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 31/2 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 over 170 years. It is a story fllled 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 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.