By the early 1830s, Baptists in the northern and western United States needed a shared statement of faith that could organize interstate missionary work without reopening the older disputes between strict Calvinist and more moderate congregations. The New Hampshire Baptist Convention appointed a committee for the task in 1830, and after several rounds of revision the confession was finally presented to the churches in 1833 by John Newton Brown, whose name has stayed attached to it ever since. Its original articles covered Scripture, the nature of God, the fall, salvation, the church, baptism and the world to come, stated in a form deliberately milder than the older Calvinistic Baptist confessions it drew on, closer to a working consensus most Baptist congregations of the period could actually sign.
Brown was not finished with it. In 1853 he added two further articles, Repentance and Faith and Sanctification, publishing the expanded eighteen article text in his own Baptist Church Manual. That later, longer version, rather than the original 1833 text alone, is the one most Baptist bodies who trace their confession to New Hampshire actually follow today, whether they adopted its wording directly or built their own statement on its language and structure. Its influence reached well beyond the small state whose name it carries, into Baptist bodies it never anticipated speaking for.