Slaves staged strikes that won concessions because masters valued their 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. Such strikes occurred with some regularity and often led to the negotiated return of the slaves. 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: Echoes Milgrom’s point about economic incentives underlying extralegal arrangements — here the ‘law of slavery’ bent to protect capital.
• QUESTION: How did this history of successful collective protest condition expectations in 1791? Worth tracing as part of the revolution’s prehistory.