This stems from a passage read long ago in the shelves of a Barnes and Noble; that the the slaves themselves were (forgive my slang interpretation) fine-tuning the art of disobedience (work slow downs, incompetence work ethics, annoying, getting under the skin) doing everything humanly possible without getting whipped or killed to be disruptive.
The book concluded that this alone, the slaves alone through their own means were tearing and eventually making the system untenable. At least, that's my recall. Is there any basis for believing this?
It's doubtful. The economy of the slaveholding portion of the United States was based on expansion, rather than maximizing efficiency. As long as there was land to be cleared for new cotton plantations (or mines, which publications of the day thought to be the future of slavery in the American West), the system would have continued. While a slave in 1820's Virginia might have been able to get away with breaking a milling stone or stealing a few chickens, his counterpart in 1820's Mississippi would have been clearing stumps or picking cotton from dawn to dusk under nearly continual supervision.
Edward E. Baptist makes the argument that slaveholders had calibrated the mechanisms of cruelty so finely that cotton production had increased 400% per slave between 1820-1860. The expansion of slavery was what drove the expansion of America's frontier. 20 percent of the capital in the United States were enslaved people. Slaveholders had their eyes on central America and Cuba and were trying to get Southern California as a slave state. Slavery was not breaking down, slavery was flourishing and it was the arrogance born of its wealth and the desire for ever more wealth that drove confederates to try and build their own nation. Slave resistance existed but it was unable to overcome the overwhelming power of slaveholders