Oliver Otis Howard, Autobiography of Oliver Otis Howard, major general , United States army : volume 2

A partial consolidation of societies was at last effected. For a time the Bureau dealt in the main with only two, the American Union Commission and the American Missionary Association. The latter, besides its freedmen's schools, carried out the universal desire that the children of white refugees should also be well cared for. At Richmond, Va., the Association had such a school with 375 pupils and five teachers. It had another each evening for 50 adults. The same Association sustained still another at Athens, Tenn., for 95 white children, and partially, for a time near Chattanooga, a refugees' school located in old war buildings which the Confederates had erected near the crest of Lookout Mountain. Mr. Christopher R. Robert of New York City had bought the buildings at the Government's auction sale and devoted them to this use. Mr. Robert ras the same who had established Robert College in Constantinople. A few hundred children were there cared for under the superintendence of Prof. C. F. P. Bancroft, who was later the efficient principal of Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass. After a few years' trial this Lookout Mountain school was closed. Before a railway came the mountain was too inaccessible.

In the face of many difficulties there was hopeful activity the latter part of 1865. An old citizen wrote from Halifax, N. C.: “I constantly see in the streets and on the doorsteps opposite my dwelling groups of little negroes studying their lessons.”

In Charleston, S. C., even in the slave times, free persons of color could be taught in books. In that city at this time the opposition to freedmen's schools was inconsiderable.

In Louisiana, where the schools had been supported