339 of the First 1,000 Policies New York Life’s Predecessor Wrote Were on Enslaved People. California Made the Company Report Them.

In 2000 California passed a law telling insurance companies to go into their own basements. Any policy a predecessor firm had written on the life of an enslaved person was to be reported to the state.

The companies wrote back. What came in is now a public registry, and the state’s list of enslaved people’s names runs to 676 rows.

The law was Senate Bill 2199, authored by then State Senator Tom Hayden, approved on September 29, 2000, and signed by Governor Gray Davis. It added sections 13810 through 13813 to the California Insurance Code.

It did not ask for opinions. It asked for documents.

What the statute actually said had been found

The Legislature wrote its reason into the law itself, and the sentence is flat enough to read twice.

Insurance policies from the slavery era, it found, “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.”

Read the grammar of that. The customer is the slaveholder. The insured event is damage to or death of a person. The payout goes to the owner.

That is the artifact this registry is made of. It is a life insurance file in which the life is not the client.

The law reached any insurer licensed in California whose predecessor had written such policies. A predecessor here means the firm that later absorbed the old one.

The filings that came back

The California Department of Insurance delivered its report to the Legislature in May 2002.

Substantive responses, in the report’s own phrase, came from ACE USA, Aetna, American International Group, Manhattan Life, New York Life, Penn Mutual, Providence Washington, and Royal & Sun Alliance.

Some responses were thin. ACE USA reported a single 1855 policy written by Aetna Life, insuring “the life a slave named Peter, identified as a laborer,” issued in Mississippi. AIG produced a magazine replica of one policy and a list of names from the bound registries of U.S. Life. Penn Mutual filed two historical documents. Manhattan Life reported one 1854 policy insuring shippers for a cargo of 700 Chinese laborers, described in the report with the period slur, on which the company took a quarter of the risk, $21,000, for a premium of $840.

Aetna reported seven policies, some covering more than one life, and produced “sixteen first names of slaves culled from the seven policies.” Sometime after its first report it found a ledger book with more names and filed those too. “In most instances,” the report says, “there is no record of the last name of the insured slave.”

The department reported that approximately 92 percent of the carriers it contacted were in compliance at the time of the report.

New York Life, Nautilus, and the first 1,000 policies

Then there is New York Life, and this is where the scale stops being a curiosity.

The firm New York Life grew out of was the Nautilus Insurance Company. It began writing life insurance in 1845, the company told the state, and sold slaveholder policies for about two years until its trustees voted in 1848 to stop.

The company went back to Nautilus’s first 1,000 policies. Of those first thousand, 339 were on the lives of enslaved people.

That is roughly one in three of the earliest business the firm ever wrote. The policies, the company reported, were usually written for less than $500 and for a term of one year, and three death claims were paid in the period reviewed, $1,050 in all.

New York Life provided 484 names of enslaved people and 233 names of slaveholders to the state.

Those numbers are not estimates and not projections. They are counts of filed paper, reported by the companies that held it.

What is in a row of the registry

The registry is not a summary. It is a list, and the list has columns.

The Department of Insurance posts it as two tables, one sorted by the enslaved person’s name and one by the slaveholder’s. Each row carries the name of the enslaved person, the county and state, the work the person was made to do, the policy number where one survives, the slaveholder’s name, and the company that filed it. The enslaved-name table runs to 676 rows. New York Life filed 485 of them, AIG 173, Aetna 17, and ACE one.

Kentucky accounts for 244 rows, Virginia 135, North Carolina 90, South Carolina 57, Georgia 49, Alabama 33 and Mississippi 22, with smaller counts from Missouri, the District of Columbia, Louisiana, Tennessee and Arkansas. The most common recorded occupation is miner, at 62 rows, then laborer, fireman and house servant.

Most of the enslaved people appear with a first name only. In 469 of the 676 rows the name is a single word, such as Aaron, a fireman in Henderson County, Kentucky, on New York Life policy 1588. That is what the original policies recorded, and the registry does not invent what the paper never held.

A ledger entry can be argued with. A name cannot.

For families researching ancestry, a registry row is sometimes the only surviving written trace of a person, because the insurance file was the document that had a financial reason to be kept.

The state built the registry so those rows could be searched by the public rather than sitting in eight companies’ archives.

The finding about ill-gotten profits

The Legislature also wrote down why it wanted this.

The documents, it found, “provide the first evidence of ill-gotten profits from slavery, which profits in part capitalized insurers whose successors remain in existence today.”

That is a claim about where startup money came from. Premium income from these policies did not evaporate in 1865. It became capital, and capital became companies.

California did not order anyone to pay anything. The law’s only demand was disclosure, backed by the state’s licensing power over anyone who wanted to sell insurance in California.

Other states later copied the approach. A 2012 report by the Connecticut Office of Legislative Research surveys the slavery era insurance registry laws that followed.

The registry is still posted

The registry has outlived the news cycle that produced it. The 2002 report to the Legislature, the two name tables, the policy documents and a New York Life clarifying letter remain posted by the California Department of Insurance, and photocopies of the carrier filings sit in the San Francisco Public Library’s history center under a public finding aid.

That was the design. A registry is a filing cabinet the state will not let close.

The first row of the enslaved-name table reads: Aaron, Henderson County, Kentucky, fireman, policy number 1588, slaveholder Alexander Brown, submitted by New York Life Insurance Company.