The Baptist War leader Samuel Sharpe planned a slave general strike, not armed revolt

Evidence

Sharpe, according to the account he gave the Wesleyan missionary, Henry Bleby, who had several conversations with him when he was in jail, did not plan armed rebellion, but mass passive resistance. After the Christmas holidays when the cane harvest was due to begin, the slaves were to sit down and refuse to work until their masters acknowledged that they were free men and agreed to pay them wages. Sharpe expected that the whites would try to intimidate the strikers by shooting hostages as examples; but the slaves were not expected to fight back, simply to continue passive resistance. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 806

Categorization

• XREF: Gandhi’s and Martin Luther King’s later nonviolent tactics echo Sharpe’s 1831 sit-down strike design; genealogies of mass nonviolence might trace to the Black Atlantic.
• SEED: An essay angle: reclaiming slave-era general strikes and passive resistance as an early, independent origin of nonviolent mass politics predating later canonized figures.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the historical-depth thread of writing about resistance movements and how leaders’ real plans diverge from how revolts are later framed.