The story of slavery’s abolition in the Atlantic world is often told from a top-down perspective. Historians highlight the legislative achievements, including the British Parliament’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the U.S. Constitution’s 13th Amendment in 1865, or the emancipatory decrees in Cuba (1886) and Brazil (1888). Less attention has been paid to the ways in which enslaved people strove for emancipation through acts of resistance.