“Inherent Vice”: Maritime Insurance, Transatlantic Slavery, and the Case of the Creole, 1841

The dramatic success of the slave rebellion aboard the brig, the Creole, in 1841, is firmly secured in African American cultural memory. It is also well known that the mutiny caused a major diplomatic incident between America and Britain. Far less attention, however, has been paid to the way in which the case unraveled as a protracted, and intensely argued, set of maritime insurance claims brought by the slave-owners first in the commercial courts and then in the Supreme Court of Louisiana in 1845. This paper examines those court cases for the ways in which they illustrate how the enslaved, via their violent resistance, managed to thwart attempts to render them into the distorted guise of commodities. McCargo, who made the majority of the claims to cover his lost ‘property’ had not bothered to insure his ‘cargo’ against the risk of rebellion but he had insured against the risk of ‘foreign interference’. Lawyers for the New Orleans Insurance Company, who did not want to pay out, thus found themselves defending the mutineers by arguing from an 18C (French) conceptual precedent originally designed for the transatlantic trade. In so doing, they argued that resisting oppression was an essential trait of a human being: it was, in other words, an ‘inherent vice’. Thus, financial speculators, so immune to exploiting the slave trade, turned abolitionist, successfully, in order to protect their economic interests.