Aetna Life Insurance Quotes

Then again, by the nineteenth century, owners could purchase life insurance on their slaves (from some of the most reputable insurance companies in the country) and be paid three-quarters of their market value upon their death. These insurance companies, including modern household names New York Life, Aetna, and U.S. Life, were just some of the many northern corporations whose fortunes were bound up with slavery.

When it was legal, slavery bolstered the economy even in states where it was not permitted. Financing the slave trade, selling the goods and services that supported it, insuring enslaved human “property,” and hosting auctions were big business. Northern banks extended the lines of credit that slavers needed to purchase human beings and agricultural equipment. New England businessmen helped Southern rural planters negotiate the cotton market, serving as brokers and paid advisers.[1] New York Life, now the nation’s third-largest insurer and a Fortune 500 company, sold hundreds of policies covering the value of enslaved people so slavers could recoup their worth in case they died doing hazardous work in mills, mines, or factories. In 1847, such policies accounted for a third of their business.[2] Aetna and US Life (now a subsidiary of AIG) did brisk business as well. Before becoming one of the nation’s most influential investment banks (and ultimately collapsing in 2008), Lehman Brothers began as an Alabama cotton brokerage. The fortunes of J. P. Morgan, John Jacob Astor, Charles Lewis Tiffany (the jeweler), and Archibald Gracie III (of the family of Gracie Mansion, now the official residence of the mayor of New York City) all had ties to the booming cotton trade.[3]