Grounding

Group 3 — Resistance & Conflict

Your Research Question

How much energy did enslaved people expend resisting their enslavement — through escape, rebellion, sabotage, and slowdown — and how much did Black soldiers expend in military service after 1862?

You are measuring what the system tried to erase.

Resistance was the most systematically undercounted category in plantation records. Enslavers had financial and political incentives to downplay every form of resistance — it reduced property values, threatened the ideology of enslaved people as "content," and revealed the violence required to maintain the system. Your job is to make the most honest estimate you can, and to be explicit about the limits of what you can document.

Your Fermi chain

Step 1

Identify resistance categories to model

Escape, rebellion, sabotage, work slowdown, maroon communities, Underground Railroad participation

Step 2

Research MET and duration for each resistance type

Same formula as Lab 02 — escape attempt is high-MET (running), slowdown is low-MET

Step 3

Research documented event rates per 1,000 people per year

Sources: Freedom on the Move (runaway ads), WPA Narratives, court records, plantation journals

Step 4

Apply undercount multiplier — your most important judgment call

Documented events ÷ estimated actual events. For slowdowns: ~1 documented per 50–200 actual

Step 5

Calculate USCT conflict energy (1862–1865 only)

~179,000 soldiers × service days × kWh/soldier/day; step function from zero before 1863

Output

Hand resistance + conflict tables to Group 5

energy_kwh.resistance and energy_kwh.conflict — both fields, for each state-year

What you need to research

Documented runaway ad rates — "Freedom on the Move" database covers ~100,000 ads from 1790–1865
Historian estimates of actual-to-documented resistance ratios (Stephanie Camp, Walter Johnson, Vincent Brown)
USCT enrollment by state: National Park Service Soldiers and Sailors System
Average length of USCT service by regiment and state
Energy cost of major rebellions: Nat Turner (1831), Stono (1739), Haitian-inspired plots

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