Notes on the Historical Relationship between Slave Insurance and Life Insurance

As the Transatlantic slave trade drew to a close—and as domestic slavery expanded to newly acquired territories, like Louisiana—planters sought increasingly to ensure their slaves against the risk of transport such that slave insurance was a robust domain of commercial credit by the 1830s. Historians have noted that Americans did not gravitate toward life insurance until the 1840s, yet have not systematically analyzed how these two industries have articulated historically. And while they usually had the juridical status of property or real estate, slaves insured for the highest premiums were not those with the most impressive physical stature, but those with a premium skill set (like blacksmiths or miners), which suggests that slave insurance was a precursor to workmen’s compensation, in some ways, and life insurance, in others, raising questions that would later be resolved in the formation of the twentieth century welfare state, and new ideas about the state’s responsibility to its citizenry.  Meanwhile, New Orleans’ celebrated Social Aid & Pleasure clubs—mutual aid societies that host jazz funerals and provide burial funds for members in financial distress—routinely trace their origins to the 1830s and 1840s when, in the words of some members, they functioned “as an early form of life insurance.”

Despite being associated with the birth of capitalism and the triumph of democracy, life insurance institutionalizes credit-debt in ways analogous to rather more notorious institutions like sharecropping and convict leasing, with implications for the way we think about social belonging in a purportedly free society. This paper explores how 19th century procedures for assessing the monetary value of a human life articulate with 21st century forms of citizenship and credit-debt, one implication being: even people who are not the descendants of African slaves are implicated in forms of valuation dating back to slavery.