price which his business prospects would justify him in paying.  Having bought a slave at such a price, an equally thoroughgoing caution would have led him to take out a life, health and accident insurance policy on the slave; but even then he must personally have borne the risk of the slave’s running away.  In practice the lives of a few slaves engaged in steamboat operation and other hazardous pursuits were insured,[7] but the total number of policies taken on their lives, except as regards marine insurance in the coasting slave trade, was very small.  The planters as a rule carried their own risks, and they generally dispensed with actuarial reckonings in determining their bids for slaves.  About 1850 a rule of thumb was current that a prime hand was worth a hundred dollars for every cent in the current price of a pound of cotton.  In general, however, the prospective purchaser merely “reckoned” in the Southern sense of conjecturing, at what price he could employ an added slave with probable advantage, and made his bid accordingly.

[Footnote 7:  J.C.  Nott, in J.B.D.  DeBow, ed., Industrial Resources of the Southern and Western States (New Orleans, 1852), II, 299; F.L.  Hoffman, in The South in the Building of the Nation (Richmond, Va. [1909]), 638-655. DeBow’s Review, X, 241, contains an advertisement of a company offering life and accident insurance on slaves.

A typical policy is preserved in the MSS. division of the Library of Congress.  It was issued Dec. 31, 1851, by the Louisville agent of the Mutual Benefit Fire and Life Insurance Company of Louisiana, to T.P.  Linthicum of Bairdstown, Ky., insuring for $650 each the lives of Jack, 26 years old and Alexander, 31 years old, for one year, at the rates of 2 and 2-1/2 per cent, respectively, plus one per cent, for permission to employ the slaves on steamboats during the first half of the period.  They were employed as waiters.  Jack died Nov. 20, and the insurance was duly paid.]

A slave’s market price was affected by sex, age, physique, mental quality, industrial training, temper, defects and vices, so far as each of these could be ascertained.  The laws of most of the states presumed a seller’s warrant of health at the time of sale, unless expressly withheld, and in Louisiana this warrant extended to mental and moral soundness.  The period in which the buyer might apply for redress, however, was limited to a few months, and the verdicts of juries were uncertain.  On the whole, therefore, if the buyer were unacquainted with the slave’s previous career and with his attitude toward the transfer of possession, he necessarily incurred considerable risk in making each purchase.  But in general the taking of reasonable precautions would cause the loss through unsuspected vices in one case to be offset by gains through unexpected virtues in another.