Conflict and the "Slave Community": Violence Among Slaves in Upcountry South Carolina (Report‪)‬

IN 1826 WILLIAM HAMILTON, A SLAVEHOLDER IN PENDLETON DISTRICT, South Carolina, reported to the authorities "that his Negro Fellow Dave was violently Beat & abused." He identified Dave's attackers as "two Negro Fellows by the Name of 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 of Agnes Barnet, "did on the plantation of the Widdow Mary Lewis in a tumultuous manner make an affray with the Slaves of John S. Rowland" in 1835. That same year the congregation of 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 of one another in the remote northwestern corner of upcountry South Carolina. Combined with dozens of 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 of violence among slaves reveals the values and unstated rules that governed their social world and contributes to the continuing effort to refine the "slave community" paradigm. (1) Despite the relative lack of 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 of the classic works in the historiography of American slavery. The Slave Community effectively refuted the 1959 argument of Stanley M. Elkins, who, drawing on an analogy to Nazi concentration camps, held that the closed system of 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 of 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 of deference and did not signal any genuine psychic injury inflicted by the institution of slavery. For slaves, acting like Sambo served as a defense mechanism, allowing them to cope with the oppression of bondage. (2)