They enacted a law several years after the uprising on April 1, 1835, which made teaching literacy to both free people of color and slaves illegal and subject to fines and imprisonment for both whites and blacks. With the passage of this law, Payne had to close his school. In May 1835, Payne sailed from Charleston north to Philadelphia in search of further education. Declining the Methodists' offer, which was contingent on his going on a religious evangelist mission to the Republic of Liberia in West Africa, (which was then being organized as a colony for free blacks and emancipated slaves from the United States), Payne instead studied at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg (founded several yeàrs earlier in 1826) in Gettysburg (Adams County) in rural farming area of south-central Pennsylvania. The Gettysburg Seminary, only a decade old was the second Lutheran theological seminary in North America (the first was Hartwick Seminary in New York) and the current oldest in American Lutheranism. With then only a small number of theology students in one three-stories building capped by a cupola, later known as Old Dorm (today restored and renamed as Schmucker Hall and used today by the Adams County Historical Society), then led by prominent, talented but controversial Evangelical Lutheran theologian and professor Rev. Samuel Simon Schmucker (1799-1873). Payne never was later called or served as a Lutheran minister, though but he was the first to be educated and ordained in 1835 by an American Lutheran church body - the General Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the U.S.A., itself also recently organized 15 years before (1820-1917) as the third major Lutheran synod in America and first nation-wide confederation of regional / state synods and congregations, ancestor to the modern Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (formed by mergers 1988). One source claims he had to drop out of school because of problems with his eyesight. Another source claimed no congregation called him and the leaders and other ministers in the General Synod of the Lutheran Church told him to work through the Methodist Episcopal Church (ancestor body from 1784 to 1939 of the current United Methodist Church) which had a number of "colored" / "Negro" congregations and very strong in Baltimore and Philadelphia, plus the recently organized off-shoot of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Marriage and family Payne married in 1847, but his wife died during the first year