and the stock will rise and fall in the market in
response to the play of conjectures as to the present value of the total
future earnings applicable to dividends. So also a planter entering the
slave market might have reckoned in advance the prospect of working life
which a slave of given age would have, and the average earnings above
maintenance which might be expected from his labor. By discounting each of
those annual returns at the prevailing rate of interest to determine their
present values, and adding up the resulting sums, he would ascertain the
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 a