"Such places were defensive communities, where black property owners had circled the wagons against outsiders—a "fortress without walls."
Teachers were very serious about discipline, which was strictly enforced by, for example, switching students with a brush or making them stand in a corner on one leg.
[7] They supervised the establishment of free labor agriculture and provided needed funding to set up schools for ex-slaves; however, some were suspected of collaborating with planters to enforce repressive regulations, or to ignore the cheating of Blacks.
It was created by three life-long abolitionists, Robert Dale Owen, James McKaye and Samuel Gridley, who visited the south and gathered testimony from Blacks and Whites, authoring two joint reports and many accounts of individual observations.
[9] After taking office, President Andrew Johnson vetoed the re-authorization and funding of the bureau in February 1866 during Reconstruction.