The Commissioner of Education was the title given to the head of the federal Office of Education, which was historically a unit within and originally assigned to the Department of the Interior in the United States. The position was created on March 2, 1867, when an Act to establish the Office of Education took effect under the influence of the more Radical Republican Party (then "liberal") influences from the Northern states and New England which were much more progressive in the fields of education and had already established many state departments of education and created a large number of public schools and systems in cites, towns and counties, both on the elementary (grammar) school level and the high schools, in which the South had lagged behind.