A Century in Captivity: The Life And Trials of Prince Mortimer, a Connecticut Slave

by Denis R. Caron

On December 21, 1811, a Middletown, Connecticut judge sentenced Prince Mortimer, a sickly eighty-seven-year-old slave, to life imprisonment for attempting to poison his master by lacing his chocolate drink with arsenic. Prince spent the next sixteen years in Connecticut's notorious Newgate Prison, a colonial copper mine that had been converted into America's first state prison. In 1827 the dungeons at Newgate were closed forever, and the prisoners were transferred to the newly constructed Wethersfield State Prison. Wethersfield was supposed to be modern and progressive, but prisoners suffered there every bit as much as at Newgate. In 1834, Prince died there in his 31/2-by-7-foot cell, reportedly at the age of 110. From his capture into slavery as a child in Guinea in about 1730, through his more than eighty years as a slave and twenty-three years as a prisoner, Prince had endured more than a century in captivity.

In an astounding feat of historical inquiry and scholarship, author Denis R. Caron has assembled a mass of facts and insights that will mesmerize general interest readers and students of African American, regional, legal, and penal history alike. A Century in Captivity is a marvelous and sobering story previously lost to history, filled with dashed dreams of freedom, unrelenting miseries, and struggles for wealth and power.

188 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1955

Reviews

[Adaela McLaughlin]

This book covers the imprisoned circumstances of an enslaved person's life. Prince Mortimer was born in 1724 in Guinea, West Africa. He died 110 years later in Connecticut, USA, in prison. Caron is a mighty researcher, and even though we have no writings of Prince to better understand his experience, Caron has delved into his occupation as a slave in New England, working as a rope maker for the busy ship industry, his circumstances of enslavement and of almost gaining freedom from his owner, his crime, and his incarceration in an underground, literally, prison. All the while, he suffered from yaws, a tropical disease that thoroughly disfigures one's face.
The most important topic of this book is the imprisonment of Prince. How the prisoners lived at the time in more than one reprehensible prison, the politics of imprisonment and the desire on the part of some people to improve the conditions of prisons in the 1800's.
Finally, there is the fact that Prince was told he could leave if he wanted to, but he returned to his prison voluntarily.