Awakened by what the zealous French in Louisiana were doing, English missionaries made progressive plans for preaching the gospel to the blacks. During the 18th century numerous missionaries, catechists, and school-masters, sent from England to America, founded schools for the slaves, and distributed many sermons, lectures, and Bibles among them. In 1705 Thomas counted among his communicants in South Carolina twenty Negroes who could read and write. Later, making a report of the work he and his associates were doing, he said: "I have here presumed to give an account of 1,000 slaves so far as they know of it and are desirous of Christian knowledge and seem willing to prepare themselves for it, in learning to read, for which they redeem the time from their labor. Many of them can read the Bible distinctly, and great numbers of them were learning when I left the province."[14] "After some opposition," Woodson further says, "this work began to progress somewhat in Virginia. The first school established in that colony was for Indians and Negroes.... On the binding out a 'bastard or pauper-child black or white,' churchwardens specifically required that he should be taught 'to read and write and calculate as well as to follow some profitable form of labor.' ... Reports of an increase in the number of colored communicants came from Accomac County where four or five hundred families were instructing their slaves at home and had their children catechised on Sunday."[15] Side by side with the work done by missionaries, men of different denominations vied with one another in bringing slaves into the light of a Christian atmosphere. Some founded Sunday schools, some preached of the "inner light in every man," others more successfully preached salvation by faith in the power of a risen Christ, who died for the sins of men. Soon after the first Negroes were placed upon the shores of Jamestown, slaves began to be baptized, and received into the Episcopal Church. Earnest says that "at least one Negro was baptized soon after the contact with the colonists in Virginia."[16] Washington says that only five years after slavery was introduced into Virginia a Negro child named William was baptized, and that from that time on the names of Negroes can be found upon the register of most of the churches. In the old record-book of Bruton Parish, 1,122[17] Negro-baptisms were recorded between 1746 and 1797.[18] In 1809 there were about 9,000 Negro Baptists in Virginia.[19] The African Baptist Church of Richmond alone subsequently increased from 1,000 to 3,832 in 24 years. The Methodist Magazine of October, 1827, reports that as early as 1817 there were 43,411 Negro members in the Methodist societies.[20]