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Q. Why are surgeons more aggressive and short tempered than doctors of other streams?A. TL;DR There are potential risks and consequences of operating room nurse/colleagues abuse and these include violation of institutional and medical staff bylaws and violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with potential monetary awards which are not covered by most malpractice carriers. If the awards include punitive damages, they are designed to punish and are not recoverable from any insurance held by the defendant.The JCAHO recommends that disruptive physicians be educated and that the focus of handling disruptive behavior should be based on rehabilitation rather than punishment. JCAHO regulations do recognize that at times, after attempts at rehabilitation have failed, suspension, abridgement, or revocation of hospital privileges are the only options remaining to the institution. At that time, reporting of the decisions to the State Licensing Board and the National Practitioner Data Bank is mandatory.Consequences and potential problems of operating room outbursts and temper tantrums by surgeonsGeorge B. Jacobs and Rosanne L. WilleAbstractBackground:Anecdotal tales of colorful temper tantrums and outbursts by surgeons directed at operating room nurses and at times other health care providers, like residents and fellows, are part of the history of surgery and include not only verbal abuse but also instrument throwing and real harassment. Our Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Nancy Epstein, has made the literature review of “Are there truly any risks and consequences when spine surgeons mistreat their predominantly female OR nursing staff/colleagues, and what can we do about it?,” an assigned topic for members of the editorial board as part of a new category entitled Ethical Note for our journal. This is a topic long overdue and I chose to research it.Methods:There is no medical literature to review dealing with nurse abuse. To research this topic, one has to involve business, industry, educational institutions, compliance standards and practices, and existing state and federal laws. I asked Dr. Rosanne Wille to co-author this paper since, as the former Dean of Nursing and then Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at a major higher educational institution, she had personal experience with compliance regulations and both sexual harassment and employment discrimination complaints, to make this review meaningful.Results:A review of the existing business practices and both state and federal laws strongly suggests that although there has not been any specific legal complaint that is part of the public record, any surgeon who chooses to act out his or her frustration and nervous energy demands by abusing co-workers on the health care team, and in this case specifically operating room personnel, is taking a chance of making legal history with financial outcomes which only an actual trial can predict or determine. Even more serious outcomes of an out-of-control temper tantrum and disruptive behavior can terminate, after multiple hearings and appeals, in adverse decisions affecting hospital privileges.Conclusions:Surgeons who abuse other health care workers are in violation of institutional bylaws and compliance regulations and create a hostile environment at work which adversely affects efficient productivity and violates specific State and Federal laws which prohibit discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, or national origin.Keywords: Compliance, discrimination, employment, federal laws, harassment, hospital privileges, hostile, sexual, state lawsINTRODUCTIONThe history of surgery abounds with tales of angry and difficult senior surgeons who abused any person who, because of physical proximity, became the object of their fury. Many of us find amusement in retelling these anecdotes after we have escaped to the relative safety of rank or distance but remember that we passed the ring of fire and escaped injury. In the operating room, the abusive outbursts were commonly directed at the scrub nurse who was expected to stand mute and take it. I specifically do not want to name the offending surgeons who not only used words but also threw instruments to the floor and occasionally at the nurses. Their aim happily was often spoiled by their rage but occasionally hit its intended victim. Most of us in academic medicine know about a famous chair of neurosurgery in the Midwest and another famous chief of surgery in New York whose statue adorns the lobby of a major medical center as chronic offenders. Younger surgeons often took on the traits of their teacher and I vividly remember a chief resident who was described by our “CHIEF” with some admiration as someone who could slam a curtain. I myself had less luck with attempts at dominant behavior in the operating room. As a young surgeon, I once irritably instructed a very young scrub nurse that I wanted only blind obedience in my operating room. For the next 35 or so years, when she was an operating room director and I was a surgical chair and we were friends, she never once let me forget the stupidity of my outburst which was told and retold accompanied by gales of laughter at my expense over and over again. I am a quick learner, so I never repeated anything like that again.Tolerating this abysmal behavior is thankfully no longer accepted. Public abuse of operating room personnel can, and should, be stopped instantly by surgical chiefs, medical staff officers, and administrators. It is more difficult to stop private discussions which border on abuse and insults, but education through mandatory conferences dealing with sexual abuse and a hostile work environment should and will help. Both industry and colleges and universities have required, compliance mandated, sessions to prevent violations of real and at times oversensitive and perceived, rather then intended, offenses.This paper will examine the industry and institutional standards and existing state and federal laws which may potentially apply and represent a risk for the offenders.INSTITUTIONAL BYLAWS AND PRACTICESEvery institution providing health care, be it a major medical center or a local community hospital must, as part of its incorporation and accreditation documentation, provide a set of bylaws of the governing body and the medical staff. All of the bylaws have a section dealing with ensuring and supporting a productive work environment. The specific wording may differ from institution to institution, but the meaning of the bylaws is uniformly clear, and that is to promote a healthy, cooperative, and safe environment for patients and staff alike.Regulatory agencies, i.e. the Joint Commission for Accreditation of Health Care Organizations (JCAHO), also known as The Joint Commission (TJC), State Medical Boards, and the federally mandated National Practitioner Data Bank have established requirements for handling and reporting of disruptive behavior by physicians. The JCAHO recommends that disruptive physicians be educated and that the focus of handling disruptive behavior should be based on rehabilitation rather than punishment. JCAHO regulations do recognize that at times, after attempts at rehabilitation have failed, suspension, abridgement, or revocation of hospital privileges are the only options remaining to the institution. At that time, reporting of the decisions to the State Licensing Board and the National Practitioner Data Bank is mandatory.[5,7]Specific forms of disruptive behavior listed are:[5,7] (1) degrading comments or insults, (2) inappropriate joking, (3) profanity, (4) physical assault, and (5) spreading malicious rumors.The JCAHO, in other words, recognizes and condemns abusive behavior in the operating room and elsewhere in the hospital environment. Insulting language or descriptions involving a member of the health care team or the spreading of malicious rumors about colleagues, out of the immediate institutional environment, would qualify as being disruptive behavior.Large businesses, industry, and educational institutions have a long history of needing to deal with complaints about discriminatory practices. In industries where the majority of workers are women and many supervisors are men, an allegation of sexual harassment is not unusual. To be defined as sexual harassment, the behavior does not have to be a request for sexual favors. Offensive comments about, or interpreted to be about, women are sufficient to be labeled sexual harassment. In an environment where the majority of nurses are women and the majority of surgeons are men, it is not difficult to imagine that the person at the receiving end of a barrage of insults decides that she was a victim of sexual discrimination.[6,14]In order to meet corporate compliance regulations of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and reduce liability of harassment claims, a company (educational or health care institution) must train employees and supervisors, require employees to report harassment, thoroughly investigate all reports, and take corrective actions.[5,6] Many institutions, including colleges and universities and major medical centers, have instituted mandatory training and education which is conducted on an yearly basis. There are multiple providers of compliancy training to assist organizations to meet the requirements and be proactive in preventing or ending a hostile work environment. Inactivity represents a real liability financially and a potentially devastating public image risks affecting the success of the institution, be it a business, hospital, or university.FEDERAL ANTI-DISCRIMINATION LAWSThe Federal EEOC is charged with enforcing all the federal laws prohibiting job discrimination.For the purpose of this paper, the most significant federal law is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. As a corollary to the 1964 Civil Rights Act is the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which among other provisions provides monetary damages in cases of intentional employment discrimination.[4]It does not take much imagination to see how this can be applied to nurse abuse in the operating room by surgeons.STATE ANTI-DISCRIMINATION LAWSMany states have adopted anti-discrimination legislation which, to some extent, is similar and even mirrors the federal laws. The most specific is California AB 1825 which requires employers of 50 or more employees to provide all supervisory employees with formal education consisting of 2 hours of sexual harassment prevention[13] every 2 years. The final regulations were issued by the California Fair Employment and Housing Commission (FEHC) which published the finding that failure to comply with AB 1825 will open the door to sexual harassment lawsuits and make it harder to prove in court that the (your) organization took reasonable steps to correct sexual harassment.A similar law in Connecticut requires that all supervisory personnel be given 2 hours of harassment prevention instruction within 6 months after becoming a supervisor. Additional training within 3 years is encouraged.Maine Title 26, Section 808 requires that employers of 15 or more employees train all their employees about workplace harassment and discrimination within 1 year. The specifics of the training are not defined.Other states have approved anti-discrimination laws, but training is not required for compliance. Federal anti-discrimination rules and training requirements apply in all states.ATTORNEY ADVERTISINGIt is only necessary to open a yellow page phone book or access Google or any other search engine to find advertising from multiple law firms seeking clients. The law firms promise to address potential discrimination claims using state and federal courts. Nearly all of the firms offer a contingency fee arrangement, or a no risk to the client lawsuit alleging, among other complaints, sexual harassment, the creation of a hostile work environment, and employment discrimination. In view of the media-publicised hostile work environment, sexual harassment, and employment discrimination awards, it is a surprise, not an expectation, that some operating room nurse has not thought about how to respond to an aggressive surgical attack instead of ignoring the torment. Sooner or later, however, this is bound to happen.DEFENDING HOSTILE WORK ENVIRONMENT CLAIMSThere are two separate areas of potential problems for the abusive surgeon which may call for a legal defense. The first one is the institution and the second, a court of law. Only two theories are available to the defense.What Dr. X said does not meet the “severe or pervasive” definition of harassment laws. He didn’t mean it. He is sorry. She is oversensitive and he was just talking and making a joke.[9] This defense theory can be best described as the “I didn’t know the gun was loaded” defense.This claim represents a violation of my First Amendment rights of free speech.This line of defense has a more substantial chance of success. Professor of Law at UCLA, Eugene Volokh, has written extensively about Freedom of Speech and Workplace Harassment Laws.[9] He reported a big free speech win in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the Huffington Post.[19] The court opined that in an academic community, a professor's expression on a matter of public concern (even if offensive to some) does not constitute harassment.DISCUSSIONThis paper aims to address the questions: “Are there risks and consequences when spine surgeons mistreat their predominately female operating room nursing staff/colleagues and what can we do about it?” It became quickly obvious to us that this could not be handled in the same manner as our usual literature search. Medical literature does not address abusive behavior problems except obliquely. Even nursing literature tends to shy away from this topic. We had to turn to industry and the law to answer these questions.Gender discrimination at work has been described in Psych Central News, an internet psychology journal.[10] In Forbes Magazine, an excellent article by Michael Morris and Susan Fiske quoted Susan Fiske's keynote address at the Columbia Business School Conference in 2012. Dr. Fiske is a Princeton University psychologist. The theme of the conference was that despite decades of activism, legislation, and human resources programs, discrimination at work continues unabated but manages to hide itself better.[8]Many of us are products of training programs which profess to practice the Socratic Method of Education.[1,3] This educational theory is based on teaching by dialogue rather then lectures and is very appealing until it becomes a method of practicing resident abuse at Grand Rounds. The fellows, who are at times leading the conferences, are expected to follow the example of the Chief and actively participate in resident hazing in order to "make men of them." Small wonder that after this education, some of us turn to nurse and colleague abuse, particularly if they are women and appear to be defenseless.The term “sexual harassment” was used for the first time in 1973 in a report to the President and Chancellor of MIT about various forms of gender issues. It may have been used by various women's groups as early as 1970.[11,12] It is essential to understand that sexual harassment does not have to include demands for sexual favors. It is sufficient that it can be interpreted as being gender specific and severe and pervasive. Employment discrimination law recognizes several protected categories. Among the 16 categories listed, Sex or Gender and Gender Orientation are pertinent to this paper.[9]Professor Volokh, in his excellent paper in the Georgetown Law Journal,[20] describes the fact that the law's vagueness increases its breath and makes it open to interpretation. He advises to stay wide of the unlawful zone and eliminate any possible offensive behavior and severe and pervasive practices to create a hostile or abusive environment at work. If an employer continues to question his attorney to describe specific potential consequences of violations of the law, Professor Volokh advises counsel to answer: “We won’t know until it gets to court.” That is exactly the potential fate of the surgeon who insists on abusing co-workers.A complaint to the governing body of the institution (hospital, medical center) leads to a hearing by a medical staff committee. Depending on the seriousness of the complaint, the resolution may be dismissal of the complaint or may include a number of remedial actions up to and including revocation of privileges. When that happens or when a suspension or abridgement of privileges is recommended, the case invariably will end up in court. It would be unusual to have operating room nurse abuse alone result in a penalty so severe that a report to the National Practitioner Data Bank and the State Board of Medical Examiners becomes mandatory. Any adverse decision about clinical privileges meets the mandatory reporting criteria in every state.[5,7] To result in privilege abridgment, or more, the physician would have to be considered a disruptive physician whose continued presence on the medical staff would interfere in quality health care delivery. Very few judges are likely to reverse that kind of decision.During my tenure as a Department Chair, President of the Medical Staff, and Chair of the Medical Board (Medical Executive Committee), and my many years of membership on the Executive Committee of the Board of Governors of the University Hospital, we had several instances dealing with impaired physicians and only one instance when a revocation of privileges was recommended because of disruptive behavior. The physician who came under review did not just abuse operating room nurses, but also engaged in hostile and threatening behavior in other areas of the institution.Most industries recognized some time ago that it is not a good business practice to use gender-specific names and terms which part of the workforce might find demeaning or offensive. Both I and Dr. Wille, as professional pilots, experienced this alternate terminology when we were directed to change the name of “cockpit” to “flight deck” and “stewardess” to “flight attendant”. It was only after the change in name was official that most of us recognized the potential problem which could be interpreted as contributing to the creation or maintenance of a hostile work environment.The First Amendment to the Constitution, adopted on December 15, 1789, simply states: Congress shall make no laws respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peacefully to assemble, and to petition the government for regress of grievances. In the beginning, the First Amendment applied only to the federal governments, but in the 20th century the Supreme Court incorporated the Establishment Clause which made the amendment apply to the states as well.[15–18]It is the First Amendment freedom of speech clause which is used to defend most of the verbal harassment complaints which are the discussed in this paper.CONCLUSIONSThere are indeed potential risks and consequences of operating room nurse/colleagues abuse and these include violation of institutional and medical staff bylaws and violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with potential monetary awards which are not covered by most malpractice carriers. If the awards include punitive damages, they are designed to punish and are not recoverable from any insurance held by the defendant.Finally, for those surgeons who have a self-value far in excess of what any nurse has, it is worth to consider the following as a valuable lesson of what the world thinks of nurses: On the retirement of Lieutenant General Eric B. Schoomaker, MD, PhD, as the US Army Surgeon General, President Obama nominated and the US Senate confirmed the appointment of Major General Patricia D. Horoho as the US Army Surgeon General. General Horoho served as the Commanding Officer of the Army Nurse Corps and Assistant Surgeon General prior to be given the Army Medical Command. On December 5, 2011, General Raymond T. Ordierno, the Army Chief of Staff, promoted Major General Horoho to Lieutenant General and administered the oath to swear her in as the Army's Chief Medical Officer. General Horoho is the first woman and the first nurse to serve as the Commanding Officer of the Medical Corps. Think about that the next time you decide to abuse a nurse or a woman colleague.[2]FootnotesDisclaimer: The authors of this paper have received no outside funding and have nothing to disclose.Available FREE in open access from: http://www.surgicalneurologyint.com/text.asp?2012/3/4/167/98577REFERENCES1. Areeda PE. The Socratic Method. Harv Law Rev. 1996;109:911–22.2. Army News Service. 1996;109:911–922.3. Benson HH. Socratic Wisdom: The Model of Knowledge in Plato's Early Dialogues. New York: Oxford University Press; 2000. pp. ix–292.4. Federal Laws Prohibiting Job Discrimination: EEOP/Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (CSRA) Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Office of Special Councel (OSC) Merit System Protection Board (MSPB)5. Gross JC. Article Regarding Disruptive Physicians. [Last accessed on 2012 Feb 15]. Available from: http://www.medical-peer-review.com/Articles/Article-Regarding-Disruptive-Physicians.sh,2012 .6. Huhman H. How to Recognize Sexual Harassment in the Workplace. [Last accessed on 2012 Feb 15]. Available from:http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/outside-voicescareers/2011/11/11 .7. McDonald O, Silbaugh B. Disruptive Physician Behavior. Quantia MD. 20118. Morris M, Fiske S. The New Face of Workplace Discrimination. [Last accessed on 2012 Feb 15]. Available from:http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/12/discriminination-workplace-prejudiceleadership-managers .9. OPM web site. [Last accessed on 2012 Feb 15]. Available from:http://www.opm.gov/er/address2/guide01.htm , http://www.osc.gov/ , http://www.mspb.gov/10. Psych Central News Editor. Gender Discrimination in the Workplace. [Last accessed on 2012 Feb 15]. Available from:http://psychcentral.com/news/2009/10/09/gender-discrimination-in-theworkplace/8868.html .11. Rowe M. Saturn's Rings: Graduate and Professional Education of Women, American Association of University Women. 197412. Rowe M, Bendersky C. Workplace to Society. New York: Cornell University Press; 2001. Workplace Justice, Zero Tolerance and Zero Barriers.13. State of California: AB 1825, June 27, 2003.14. US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: Sexual Harassment. 2003 Jun 27;15. United States Supreme Court: Burlington Industries v. Ellerth, 524 U.S. 199816. US Supreme Court: Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet, 512 U.S. 687. 199417. US Supreme Court: Everson v. Board of Education. 194718. US Supreme Court: Faragher v. City of Boca Raton, U.S. 755. 199819. Volokh E. Freedom of Speech vs. Workplace Harassment Law–A Big Free Speech Win in the Ninth Circuit. [Last accessed on 2012 Feb 15]. Available from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eugene-volokh/freedom-of-speech-vs-work_b_584017.html .20. Volokh E. What Speech Does “Hostile Work Environment” Harassment Law Restrict? Georgetown Law J. 1997;85:627.

The idea of ‘With malice towards none; with charity towards all’ died with Lincoln. Federal troops did occupy portions of the South until the election of 1876: see my answer about the end of reconstruction in another answer.Most promises made by governments last as long as the people making the promises are in power. Andrew Johnson was no friend to the freed slaves, but he was no friend to the ‘Radical Republicans’ who ran the country 1865–1876 either.Even before Appomattox, the Congress had planned for how to help former slaves transition to freedom. The original name was The Freedmen’s Bureau, formally known as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, was established in 1865 by Congress to help millions of former black slaves and poor whites in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Freedmen’s Bureau provided food, housing and medical aid, established schools and offered legal assistance. Like most government programs, the organization was rife with corruption. Despite its shortcomings, the Union occupiers assisted former slaves and protected them from their former owners.The most significant promise was for ’40 acres and a mule’, a slogan agreed upon by Union General Sherman and a group of Black ministers. That idea did not survive President Johnson’s determined resistance.Imagine what the world, especially the South, would be like, if the plan had been implemented. Land up to thirty miles inland, from Charleston, South Carolina to Florida, would be given to the freed slaves. Land was the magic elixir that enables people to grow and prosper.If you are interested in doing more research, study the biography of the founder of Howard University.I take no responsibility for the veracity of Henry Louis Gates’ account of the Union’s promise, but here it is:The Truth Behind ’40 Acres and a Mule’by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. | Originally posted on The RootWe’ve all heard the story of the “40 acres and a mule” promise to former slaves. It’s a staple of black history lessons, and it’s the name of Spike Lee’s film company. The promise was the first systematic attempt to provide a form of reparations to newly freed slaves, and it was astonishingly radical for its time, proto-socialist in its implications. In fact, such a policy would be radical in any country today: the federal government’s massive confiscation of private property — some 400,000 acres — formerly owned by Confederate land owners, and its methodical redistribution to former black slaves. What most of us haven’t heard is that the idea really was generated by black leaders themselves.It is difficult to stress adequately how revolutionary this idea was: As the historian Eric Foner puts it in his book, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, “Here in coastal South Carolina and Georgia, the prospect beckoned of a transformation of Southern society more radical even than the end of slavery.” Try to imagine how profoundly different the history of race relations in the United States would have been had this policy been implemented and enforced; had the former slaves actually had access to the ownership of land, of property; if they had had a chance to be self-sufficient economically, to build, accrue and pass on wealth. After all, one of the principal promises of America was the possibility of average people being able to own land, and all that such ownership entailed. As we know all too well, this promise was not to be realized for the overwhelming majority of the nation’s former slaves, who numbered about 3.9 million.What Exactly Was Promised?General William Tecumseh Sherman in May 1865. Portrait by Mathew Brady.We have been taught in school that the source of the policy of “40 acres and a mule” was Union General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, issued on Jan. 16, 1865. (That account is half-right: Sherman prescribed the 40 acres in that Order, but not the mule. The mule would come later.) But what many accounts leave out is that this idea for massive land redistribution actually was the result of a discussion that Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton held four days before Sherman issued the Order, with 20 leaders of the black community in Savannah, Ga., where Sherman was headquartered following his famous March to the Sea. The meeting was unprecedented in American history.Today, we commonly use the phrase “40 acres and a mule,” but few of us have read the Order itself. Three of its parts are relevant here. Section one bears repeating in full: “The islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns river, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes [sic] now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States.”Section two specifies that these new communities, moreover, would be governed entirely by black people themselves: ” … on the islands, and in the settlements hereafter to be established, no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves … By the laws of war, and orders of the President of the United States, the negro [sic] is free and must be dealt with as such.”Finally, section three specifies the allocation of land: ” … each family shall have a plot of not more than (40) acres of tillable ground, and when it borders on some water channel, with not more than 800 feet water front, in the possession of which land the military authorities will afford them protection, until such time as they can protect themselves, or until Congress shall regulate their title.”With this Order, 400,000 acres of land — “a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St. John’s River in Florida, including Georgia’s Sea Islands and the mainland thirty miles in from the coast,” as Barton Myers reports — would be redistributed to the newly freed slaves. The extent of this Order and its larger implications are mind-boggling, actually.Who Came Up With the Idea?Here’s how this radical proposal — which must have completely blown the minds of the rebel Confederates — actually came about. The abolitionists Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens and other Radical Republicans had been actively advocating land redistribution “to break the back of Southern slaveholders’ power,” as Myers observed. But Sherman’s plan only took shape after the meeting that he and Stanton held with those black ministers, at 8:00 p.m., Jan. 12, on the second floor of Charles Green’s mansion on Savannah’s Macon Street. In its broadest strokes, “40 acres and a mule” was their idea.Stanton, aware of the great historical significance of the meeting, presented Henry Ward Beecher (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous brother) a verbatim transcript of the discussion, which Beecher read to his congregation at New York’s Plymouth Church and which the New York Daily Tribune printed in full in its Feb. 13, 1865, edition. Stanton told Beecher that “for the first time in the history of this nation, the representatives of the government had gone to these poor debased people to ask them what they wanted for themselves.” Stanton had suggested to Sherman that they gather “the leaders of the local Negro community” and ask them something no one else had apparently thought to ask: “What do you want for your own people” following the war? And what they wanted astonishes us even today.Who were these 20 thoughtful leaders who exhibited such foresight? They were all ministers, mostly Baptist and Methodist. Most curious of all to me is that 11 of the 20 had been born free in slave states, of which 10 had lived as free men in the Confederacy during the course of the Civil War. (The other one, a man named James Lynch, was born free in Maryland, a slave state, and had only moved to the South two years before.) The other nine ministers had been slaves in the South who became “contraband,” and hence free, only because of the Emancipation Proclamation, when Union forces liberated them.Their chosen leader and spokesman was a Baptist minister named Garrison Frazier, aged 67, who had been born in Granville, N.C., and was a slave until 1857, “when he purchased freedom for himself and wife for $1000 in gold and silver,” as the New York Daily Tribune reported. Rev. Frazier had been “in the ministry for thirty-five years,” and it was he who bore the responsibility of answering the 12 questions that Sherman and Stanton put to the group. The stakes for the future of the Negro people were high.And Frazier and his brothers did not disappoint. What did they tell Sherman and Stanton that the Negro most wanted? Land! “The way we can best take care of ourselves,” Rev. Frazier began his answer to the crucial third question, “is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor … and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare … We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.” And when asked next where the freed slaves “would rather live — whether scattered among the whites or in colonies by themselves,” without missing a beat, Brother Frazier (as the transcript calls him) replied that “I would prefer to live by ourselves, for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over … ” When polled individually around the table, all but one — James Lynch, 26, the man who had moved south from Baltimore — said that they agreed with Frazier. Four days later, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, after President Lincoln approved it.What Became of the Land That Was Promised?The response to the Order was immediate. When the transcript of the meeting was reprinted in the black publication Christian Recorder, an editorial note intoned that “From this it will be seen that the colored people down South are not so dumb as many suppose them to be,” reflecting North-South, slave-free black class tensions that continued well into the modern civil rights movement. The effect throughout the South was electric: As Eric Foner explains, “the freedmen hastened to take advantage of the Order.” Baptist minister Ulysses L. Houston, one of the group that had met with Sherman, led 1,000 blacks to Skidaway Island, Ga., where they established a self-governing community with Houston as the “black governor.” And by June, “40,000 freedmen had been settled on 400,000 acres of ‘Sherman Land.’ ” By the way, Sherman later ordered that the army could lend the new settlers mules; hence the phrase, “40 acres and a mule.”And what happened to this astonishingly visionary program, which would have fundamentally altered the course of American race relations? Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor and a sympathizer with the South, overturned the Order in the fall of 1865, and, as Barton Myers sadly concludes, “returned the land along the South Carolina, Georgia and Florida coasts to the planters who had originally owned it” — to the very people who had declared war on the United States of America.

if all variables are equal Amway, Primerica & Pre-paid Legal are probably by far the fastest & easiest avenues to properly licensed business formation, or incubation. the last i heard their independent business owner kits were in the under $ 200 realm(s).emotionally those types of mlm’s feature more supportive & nurturing level training than most other industries. but one really has to have the stomach for high percentages of rejection to be a financially effective business owner.i always encourage candidate business owner/operators to stabilize their incomes via taking equity in the parent enterprises of their mlm, or non-mlm industrial sector(s). usually the securities tend to be a better reflection of the affiliated ventures’ future growth [or lack of market acceptance]. your investment portfolio should be balanced around variables like how you’ll make-out if your entrepreneurial exploits don’t generate a positive cash flow for 3 or 5 years.there must be several hundred real estate and on-line training ventures claiming to put you in business as a marketer—-promising instant positive incomes. scaling & measurement of the resources that have to be allocated to reach your particular break-even thresholds vary so widely you might be able to better appreciate that accurate answers to your question might be gaged by an interview i listended to yesterday,Alfred Liggins who’s Cathy Hughes’ son told an interviewer about his mother & he winding up living in the commercial space of an AM radio station that Cathy and Alfred’s stepfather owned. the stepfather & Cathy divorced. Cathy couldn’t handle the rent on the large home that she & Alfriend’s stepfather’d been renting (as a married couple). Cathy wasn’t rich; and the AM station’s total revenue was under $ 300K p/a. a big chunk of that income was allocated to pay-off financing that’d been used to purchase that single radio station.so to not only save money Cathy encouraged Alfred to come from California, where she asserts (intriguingly in her own related interviews) Alfred couldn’t get acting work in tv). Alfred’s version of the events depicted his having quit an ok job with a small media venture prematurely—-only to find out that he’d lost a more corporate role in the media field with a very substantial conglomerate. neither of those employers were willing to factor Cathy into their prospective arrangements with Alfred. as he puts it he really wanted to be in the music business at that point. besides Cathy only had one small radio station. so she influenced Alfred to come back to DC and takeover the advertising sales of by that point her radio station—-where he could become an equity player if moreorless tookup residence in part of the radio station’s offices.i literally ironically had a few comparable situations on that order presented to me as college student by my former lawyer. he was the johnnie Cochoran of the bankruptcy legal sector on the east coast about 10 years prior to Johnnie becoming prominent as a west coast civil rights specialist. we had a number of discussions surrounding setting priorities of compromise in order to be in business. i specifically remember him telling me to pay the office rent first if there’s only enough cash to pay the home’s mortgage, apartment’s rent (verses the business’s rent). i sort of think he might’ve been the only multi-millionaire to offer me that simple of a perspective [on that particular psychological challenge) of commercial decision making.he had 2 kids. one of them physically killed himself by jumping out of a 14th floor window—-over his embarrassment at the wealth that his father’d accumulated. the other more psychologically adjusted son partnered with their mutual high school alumni Russell Simmons & Rev. Run to incubate the generic $ 2B to $ 3B Simmons’ family empire using the lawyer’s Manhattan office space and perfunctory 9,000 sf Sag Harbor, Long Island summer home/mansion to enter the artist management sector. ergo, using some rich person’s facilities may have a great deal of influence in determining the quality of industrial leverage your business ambition will receive.my father gave me one of the lawyer’s son’s original business cards around 2001, which featured the 381 Broadway office address on it. i remember visiting the lawyer around the 1980’s at that particular law office which was sandwiched logistically between 2 of the 4 offices i had in various parts of Manhattan—-at that phase in my own career. i was between 22 & 25 at that stage; and i felt that i was doing ok professionally due to the upto 13 support staff which i co-supervised and 4 clients who were funding those fancy offices i was operating from. when one’s able to keep $ 150M to $ 200M in assets under management before finishing college—-in no small part due to the corporate sales/marketing training i’d received in both Amway & it’s predecessor mlm Holiday Magic (between ’68 through the early ‘1980’s.my opinion is that what’s easy, or on pragmatic levels fastest in getting into business depends on how many dependents you’ve got to feed, house & pay the medical bills of. in other words your minimum legal responsibilities determine if you can afford to use avenues that might include being mentored by a business owner that’s willing to provide you with sufficient equity to form your own enterprise. i have a very famous international former boxer client who’s 47 that a New Zealand mid-size trucking venture hired as a celebrity driver in order to specifically put him into the truck freight business & refrigerated warehouse storage enterprise ownership industries. that deal includes licensing/cdl training, real estate co-investment and next generation formal business mentoring.that client has no children. he’s always lived with his mother in his very famous boxer father’s home, except when he attended college. he wants to be a hedge fund operator/money manager. i advised him to be a spokesperson to those industrial sectors because he’s way too famous to become competitively trained as a hands-on capital transactions expert—-trying to match wits with people half his age (with several times the academic gifts that he has). his fame makes it way easier for other famous friends and peers of his to be steered to any service provider that he promotes. in that context he’s a run of the mill multi-billion dollar business volume referral conduit [with proportionally little competition].in his case his biggest strength is the reputation that both he and his father accrued as too nice of guys to be in the boxing profession. that kind of reputation is relatively easy for anyone to achieve. i aggressively warn against trying to get famous in the fight game, or any physical competition to leverage your athletic prowess into a spokesperson’s career. there are too many way easier means of getting notoriety. volunteering with the disabled, or homeless can & will put you the same scope of opportunities that being a famous celebrity generates.the number of jobs at whichever pay scale you intend for your business efforts to create within what time frame will even more speck to which avenue(s) offer optimal levels of success, or efficiency. when i was in my early 20’s i learned that i could go to most federal bankruptcy court clerk’s offices and peruse the petitions for bankruptcy protection and generally take over companies that i found commercially attractive enough answer your question. unless the target venture needs unusual licenses normally enterprises that file Chapter 11 already have a drafted set of targeted objectives that include what comprises a road map to success as defined by the registered creditors.i had a lot of high powered credentials in my 20’s—-including a structural engineering education, along with roles managing up to 15 employees. the average company in bankruptcy has less than one full-time serious staffer. that staffer most of the time is the owner—-who’s more important income is connected to their spouse, or parents. i got so sick of encountering that pattern that i decided after a couple of years only to represent creditors as an adviser to the business re-organizations; due to the lack of equity, or emotional/ethical substance of the debtors.equally relevant being a boss doesn’t generate an income. even my former multi-millionaire lawyer offered what i thought at the time was an intriguing insight on that facet. he told me after he’d broken up his main white shag carpet office law practice in the 200’s of Broadway facing City Hall’s higher rent district, that he only kept an office outside of his home because he had young children at home; and they nor his wife appreciated what scale of distractions that they posed (to his concentration—-on the great issues of his work [lol]). i felt that he was a professional pirate. he’d stolen hundreds of properties that wound up having to be serviced by his assorted roles prior to my entering the commercial real estate sector.i partnered with one of my real estate instructors from college to form our own consulting practice (at 21). he turned out to be very prominent WW II mega time international war hero. hence i had credentials of his zoning law achievements along with his peer colleague that’d just retired from being the senior civil engineer for the state of NJ, as our business start-up licensed professional roles to offer federal court judges & the legal industry associated with whatever bankruptcy case work i opted to pursue. i recruited a high school alumni that’d become an architect as our 4th partner—to offer in-house project design services catering to complex property development {as principals}.the overall premise is that should you lack personal licensure(s), or the direct financial means of establishing particular types of enterprise ownership invariably you’ll encounter acquaintances that have those resources positioned in a manner that’s accommodative to your ambition(s). in that aspect of my work as a consultant i recruited the clients and followed my former college instructor’s directions. i was a night student majoring in real estate. one of the classmates who was around 34 invited me to consider joining the commercial real estate start-up brokerage that he was vice president to. i told our professor about the offer & i requested that he look into the brokerage’s background because i’d already worked in around 4 residential real estate brokerage firms in Brooklyn [that left a very bad taste in my mouth—for the whole brokerage sector].my professor informed me that his research as an attorney uncovered that the broker of the firm was a scion of very bad men. his quote was that they’re ‘bad, bad, b-a-d….. BAAD people’; and he wanted me to take the position with them. so that upon my getting in good enough with them i was instructed to bring the professor in as their senior legal counsel. his premise was in short that due to their global reputation as mega crooks they’d be needing a great deal of his legal services. at 21 i summed up his instructions as being a very quick way to get in business. to seduce me the big shots gave me 4 fancy offices south of Central Park. i brought the professor—who happened to be prominently disabled from participation in D-Day {fundamentally saving the free world as we know it]. so he was actually legitimately owed the right to experience the benefits that were part of my roles.he unfortunately waited until decades later to mention to me how he’d gotten the injuries that caused him to have very conspicuous limp. today i’d have used his G.I. Bill benefits to even more professionally optimized those 4 offices and the thousands of perks that little assistant vice presidency title provided me. buying and selling companies would’ve been my main income generating activity during that phase of my career had i better grasped the speed that life would go by within.my internship was straight out of The POTUS’s Apprentice tv series with no cameras filming. my boss was nurturing, or investing in multiple enterprises a month. i mostly handled research associated with leasing office space and financing of whatever deals my boss felt was of interest to him, along with his father’s prior venture Arlen Realty Group. Arlen had blown $ 2B of public money a few months before i started my internship. they still held options on numerous very prominent assets that they officially lost in their own bankruptcy filing work-out.using your alumni and instructors are an excellent method of shortening your time frame for getting into business. normally we offer all kinds of unbelievable conveniences in the hope that the favors will be returned at some point(s) in the future. one of my double alumni more than extended that scale of opportunity to me on 5/1/18. he literally called me and invited my management consulting practice to create means of optimizing offers of support that his terminal cancer prognosis caused Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Vivica A. Fox and Anthony Anderson to extend to him. if you can’t establish a business around that scale of opportunity you’re not emotionally ready for the type of sharing of responsibility being in business demands. normally when i even offer access to that combination of brand ambassador(s) audiences won’t take it seriously.my alumni in that instance is a very big star maker, that’s been a big celebrity among big celebrities for nearly 40 years. he actually spent 5 years developing Nicki Minaj; along with integral roles in training Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and many artists. when we were 10 in our social circle he was a very prominent musician, lyricist. when we were in college together his band & music production combination had the business presence of P Diddy, J-Z & J-Lo under one commercial umbrella. the lesson i think was most important from having that early junior high school and university tier socialization is that w when you are 10 years old never talk down about rap, or hip hop—-or stripping.my alumni’s group’s stage performance used alot of male stripper themed antics & early rap/hip hop focused music. in my own weird conservativeness i let those details block my level of needed follow through in terms of pursuing the kind of access i had since 1968 (with them in particular). it really only recently occurred to me that i—-like all of us—-know people that make big celebrities. in this case i understood that my alumni were always real big stars; so it never registered that for 35 years that they’ve been making all kinds of big stars.i told some cousins of mine in their late 20’s at the time to makeover the music libraries of a couple of our elder cousins—-who were very big music celebrities in the 1960’s and 70’s (as a generic business model). their response was that they had their manager/god brother ask me to invest $ 20K in their music endeavors. i let the god brother know that i’d had troubling experiences with investing in entertainment previously—-from the vantage point that too often there was a problematic illegal narcotics feature of the arrangement. the god brother/manager admitted that this situation fell squarely into that same category. i asked the god brother/manager to steer my cousins to my alumni as a package deal for himself (since he’d been candid enough to admit that were the usual flies in the ointment). he never followed up. my eldest of those cousins was shortly there after arrested for dealing cocaine and put out law school in his 2nd year.we’re all vulnerable to that kind of lapse in judgment. i experienced it from age 10 to 17. by the time i got to college i was facing triple life in prison for selling less than 2 tea cups of cocaine to an undercover cop—-quite by accident of course. you can’t imagine the disappointment the affair had on my small staff of 13 to 14 loyalists (when they learned that i’d decided to retire from the reefer & cocaine business less than 20 days before turning 18. had i gotten busted 21 days later i wouldn’t have been able to get the youthful offender disposition for that case.so when it comes to determining the quickest and easiest way to go into business do what you can to steer clear of lawyers that are also cocaine addicts & pirates. you’ll normally find them fornicating with the most beautiful teen age girls—which they’ll be bugging you to provide for them. ironically with the legalization of reefer & prostitution in various jurisdictions there may be some exceptions that need to be looked into (lol). monetizing blogging and cross media platforms is definitely also a prodigiously efficient means of going into business quickly—-with nearly no police interference (most of the time).