IN 1826 WILLIAM HAMILTON, A SLAVEHOLDER IN PENDLETON DISTRICT, South Carolina, reported to the authorities his Negro Fellow Dave was violently Beat & abused. He identified Dave's attackers as Negro Fellows by the Name Ben & Aleck Belonging to John Adams & a Negro Boy Named Allen belonging to Archd Keaton. In another incident, two Spartanburg District slaves, Bob and Harry, the property Agnes Barnet, on the plantation the Widdow Mary Lewis in a tumultuous manner make an affray with the Slaves John S. Rowland in 1835. That same year the congregation Big Creek Baptist Church in Anderson District learned that Mr. Owenses ben had acted disorderly in striking his fellowservant. Only three years earlier, the same church had dismissed Brother Ceasor ... fornocking down his fellow servent with an Ax. All these episodes occurred within a decade one another in the remote northwestern corner upcountry South Carolina. Combined with dozens similar cases from the same region, they together speak to the complex role violence played among slaves, as both a creative and a destructive force in the quarters. An analysis violence among slaves reveals the values and unstated rules that governed their social world and contributes to the continuing effort to refine the paradigm. (1) Despite the relative lack academic fanfare it received when first published in 1972, John W. Blassingame's The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South quickly emerged as one the classic works in the historiography American slavery. The Slave Community effectively refuted the 1959 argument Stanley M. Elkins, who, drawing on an analogy to Nazi concentration camps, held that the closed system slavery in the American South produced a distinctive slave personality, the docile and childlike Sambo. Blassingame argued that the Sambo stereotype was not the dominant personality type among slaves; rather, it marked merely one in an entire range personality types. Moreover, Blassingame demonstrated that Sambo was a mask, a role that slaves performed for masters' edification, and that slaves could play Sambo without being Sambo. The submissive Sambo, Blassingame clarified, proved real, but Sambo-like behavior represented a ritual expression deference and did not signal any genuine psychic injury inflicted by the institution slavery. For slaves, acting like Sambo served as a defense mechanism, allowing them to cope with the oppression bondage. (2) In rejecting Elkins's Sambo thesis, The Slave Community not only provided a necessary corrective but also contributed to a fundamental reorientation in slave studies. Blassingame helped initiate decades sophisticated scholarship that looked at slavery from the perspective the bondpeople themselves. Increasingly, historians recognized slaves not as passive objects white treatment but as active agents shaping their own lives. These scholars emphasized the ways in which slaves' close familial networks, religious beliefs and gatherings, and rich culture insulated those in bondage from the brutal excesses enslavement and helped them resist dehumanization. (3) But as Peter Kolchin has observed, the resulting portrait antebellum slavery present[ed] an exaggerated picture the strength and cohesion the slave The scholarship's stress on the positive steps slaves took to cope with bondage and its celebratory tone often overlooked the harsh realities bondage, forging what he described as the myth of the utopian slave Taking to heart Kolchin's caution against such glorification, several historians, including most recently Brenda E. Stevenson, Christopher Morris, Anthony E. Kaye, and Dylan C. Penningroth, have challenged overly romantic interpretations a harmonious and idyllic slave community virtually devoid conflict. A look at violence among slaves in upcountry South Carolina adds to this ongoing scholarship designed to complicate our understanding the slave community. …