The Freedmen's Aid Society was founded in 1859 during the American Civil War by the American Missionary Association (AMA), a group supported chiefly by the Congregational, Presbyterian and Methodist churches in the North. It organized a supply of teachers from the North and provided housing for them, to set up and teach in schools in the South for freedmen and their children. The AMA founded a total of more than 500 schools and colleges for freedmen in the South after the war, so that freedmen could be educated as teachers, nurses and other professionals.