There are a smattering of reported cases about life insurance upon slaves. My big worry was moral hazard. Fortunately, no reported cases consider this issue. The fact that there are no reported cases suggest that it was perhaps not a big problem.
From an insurance standpoint, the cases are fairly routine. In one case, the life of a slave was insured so long as he was not engaged in an occupation more dangerous than being a laborer in a tobacco warehouse and so long as he was not south of New Orleans. The man died when he fell off a riverboat traveling north from New Orleans so that he could work on a sugar plantation. The insurer refused to pay upon the grounds that he was on his way to a more dangerous occupation. The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that the slave was not involved in that occupation yet and was not south of New Orleans, and so the insurance applied.
Read more at: Insurance Journal
So you go from “almost all slave holders took out life insurance policies on there slaves” to “a smattering of reported cases about life insurance upon slaves”. A bit of a difference, don’t you think?