Description:
An enslaved man's life reveals slavery's entanglement with the early prison system
On December 21, 1811, Prince Mortimer--an elderly, ailing enslaved man believed to be around eighty-seven years old--was sentenced by a Middletown, Connecticut, judge to life in prison for attempting to poison his enslaver by putting arsenic in his chocolate drink. He spent the next sixteen years confined in Newgate Prison, a former colonial copper mine repurposed as a dungeon to serve as Connecticut's first state prison. When Newgate closed in 1827, Prince and the other inmates were transferred to the newly built Wethersfield State Prison. Though designed with reformist intentions, conditions at Wethersfield remained harsh, and Prince died there in 1834 at the reputed age of 110 in a cell just three and a half feet wide. His life--beginning with his capture as a child in Guinea around 1730, followed by more than eight decades of enslavement and over two decades of imprisonment--offers a rare window into overlapping systems of captivity in early America.
Despite the paucity of direct source documentation, Denis R. Caron was able to draw on extensive archival research to piece together Prince Mortimer's story by examining the institutions that shaped it. The result is a carefully documented account that will attract readers with such varying interests as African American history, early American law and history, and the development of the American prison system. Through his examination of Prince's life, Caron traces the persistence of institutional unfreedom in a period often associated with liberty and progress.
This updated edition introduces newly discovered information regarding several aspects of the life of Prince Mortimer, as well as the shameful history of slavery in Connecticut.
Review Quotes:
"Denis Caron's new book, A Century in Captivity, has all the ingredients of a blockbuster movie--an attempted murder, a trial and a protagonist who never stood a chance against his captors and masters."--Brucie Izard, Glastonbury LIFE
"A towering tale told with precision and conviction... Caron's skill as a lawyer... helps him describe and interpret the will of Mortimer and how Prince's fate hung in the balance."--G. C. Gould, Wethersfield Post
"While the reasons behind the near poisoning of George Star will most likely never be known, thanks to Caron, Mortimer's story will: a story of nearly unspeakable hardship, unconscionable cruelty, and the remarkable perseverance of the human will."--Shawn R. Dagle, The Middletown Press
"A Century in Captivity not only resurrects a life that was otherwise lost to history, but offers a chilling portrait of the state's early prisons, and Middletown's place in the northern slave trade."--Josh Kovner, Hartford Courant
"Caron's narrative reveals as much about Connecticut's involvement in slavery, the slave trade, and the oppression of enslaved Africans as it does about the state's gruesome prison system in the early decades of the 19th century."--Edward L. Robinson, Jr., Journal of African American History
"As a study of Connecticut's first prisons, A Century in Captivity is an outstanding book."--Michael Bellesiles, Connecticut History
"There are portions of the book that will interest attorneys even more than Mortimer's life. Caron gives well-researched observations on such matters as emancipation, will contests, and, of course, the prison system itself... It is a pioneering work of Connecticut legal history--a biography, not of a hero or successful lawyer, but of an outcast from society and his contemporary world."--Henry S. Cohn, Judge of the Connecticut Superior Court, Connecticut Bar Journal
"Author Denis Caron offers, at last, a just epitaph for a slave lost to history. It is a story that deeply matters, and it will live as a demonstration of the grace bestowed on us all when a writer illuminates the magnificent in the ordinary."--Faith Middleton, The Faith Middleton Show, WNPR