Eye for an Eye: The Role of Armed Resistance ... - Freedom Archives

sisters and brethren from the accursed yoke of human bondage .-9
The Black heroine Harriet Tubman continued her efforts to liberate her brothers
and sisters during the Civil War. Tubman supervised the escape of 700 enslaved
men, women and children in a raid by the Second South Carolina Volunteers on
plantations along the Combahee River in South Carolina.'° In other cases, newly
emancipated Black soldiers sought out their former enslavers for retribution . In
1864, the First Regiment, United States Colored Troops captured Wilson's Land-
ing, Virginia. Many of the soldiers of the First Regiment had been enslaved at
Wilson's Landing . While on a foraging mission, the soldiers captured a plantation
owner who was responsible for the severe beating of several women enslaved on
his plantation . The slaver was stripped of his clothing, tied to a tree, and adminis-
tered twenty lashes by a member of the First Regiment, who happened to be one
of his former slaves. Then the whip was handed over to the women who had been
beaten . According to George W. Hatton, sergeant in Company C of the First
Regiment, "one by one" the formerly enslaved women "came up and gave him a
number, to remind him that they were no longer his, but safely housed in
Abraham's bosom, and under the protection of the Star Spangled Banner, and
guarded by their own patriotic, though once down-trodden race ." 3'
While Black participation in the Union military had its liberating aspect . .
racism within the Northern forces limited its potential as a Black liberation arm%
Black leaders and soldiers were critical of the North's policies of paying Black
troops less than white soldiers and assigning white commanding officers over
segregated Black regiments . Black nationalists Martin Delany and Henry McNe .a .
Turner called for Black units with Black commanding officers . Turner desired a