Collective strikes became a negotiated weapon because slaves were valuable capital

Evidence

On absentee-owned plantations, mass marronage was sometimes used as a form of protest against a manager. On a plantation in the Cul-de-Sac plain in 1744, for instance, sixty-six slaves left the plantation during the day but came back to sleep in their quarters at night, demanding the removal of the overseer. One day the overseer killed one of the protesting slaves, a pregnant woman, with a knife. Two months later the slaves surprised him, carried him away, and executed him. They were condemned to death, but the governor intervened on their behalf, recognizing that their actions were justified by the particular brutality of their overseer. … Masters had a great deal of capital invested in their human property, and it was often cheaper to negotiate a return and to replace a white manager than to risk the loss of many slaves and the disruption of plantation labor. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 192

Categorization

• XREF: Slaves self-organizing collective protest to remove an overseer anticipates the political leverage they’d exercise during the revolution itself — early evidence of collective bargaining by labor as property.
• QUESTION: How far back does documented mass-marronage-as-strike go, and what made the Cul-de-Sac plain a recurring center of resistance?