Don Doggy, did you choose to be a merchant at the beginning of the game? During character creation, I apparently "found" a runaway slave in a city and hid him from justice, and that made my relations with "Rebel Slaves" go from -5 to -1, which doesn't seem to help seeing that they aren't a faction in the current version.
It still doesn't make the stupid Mutinous Slaves keep on trying to attack me. For some reason they all want to attack me, even though I have a buffed up army of fifty then still chase me down with their party of five. Do they just all have death wishes?