By Dr. Stacey Patton
On the morning of April 20, 1859, a terrible explosion rocked the Bright Hope Coal Pits in Chesterfield County, Virginia, about 18 miles from the Richmond Railroad.
The tragedy claimed the lives of nine men, four of whom were white. Their names were solemnly printed in local newspapers across the South: Isaac Farmer, George Smith, Nicholas Blankenship, and Albert Rowe.
A dispatch from the Kanawha Valley Star reported: “The explosion created great excitement, and every effort was made to descend the shaft and to rescue the unfortunate men, dead or alive, but it was impossible to do so, because of the life destroying gasses, which seemed to fill the entire shaft.” The bodies were believed to have been entirely consumed in the explosion.
Among the victims were also five Black males whose names did not make it to the public record.
Press accounts identified those Black victims as “servants.” But they were slaves owned by four different white masters, male and female, and their deaths were noted only in terms of property loss. Archival records reveal that all five slaves had an insurance policy taken out on them, valued at $800 each, roughly equivalent to around $29,000 in today’s dollars. Payouts from the insurance policies likely went entirely to the purchaser of the plans, the slaveholders, leaving the loved ones of those victims still enslaved and penniless.
This incident sheds light on a grim chapter in American history, during which human lives were commodified and insured as property by some of the largest insurance companies in the world.
Several historians have noted that slave insurance was one of America’s earliest forms of industrial risk management that provided an important source of revenue for companies that included Baltimore Life, New York Life, AIG, Aetna, American Life, Virginia Life, Richmond Fire Association, North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, Asheville Mutual Insurance Company, Lynchburg Hose and Fire Insurance Company, Greensborough Mutual Life, and others. It is important to note that Aetna Life first issued policies in 1853 out of Hartford, Connecticut, even though slavery had been illegal in the state since 1848.
Source: Once Upon A Time, Enslaved Africans Were An Insurance Commodity
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