Insurance companies sold policies covering slaves

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The United States’ third-largest life insurance company, New York Life, opened in the spring of 1845 and had a board that was made up of some of the city’s wealthiest people.

Sales were slow that year, so they looked to the South. On February 1846, they were able to sell 30 policies. From there, they ran ads in newspapers from Wilmington, North Carolina, to Louisville, Kentucky, encouraging people to buy insurance to protect what was seen as their most valuable commodities: their slaves.

Living slaves were seen as a white man’s most prized possessions, but dead, they were worth nothing. Life insurance was a gamechanger for slave owners as it allowed them to get back three-quarters of the slave’s value upon their untimely death.

This insurance company’s first president, James De Peyster Ogden, would later call the American slavery system “evil.” But in 1847, these types of insurance policies accounted for a solid one-third of the policies sold.

Banks that were absorbed by big names like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo made it possible for those seeking loans to use their slaves as collateral. They even took possession of some of these slaves when the debtors defaulted on the loans they were given.

Aetna and US Life also sold these types of insurance policies to slave owners. This was an especially common practice for those whose slaves did hazardous work. This included those working in mines, lumber mills, on steamboats and in turpentine factories.

— Obama: ‘America has not overcome legacy of slavery and Jim Crow’ — 

US Life has declined to comment on this story, but Wachovia has apologized for these practices.

There are over 40 other firms that also sold slave policies, most of them based in the South.

These insurance policies on slaves didn’t turn out to be all that lucrative in the end, with New York Life paying out almost as much in death claims as it raked in. Still, in the span of just three years, it sold 508 of these policies. That is more than Aetna and US Life combined, according to records examined.

In 1957, New York Life hired one of the industry’s first black sales agents, and today, African-Americans make up about 13 percent of their employees.

They also donate millions of dollars each year to causes and groups that benefit black Americans.

“We profoundly regret that in the 1840s our predecessor company, Nautilus Insurance Company, insured the lives of slaves for a brief period of time,” Kevin Heine, a spokesman for the company, stated. “While we cannot change our history, our longstanding recognition of it has helped shape our commitment to the African-American community.”