This is called often "everyday resistance". It's been quite popular in both history and anthropology for the past few decades. Obviously, it's an older idea that Harriet Beecher Stowe could recognize in the 19th century (though not everyone in the 19th century recognized it), but it's an idea that's gotten recently popular in academia thanks to the anthropologist/political scientist James C. Scott.

Scott's books are about peasants, not slaves, but it's the same idea. We're used to imagining "resistance" as using certain repertoires (a term sociologist Charles Tilly popularized). Our "modern repertoires" for "contentious politics", Tilly argues, got set in the 19th century--familiar things like protests, rallies, picket lines, placards, petitions, boycotts, pamphlets, etc. etc. In the period before that, you the dominant European repertoires of contention involved things like tarring and feather, rough music, etc. The modern repertoires rely on showing "WUNC": worthiness (we're respectable individuals like you), unity (we're united against this), numbers (there's so many of us!), and commitment (we're giving up our time and perhaps other resources to show you how important this to us). The traditional repertoire on local power and other different things. But the point is that many peasants (and slaves) didn't have access to those things.

We do see peasant rebellions and slave rebellions, which is resistance of a different kind: in America, we have Igbo Landing, Nat Turner, Denmark Vassey, etc. There are also various big peasant rebellions. These were traditionally thought of as the way that peasants and slaves resisted, as well as going to the powerful and making a request, either directly or through appropriate channels. Marxists in particular used this all to argue that peasants (and slaves) were "non-revolutionary classes" who could occasionally revolt, but not bring about revolutionary change (the first piece of Marxist history was by Friedrich Engels himself, and called The Peasant War in Germany [pdf], about the peasant revolt that occurred at the start of the Reformation).

But Scott turned all of this on its head when he published his second book called Weapons of the Weak (the whole book is available as a PDF here). He argued we're used to seeing "resistance as organization"--from protests to slave revolts, we're used to thinking of resistance in terms of organized collective action. He argues that, for peasants and the urban underclass (as well as slaves), we're looking in the wrong place for resistance. Rather than looking for well coordinated resistance, which invariably would be ruthlessly shutdown by the powers that be, we should look for what he calls "everyday resistance": foot-dragging, evasion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander and sabotage.

For these reasons it seemed to me more important to understand what we might call everyday forms of peasant resistance the prosaic but constant struggle between the peasantry and those who seek to extract labor, food, taxes, rents, and interest from them. Most forms of this struggle stop well short of outright collective defiance. Here I have in mind the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on. These Brechtianor Schweikian forms of class struggle have certain features in common. They require little or no coordination or planning; they make use of implicit understandings and informal networks; they often represent a form of individual self-help; they typically avoid any direct, symbolic confrontation with authority. To understand these commonplace forms of resistance is to understand much of what the peasantry has historically done to defend its interests against both conservative and progressive orders. It is my guess that just such kinds of resistance are often the most significant and the most effective over the long run. Thus, Marc Bloch, the historian of feudalism, has noted that the great millenial movements were "flashes in the pan" compared to the "patient, silent struggles stubbornly carried on by rural communities" to avoid claims on their surplus and to assert their rights to the means of productionfor example, arable, woodland, pastures.^2 Much the same view is surely appropriate to the study of slavery in the New World. The rare, heroic, and foredoomed gestures of a Nat Turner or a John Brown are simply not the places to look for the struggle between slaves and their owners. One must look rather at the constant, grinding conflict over work, food, autonomy, ritual, at everyday forms of resistance. In the Third World it is rare for peasants to risk an outright confrontation with the authorities over taxes, cropping patterns, development policies, or onerous new laws; instead they are likely to nibble away at such policies by noncompliance, foot dragging, deception. In place of a land invasion, they prefer piecemeal squatting; in place of open mutiny, they prefer desertion; in place of attacks on public or private grain stores, they prefer pilfering. When such stratagems are abandoned in favor of more quixotic action, it is usually a sign of great desperation.

Such low-profile techniques are admirably suited to the social structure of the peasantrya class scattered across the countryside, lacking formal organization, and best equipped for extended, guerrilla-style, defensive campaigns of attrition. Their individual acts of foot dragging and evasion, reinforced by a venerable popular culture of resistance and multiplied many thousand-fold, may, in the end, make an utter shambles of the policies dreamed up by their would-be superiors in the capital. Everyday forms of resistance make no headlines. But just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do the multiple acts of peasant insubordination and evasion create political and economic barrier reefs of their own. It is largely in this fashion that the peasantry makes its political presence felt. And whenever, to pursue the simile, the ship of state runs aground on such reefs, attention is usually directed to the shipwreck itself and not to the vast aggregation of petty acts that made it possible. For these reasons alone, it seems important to understand this quiet and anonymous welter of peasant action.

So because organization was so difficult, and confronting powers directly carried such great risks, peasants (and slaves) usually employed indirect, unorganized methods of resistance. This was developed further in his next book Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, which focused more on the language of resistance, "rumour, gossip, disguises, linguistic tricks, metaphors, euphemisms, folktales, ritual gestures, anonymity".

With Scott's work, he wasn't working slaves, but rather doing ethnography of peasants so sometimes the peasants were willing to straight up tell him what they were doing, and sometimes he had to "read between the lines" of what he was seeing and, to Clifford Geert's metaphor, know how to differentiate a blink from a wink. But since the 1985 publication of Scott's work, there has been a whole research agenda focused on "everyday resistance", among peasants, slaves, nomads, and urban workers. See for instance this press release from the University of Washington, "Everyday Resistance to Slavery Far More Common than Believed, Historian Says", which is about Stephanie Camp's book Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Here's radio interview about the same book. I'm sure there are more books that explore this topic, I just know it as it relates to peasants more than slaves.