Re: Anita's post about slaves buying their freedom -- 
I met a business historian at UVA several years ago who was doing her
dissertation on the development of the life insurance business.  To her
surprise she found that in the 1850s insurance companies were writing more
and more policies for slaves.  Most of these were taken out by masters who
were hiring out their slaves to work in factories, but some policies were
taken out by slaves with the masters as the beneficiaries.  She found that
this was a manumission strategy.  A slave who wanted to buy himself on, say,
a ten-year plan, would naturally meet resistance from the master -- what
happens if the slave makes two years of payments and then gets killed on a
dangerous job? The master loses 80% of the slave's value.  But if the slave
has a policy, the master gets the full death benefit.  So life insurance
eased the path to freedom. On the larger scale, the entry of the big
insurance companies into the slavery business showed how slavery was
evolving in the 1850s into something more modern, flexible, and robust,
adapting to industrialization and becoming woven into the national financial
markets.  

Henry Wiencek