Northern institutions openly profited from slavery even where it was illegal

Evidence

Two of the Hartford Courant’s best investigative reporters were assigned to my story and I learned through them the paper had done its own investigative piece on itself. As one of the oldest, longest-running newspapers in the United States, it had published ads for runaway slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It also ran a story about how Aetna, the Hartford-based insurance company, had insured slaves for the people who owned them—in the 1850s, when enslavement was illegal in Connecticut. … Aetna, the global leader who dominated the insurance industry and made Hartford the insurance capital of the world, was prompted to issue a public apology in March 2000 for insuring the lives of slaves. Aetna referred to this chapter of the company’s history as “deeply disappointing.” — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 343

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader questions about how Northern institutions (newspapers, insurers) held and profited from enslaved people — an institutional-complicity parallel to Harvard’s photographic archive.