old when the Civil War ended, but the next seventeen years of his life were as busy as those of his early and middle manhood.
He did not retire from active work until he was eighty-one years of age, and then only a few months before his death. Upon the request of the General Conference of 1854 he wrote a biography of Bishop McKendree, entitled Life and Times of William McKendree (1869). He also prepared a series of articles in 1881 for the Nashville Christian Advocate, under the title "Notes of Life". At one time he possessed considerable property, but as a result of the Civil War he suffered heavy financial losses. He died on October 19, 1882.
Achievements
Connections
Robert Paine was married three times. First, in 1824, to Susanna Beck of Nashville, Tennessee, who died in June 1836. Second, in 1837, to Amanda Shaw of Columbia, Tennessee, who lived but a few months thereafter. Third, in 1839, to Mary Eliza Millwater. There were two sons by the first marriage and four sons and three daughters by the third.