Slaves pilfered fruits, vegetables, livestock, tobacco, liquor, and money from their masters. Of course, masters also stood to benefit from these negotiations, as contented slaves worked harder, increasing output and efficiency.Īnother common form of slave resistance was theft. In this way, the enslaved often negotiated the basic terms of their daily routines. These everyday forms of resistance vexed slave masters, but there was little they could do to stop them without risking more widespread breaks in production. If slave masters increased workloads, provided meager rations, or punished too severely, slaves registered their displeasure by slowing work, feigning illness, breaking tools, or sabotaging production. These customs dictated work routines, distribution of rations, general rules of comportment, and so on. Over the years, customary rights emerged in most fields of production. After all, slavery was ultimately about coerced labor, and the enslaved struggled daily to define the terms of their work. Perhaps the most common forms of resistance were those that took place in the work environment. As one scholar has put it, “slaves ‘naturally’ resisted their enslavement because slavery was fundamentally unnatural.” 1 Forms varied, but the common denominator in all acts of resistance was an attempt to claim some measure of freedom against an institution that defined people fundamentally as property. Slave resistance began in British North America almost as soon as the first slaves arrived in the Chesapeake in the early seventeenth century.

Jazz and the African American Literature Traditionįreedom’s Story is made possible by a grant from the Wachovia Foundation.

The Image of Africa in the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance.

The New Negro and the Black Image: From Booker T.

Rebellion by H.L. Day