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

Southern whites were not willing to defend the Republican administration, while
the majority of Blacks viewed the Republicans and the Federal government as
allies . While there was ambivalence by the Federal government and liberal and
moderate Republicans about Blacks with guns, Reconstruction governments in the
South depended on Black militias against their Democratic and openly violent
enemies .
The Black civilian army concept did not begin during Reconstruction .
From the outset of Emancipation, the Freedpersons realized the necessity of arms
to protect their freedom and obtain and maintain the land necessary for their
survival and progress . During the Civil War, Black civilians were armed to
protect their liberty. In one case, when Black Union forces liberated plantations
near Jackson, Mississippi, in 1863, they armed their freed sisters and brothers in
the area . The recently freed and armed Blacks equitably divided the plantations
and the cotton and farm implements among themselves . Armed Blacks on land
liberated from Confederate slavers frightened local whites, realizing their greatest
fears . Later these Black liberated plantations were recaptured by Confederates and
their armed resistance fighters removed and imprisoned in Jackson .
As in the above example, newly freed Black peasants sought to defend
their liberty and fight for land. In some cases they sought to protect land already
granted to them by the government . Others even sought arms to seize land they
viewed was theirs by right, for compensation for decades, even centuries, of
unpaid, forced labor. In 1865, Black freedmen and women established a militia
275 men to protect their settlement on the Georgia Sea Island of Saint Catherine ,
Under the leadership ofTunis G . Campbell, who was appointed "governor of the