A Century in Captivity: The Life and Trials of Prince Mortimer, a Connecticut Slave
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...
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The riveting reconstruction of an eighteenth-century slave's life and imprisonment
Preface Acknowledgments The Trial The Early Years The Will to Be Free The Codicils Probate The Appeal The Conviction Revisited To Newgate Early Newgate Mortimer, Prince Freedom Delayed The Counterfeiter The Bible Peddler Three and a Half Feet Moses and Amos Old Soldiers Acidum Arseniosum Postscript Notes Bibliographic Note Index
\ From the Publisher"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\ "A Century in Captivity: The Life and Trials of Prince Mortimer, a Connecticut Slavenot 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."--Hartford Courant\ "[T]his book provides a solid overview of penal reform and the prison system in Connecticut in the early nineteenth century. Caron also offers an interesting glimpse into the complexity of property law in nineteenth-century Connecticut that would appeal to individuals interested in early American legal history."--Common-Place\ "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."--Middleton (CT) Press\ \ \
