Foreign friends of the race were equally active in promoting education and religion among the freedmen. In 1863, members of the Society of Friends in England contributed to this relief work L3,000. The following year L5,000 came from this source in England and L1,500 from Ireland. That same year there came through the New England Society $2,100 from the London Freedmen's Aid Society, smaller sums from France and Ireland, and $1,313 from five Parsee firms in London. Similar contributions were secured from abroad by other relief societies organized in the United States. According to facts obtained by the Freedman's Bureau the English aid societies contributed to the relief of the Negroes between 1865 and 1869 at least $500,000. Dr. J. L. M. Curry believed that the total receipts in money and supplies reached $1,000,000. The facts set forth above well represent the activities of the Friends and of the Congregationalists, Free Will Baptists, Wesleyans, Methodists, and Reformed Dutch, for whom the American Missionary Association served as an agent; but there were in the field several churches working independently. Among these were the Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians. To systematize its efforts the Methodists organized in 1866 "The Freedmen Aid Society of the Methodist Church." The first efforts of this society were directed toward primary, normal, and higher education. In 1868 the Methodists had then established through this agency 29 schools with 51 teachers and 5,000 students in Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia. By the end of the sixth year of its existence the receipts of the society amounted to $315,100. During these years the American Baptist Home Missionary Association supported by Presbyterians and United Brethren in Christ, was sending workers right in the wake of the Union armies invading the Mississippi Valley. The Baptists had opened a school for Negroes in Alexandria in 1862, and by 1864 had sent missionaries into the District of Columbia, Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Louisiana. Because of the freedom exercised by the Baptists locally, there was among them much duplication of effort which resulted in confusion; but the American Baptist Home Missionary Association finally emerged as a unifying factor among these workers. This society had made such rapid strides by 1867 that it had in the field 50 ordained ministers and a large number of Negro students in training for the work. The Free-Will Baptists while cooperating with the American Home Missionary Association made some efforts by themselves. They carried on some work in the Shenandoah Valley and in the West with 40 missionaries and teachers and 3,467 students.