Planter authority collapsed when slaves collectively rejected the whites chosen to manage them

Evidence

“Our surprise was extreme,” wrote the visitors, “to hear them all shout that they didn’t want any more whites.” It turned out that a free man of color named Enard had “taken over the management of the plantation without anyone asking him to.” When Mauger’s representatives came to the plantation, the slaves announced they were quite happy with Enard’s services and wanted “no others.” The visitors explained that Enard was less qualified than the white manager they had chosen. They had every legal right to choose who would manage the plantation, and the slaves had, in principle, no right to refuse. But when Mauger’s representatives insisted, the assembled slaves made “murmurs and threats” and showered them with jokes and insults, and the whites retreated. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 453

Categorization

• SEED: The scene of slaves jeering and insulting planter representatives who held full legal right yet retreated is a vivid inversion-of-power tableau worth narrating at length in any account.
• XREF: Echoes the breakdown of planter authority under slave pressure elsewhere in Atlantic slave societies. — connects to: Nearly all the theologian’s slaves rejected his paternalist family myth — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 252