Slaves claimed a right to fair treatment and seized plantations rather than destroying them

Evidence

“We are slaves and your subjects, and we give ourselves over to work as we should, but humanity must interest itself in our fate.” They had a right to be treated according to certain rules, they asserted, and to take action when they were wronged by those in power. Philipeau had taken a bold step years before in writing to his mistress to ask her to intervene on behalf of her slaves. In the new context created by the insurrection of 1791, he and the other Mauger slaves had gone further, using their numbers and their determination to take over the plantation themselves. They understood that those in charge had little power to resist and would ultimately be forced to negotiate with them over the terms of their labor. Like slaves elsewhere in the Artibonite region, and throughout the Western Province, they did not destroy or abandon the plantations, but they began to make them their own. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 456

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the logic of slave-run plantations being made ‘their own’ (petit marronage / de facto self-management) — connects to the eventual trajectory toward emancipation and to the author’s earlier point about slave self-organization before 1791.