The Negro Baptists of North Carolina organized the first State Convention in 1866. Alabama and Virginia followed in 1867, and very soon thereafter came Arkansas, Kentucky, and finally all of the States in the South. Immediately thereafter they began to affiliate with larger national bodies. The first of these larger groups was the Northwestern and Southern Baptist Convention, organized in 1864. In 1866 there was held an important convention in Richmond, when it was determined to consolidate all of the general interests of the Negro Baptists, the Missionary, the Northwestern and Southern conventions as one large body, to be called the Consolidated American Baptist Missionary Convention.[10] This convention operated largely in the South and tended to decline. In 1873 the West revived its organization under the name of the Baptist Association of the Western States and Territories, while the northern churches adhered to another organization called the New England Missionary Convention, organized in 1875. In the course of time these two bodies so expanded as to embrace the whole country, yet in 1880 certain Baptists here and there formed a national body to do work in foreign lands, designating it the Baptist Foreign Mission Convention of the United States. The feeling, however, that there should be a concentration of the efforts of all Baptists directed through one national body to a particular point of attack led to a more significant national meeting of the Negro Baptists held in St. Louis in 1886. The work of the Baptist Foreign Mission Convention was later so modified that all of the national and international church work of the denomination was unified through the organization of the National Baptist Convention. That these Baptists despite their excess of liberty succeeded as well as they did, was due in a measure to the fact that they exercised the good judgment in not immediately getting too far from their friends. The Negroes used the same polity, the same literature, and sometimes the same national agencies as the white Baptists. The southern Baptists were then less interested in these communicants whom, some say, they gladly got rid of when they could no longer dictate their spiritual development as the master did that of the slave; but the northern Baptists felt obligated to send their missionaries among the freedmen. These apostles to the lowly brought words of good cheer, expounded the gospel, established new churches, and distributed books for the enlightenment of the masses. Among some of these lowly people these men were received as apostles of old, welcomed to a new harvest which had long been waiting, for the laborers among the lowly were few. CHAPTER X RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AS A PREPARATION