A CENTURY IN CAPTIVITY: The Life and Trials of Prince Mortimer, A Connecticut Slave
By Denis R. Caron
University Press of New England (NYP)

On December 21, 1811, a Middletown, Connecticut judge sentenced Prince Mortimer, a sickly 87-year old slave, to life imprisonment for attempting to poison his master by placing arsenic in his chocolate drink. Prince spent the next 16 years in Connecticut’s notorious Newgate Prison, a colonial copper mine that had been converted just before the revolution into the country’s first state prison. In 1827, Newgate’s dungeons were closed forever and the prisoners were transferred to the newly-constructed Wethersfield State Prison, then believed to be the most modern and progressive prison in the world. In reality, however, Wethersfield’s early years were filled with suffering and deprivations that rivaled the intensity of Newgate. Prince died in his 3 ½ x 7 foot cell at Wethersfield Prison in 1834, at the age of 110. Between his 80+ years as a slave and 23 years as a prisoner, Prince Mortimer had endured more than a century in captivity.

Denis Caron’s research into the life of this most unfortunate soul has uncovered a compelling story lost to history for nearly 170 years. It is a story filled with dashed dreams of freedom, unrelenting miseries, and struggles for wealth and power, told against the successive backgrounds of northern slavery and the early development of American prisons. But it is also a story filled with an unsolved mystery: What would prompt an elderly slave to engage in such an ill-conceived criminal act, in which his complicity would certainly be discovered and his punishment just as certainly administered? A Century in Captivity explores this question, and discusses a possible answer rooted in Prince’s earliest years, back to the days of his arduous journey across the Atlantic in the rank bowels of a slave ship.

Denis R. Caron is an attorney practicing in Connecticut. He has written and contributed to a number of legal texts and is the author of many articles on a variety of aspects of real property law.

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