Review: California Slavery Era Insurance Registry

Dataset CreatorCalifornia Department of InsuranceCalifornia’s Slavery Era Insurance Registry is a dataset of 677 records of life insurance policies on enslaved people in Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, whose lives enslavers insured through companies (or successor firms), still doing business in California in 2000. The same year, California passed a public disclosure law, SB2199 Sec. 1(a), based on its finding that “insurance policies from the slavery era have been discovered in the archives of several insurance companies, documenting insurance coverage for slaveholders for damage to or death of their slaves, issued by a predecessor insurance firm. These documents,” the law continues, “provide the first evidence of ill-gotten profits from slavery, which profits in part capitalized insurers whose successors remain in existence today.”1 The corresponding law applies to companies doing business in California whose predecessors underwrote slave insurance policies.In October 2002, SB 2199 required insurance companies to submit records or knowledge of any of a firm’s policies on enslaved lives to California’s insurance commissioner. Each policy subject to the law should include reporting on enslavers’ names and names of the insured enslaved. The law stipulates that “descendants of slaves, whose ancestors were defined as private property, dehumanized, divided from their families, forced to perform labor without appropriate compensation or benefits, and whose ancestors' owners were compensated for damages by insurers, are entitled to full disclosure.”2Between 2002 and 2005, the California Department of Insurance received reports from at least eight companies, three of which supplied 690 records of insurance policies. New York Life Insurance Company supplied 488 policy records (71 percent of the total); American International Group, Inc. (AIG) supplied 173 (25 percent), and Aetna supplied 29 (4 percent). Ace USA (ACE Property and Casualty Insurance Company) discovered one record of a policy issued to Francis Fountain of Harrison, Mississippi, on an enslaved laborer named Peter, which Ace determined to have been issued by Aetna. Aetna also submitted a record of an insurance policy on the same Peter’s life sold to Francis Fountain of New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1855. Most policies were sold in the upper south states of Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia.According to Sharon Ann Murphy, New York Life sold policies in Southern states between 1846 and 1848 on 488 enslaved people to about 235 enslavers. Both Murphy’s research and the California dataset reveal that most policies were on the lives of enslaved males performing dangerous jobs as maritime workers and miners. About 17 percent of policies New York Life sold were on enslaved people working in mines.3 New York Life sold Elias Burnette of Albemarle County, Virginia, a policy on the life of enslaved miner Dabney Burnette, whom the enslaver hired to the Mid-Lothian coal mine in Chesterfield County some seventy-five miles away. Some enslavers hired at greater distance, like Stephen Chenoweth of Louisville, Kentucky, who bought an Aetna policy on Tillman, who was “employed as fireman on board of a … steam boat on the rivers between Louisville & New Orleans or on the Alabama and [Tombigbee] Rivers.” Some of the insured were female, such as Amanda (15), Ann (15), and Martha (14), insured by Aetna on policies bought by Charles Meyer of St. Francis, Missouri in 1860. Their occupation was listed as “Housegirl.”4 Murphy’s research reveals that about 17 percent of policies insured the lives of enslaved artisans and another 12 percent covered enslaved domestic workers.52001-2005EnglishAlabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia1846-1860Insurance policiesAce USA, Aetna, American International Group, Inc. (AIG), Manhattan Life, New York Life Insurance Company, Penn Mutual, Providence Washington, Royal & Sun Alliance, and others. See: Preliminary Guide to the Slavery Era Insurance Documents, ca. 1846-60, 2001-2002, Department of Special Collections, Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara, https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/ft5w1007cc/entire_text/.SB 2199 requires insurance companies doing business in California to research their archives and submit a report on any policies that company or a predecessor firm issued on enslaved lives and to include any other relevant information on insurance policies on enslaved people known or suspected by that firm. The statute required the following: Section 13810: The Commissioner shall request and obtain information from insurers licensed and doing business in this state regarding any records of slaveholder insurance policies issued by any predecessor corporation during the slavery era.Section 13811: The Commissioner shall obtain the names of any slaveholders or slaves described in those insurance records, and shall make the information available to the public and the Legislature.Section 13812: Each insurer licensed and doing business in this state shall research and report to the Commissioner with respect to any records within the insurer's possession or knowledge relating to insurance policies issued to slaveholders that provided coverage for damage to or death or their slaves.Section 13813: Descendants of slaves, whose ancestors were defined as private property, dehumanized, divided from their families, forced to perform labor without appropriate compensation or benefits, and whose ancestors' owners were compensated for damages by insurers, are entitled to full disclosure.6The California Department of insurance collated the reports submitted by the various companies into a single table, publicly available on its website at a PDF. To make the registry more usable, Enslaved.org project staff converted the PDF table made public by the state into a .csv spreadsheet. In the many cases where the registry said “Same” for “Slave County (Parish), State,” staff copied the information from the “Slaveholder County (Parish), State” column to which the “Same” referred. Where a cell contained the term “NOT LISTED,” they instead made it blank, in line with data best practices. Bold typeface, which indicated the 2005 addenda to the data, but was not retained but all the content was.Website: https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/150-other-prog/10-seir/Dataset Repository: Harvard Dataverse, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/BP6JHQEnslaved.org Linked Data Representation: https://enslaved.org/visualizedata?type=Dashboard&field=po&proj=california+slavery+era+insurance+registrySharon Ann Murphy