Insurance Policies on Slaves: New York Life’s Complicated Past
In its 19th-century beginnings, New York Life Insurance sold 508 policies covering slaves. Their descendants are grappling with it.
New York Life,
the nation’s third-largest life insurance company, opened in
Manhattan’s financial district in the spring of 1845. The firm possessed
a prime address — 58 Wall Street — and a board of trustees populated by
some of the city’s wealthiest merchants, bankers and railroad magnates.
Sales were sluggish that year. So the company looked south.
There,
in Richmond, Va., an enterprising New York Life agent sold more than 30
policies in a single day in February 1846. Soon, advertisements began
appearing in newspapers from Wilmington, N.C., to Louisville as the New
York-based company encouraged Southerners to buy insurance to protect
their most precious commodity: their slaves.
Alive,
slaves were among a white man’s most prized assets. Dead, they were
considered virtually worthless. Life insurance changed that calculus,
allowing slave owners to recoup three-quarters of a slave’s value in the
event of an untimely death.

James
De Peyster Ogden, New York Life’s first president, would later describe
the American system of human bondage as “evil.” But by 1847, insurance
policies on slaves accounted for a third of the policies in a firm that
would become one of the nation’s Fortune 100 companies.
Georgetown, Harvard and other universities have drawn national attention to the legacy of slavery this year as they have acknowledged benefiting from the slave trade and grappled with how to make amends.
But slavery also generated business for some of the most prominent
modern-day corporations, underscoring the ties that many contemporary
institutions have to this painful period of history.
Banks
absorbed by JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo allowed Southerners seeking
loans to use their slaves as collateral and took possession of some of
them when their owners defaulted.
Like
New York Life, Aetna and US Life also sold insurance policies to slave
owners, particularly those whose laborers engaged in hazardous work in
mines, lumber mills, turpentine factories and steamboats in the
industrializing sectors of the South. US Life, a subsidiary of AIG,
declined to comment on its slave policy sales.
Wachovia, one of Wells
Fargo’s predecessor companies, has apologized for its historic ties to
slavery as have JPMorgan Chase and Aetna.
More
than 40 other firms, mostly based in the South, sold such policies,
too, though documentation is scarce and most closed their doors
generations ago.
New
York Life survived. Its foray into the slave insurance business did not
prove to be lucrative: The company ended up paying out nearly as much
in death claims — about $232,000 in today’s dollars — as it received in
annual payments. But in the span of about three years, it sold 508
policies, more than Aetna and US Life combined, according to available
records.
Now,
the descendants of one of those slaves — who were recently identified
by The New York Times — are coming to terms with the realization that
one of the nation’s biggest insurance companies sold policies on their
ancestors and hundreds of other enslaved laborers.

Policy
No. 447 covered Nathan York, a slave who toiled in the Virginia coal
mines where the earth often collapsed on its subterranean work force.
Policy No. 1141 insured a slave known as Warwick, who fed the fiery
furnaces on a Kentucky steamboat. Policy No. 1150 covered Anthony, who
labored amid the whirling blades of a sawmill in North Carolina.
The
handwritten record of sales, insurance premiums and expenditures, many
described here for the first time, illuminate the inner workings of a
company born before the Civil War. That history has stirred anxiety
among some New York Life executives, who take pride in their multiracial
work force and customer base. They worry that news coverage about the
company’s ties to slavery may overshadow their efforts to provide philanthropic support to the black community.
New York Life hired one of the insurance industry’s first black agents
in 1957. African-Americans currently account for 13 percent of the
firm’s employees, including its senior vice president for governmental
relations, George Nichols III, who reports directly to the chief executive.
The
company donates millions of dollars annually to causes and groups that
benefit African-Americans, the executives said, pointing to a $10 million endowment to the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies at the City College of New York, sponsorship of the National Museum of African American History
& Culture and other initiatives. (The company was known as Nautilus
Mutual Life Insurance; the name was changed to New York Life in 1849.)
“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, said in a written
statement. “While we cannot change our history, our longstanding
recognition of it has helped shape our commitment to the
African-American community.”
The
company’s connections to slavery drew attention in the early 2000s as
California and more than a dozen localities, among them Chicago,
Philadelphia and San Francisco, began to require companies to disclose
their slavery-era activities. The disclosure laws
emerged in response to black activists and lawyers who pressed for
reparations and a public reckoning with history. (A lawsuit filed
against New York Life and other companies tied to slavery was dismissed in 2004
after a judge ruled that the African-American plaintiffs had
established no clear link to the businesses they sued and that the
statute of limitations had run out more than a century ago.)

New
York Life executives found the old records in a storage room that
served as an informal archive on the 16th floor of their headquarters, a
trove of fraying ledgers and yellowing documents. They turned over the
names of slaves and slaveholders as required by law and donated several
of the accounting books to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where they are available to the public. The company stored the rest in a private corporate archive.
Company
officials allowed The Times to review several ledgers from its archive,
but declined to allow a reporter to interview its archivist to
determine whether additional records related to the slave policies still
exist. The executives said that slave policies generated only about 5
percent of total revenues during the three fiscal years in which the
policies were sold. They said the policies proved to be unprofitable and
did not drive the company’s growth.
But
historians say the slave policies had an impact on the company’s
development. The company had two years to invest or spend much of the
revenues from the slave policies before death claims exceeded annual
premium payments, according to Dan Bouk,
a historian at Colgate University who has studied 19th- and
20th-century insurance companies, and reviewed the company’s figures at
the request of The Times.
The
policies helped New York Life establish an early foothold in the South,
which distinguished it from its larger competitors, said Sharon Ann Murphy,
a historian at Providence College. Its agents continued to insure white
lives in the region after the slave policies were discontinued.
“Slave
policies were an opportunity for them to break into the industry and
they actively promoted these policies in the early years,” said Ms.
Murphy, who is the author of a book about the emergence of the insurance industry before the Civil War.
“We
can be disturbed by this, but we shouldn’t be surprised by it,” she
said. “It wasn’t just Southern companies that benefited from slavery;
many Northern institutions also benefited directly or indirectly.”
The
advertisement appeared in the Richmond Enquirer on Jan. 29, 1846. It
described a new firm offering life insurance for slaves employed in any
“occupation where there may be danger or risque.”

Within
four days, the customers started streaming into the office of the
insurance agent for New York Life. They owned laborers who worked in the coal mines in nearby Chesterfield County and they all knew something about risk.
Their
slaves dug for black ore in underground shafts that oozed deadly gases
and shuddered with explosions. Dozens of enslaved African-Americans had
died in a blast just seven years earlier, mining records show, a
catastrophic financial loss for their white owners.
Nicholas
Mills, who owned shares in the Midlothian Coal Mining Company, was
determined to protect himself from such a calamity. So he purchased
policies on more than 20 of his enslaved laborers, including Mr. York, a
40-year-old coal miner and the father of a baby boy.
The
premiums Mr. Mills paid in the spring of 1846 — about $7,000 in today’s
dollars — flowed into the New York Life office on Wall Street, where
employees began recording the names, ages, policy numbers and
occupations of the slaves who were insured.
Slavery
was finally abolished in New York in 1827. But the plantations in the
South continued to generate business in the city in the decades before
the Civil War, according to Eric Foner, a historian at Columbia University.
New
York City’s merchants helped to finance the nation’s premier export
crop, cotton, and the purchase of the land and slaves needed to grow it.
They controlled the boat companies that shipped the cotton to Europe,
leading one Southern editor to describe New York City as “almost as
dependent upon Southern slavery as Charleston.” And some of these
businessmen assumed prominent positions at New York Life.
Mr.
De Peyster Ogden, the company’s first president, was a cotton merchant
who grew up in a home tended by slaves. He would become a prominent
defender of slavery, describing it as an unfortunate, but inextricable
part of the nation’s economy.

Several
wealthy members of the company’s board also opposed efforts to end
slavery, including William H. Aspinwall, a builder of the trans-Panama
railroad; Schuyler Livingston, the New York representative of Lloyd’s of
London; and James Brown, a banker whose firm, Brown Brothers,
controlled several plantations in the South. (A board member, Henry W.
Hicks, on the other hand, came from a family of abolitionists.)
It
was no surprise then that New York Life tried to tap into the flood of
money pouring into the city from the South. In the beginning, the
payments from slaveholders and other customers helped the company
generate interest and cover the rent of its Wall Street office ($500 for
the first year), the salary of its first president ($500), commissions
for agents (roughly 5 to 10 percent of premiums), the fees for the
medical doctors who examined the slaves ($2 per exam) and office upkeep
like painting, carpeting and postage.
The
clothbound ledgers, which describe New York Life’s revenues and
expenses in spidery script, also document how the company
institutionalized the nation’s racial hierarchy.
Officials
typically insured the lives of white customers for $1,000 to $5,000 in
the early years. Slaves, on the other hand, were considered property
under the law and were typically insured for about $400, the records
show, and some for as little as $200.
Payouts
from death claims usually went to the grieving relatives of white
customers. In the case of slaves, however, it was the slave owners — who
insured their laborers and paid the annual premiums — who collected.
Abraham
S. Wooldridge, a mining magnate and business partner of Mr. Mills,
praised the company’s swift response after two of his slaves perished on
the job.
“The
insurance was promptly paid,” Mr. Wooldridge said in an advertisement
published by the Richmond Whig newspaper in 1847. “I have entire
confidence in the solvency and fair dealing of the company.”

As
the death claims mounted, New York Life’s board voted on April 19,
1848, to discontinue the sale of slave policies. It would take about six
years for the last slave policies to lapse.
But
the names of the slaves remained inscribed in accounting books that
moved from one office to the next as the company grew, handwritten clues
that would link the past to the present.
Policy
No. 447 led to a red brick church in Midlothian, Va., and to Audrey
Mozelle Ross, an amateur historian who has spent years researching the
origins of the First Baptist Church. Enslaved miners founded the congregation in 1846, gathering to pray amid the dust and dangers of the coal pits.
Ms.
Ross, a retired public health scientist, prayed at First Baptist just
as her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents did before her. She
knew the names of the founding members by heart.
She
never imagined that she was connected to any of them, though, until she
received an unexpected email earlier this year. That’s when she learned
that The Times, with the help of Crista Cowan, a genealogist at Ancestry, had unearthed a missing piece of her family tree.
Ms.
Ross’s great-great-grandfather was Mr. York, a founding member of her
church and one of the hundreds of slaves whose lives were insured by New
York Life.
“I
can’t believe it,” said Ms. Ross, who is 66 and had researched the
family histories of several church members, but not her own. “You have
just opened my eyes.”

Ms.
Ross worked in New York City in the mid-1970s and never dreamed that
one of the city’s insurance companies had tried to profit from her
ancestor’s enslavement. “I think it was pathetic that they used the
labor, the hard work, blood, sweat and tears of the slaves” to help
their business, she said.
Even
so, she considers herself lucky. Her great-great grandfather survived
his time as an enslaved miner. After the Civil War, Mr. York continued
digging for coal and earned enough money to buy land and cattle. He
helped to establish a school for newly freed slaves and became the
patriarch of a sprawling family.
Others
were less fortunate. The stone ruins of the Grove Shaft building, the
remains of the Midlothian Coal Mining Company, are only a short drive
from Ms. Ross’s home. Whenever she visits, she prays for the enslaved
miners who never made it home.
Godfrey, a 50-year-old slave who was also insured by New York Life, died in a fire in Midlothian on Nov. 20, 1847.
“Burned to death,” reads the entry in the company’s accounting of the dead.
The
insurance clerks on Wall Street did not record Godfrey’s last name or
the location of his burial place. But they described what happened next:
Mr. Mills, Godfrey’s owner, filed a claim with New York Life for the
loss of his human property.
Within three months, the company delivered, paying him $337.

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