Starr and Starr vers. Starr and Phillips, executors of Philip Mortimer

In the Connecticut Superior Court’s December 1795 court term, George and Ann Starr sued Elihu Starr and George Phillips as executors of Philip Mortimer’s estate, seeking to overturn the validity of the man’s will.

George and Ann’s young son, Philip Mortimer Starr, was in fact the main beneficiary of that will. But to inherit his great-uncle’s property, he’d have to change his surname to Mortimer on coming of age.

Before then, the will required the estate to grant land and £1,000 to the city of Middletown, Connecticut, to expand a cemetery and build and stock a granary. Maybe the Starrs opposed those plans.

The Starrs’ arguments that the will of Ann’s uncle was invalid were:

• Philip Mortimer was “not of sound disposing mind and memory” when he set up the will and codicils.
• The codicils weren’t completely signed and witnessed.
• Elihu Starr was too entangled in the situation as an heir, a witness, and an executor, not to mention the man who wrote out one of those codicils for Mortimer.
• The other witnesses to the will, Timothy Starr and Joseph Sage, were also heirs inasmuch as they were citizens of Middletown and therefore stood to benefit from that granary.

The court decided that Philip Mortimer was mentally capable of composing the will and codicils. Implicitly, the judges therefore agreed that Mortimer wanted to give the town a granary, to leave most of his money to his great-nephew with the name-change stipulation, and to free his enslaved workers.

However, the majority of the court found that the technical violations of the law invalidated the will. Apparently someone should have told Philip Mortimer that he needed out-of-town witnesses, that he shouldn’t have made even small bequests to his witnesses and executors. Though I have a sense that telling Philip Mortimer what to do wasn’t easy.

Judge Jesse Root (1736–1822, shown above), a veteran of both the Continental Army and the Continental Congress, dissented from the court’s ruling. In fact, Root’s dissent took up most of the official report on the case. But his argument that the court should respect Philip Mortimer’s clear desires and overlook legalities didn’t carry the day.

In January 1796 the court negated the Mortimer will, ruling that he had died intestate. It appointed the husband of his nearest relative to administer the estate. The 12 February Middlesex Gazette carried this notice:

THE Subscriber, being appointed Administrator on the Estate of PHILIP MORTIMER, Esq. late of Middletown, deceased, hereby gives public Notice to the several Creditors, That the hon. Court of Probate for the District of Middletown has limited Twelve Months from the 30th Day of January, 1796, as the Time for exhibiting their respective Claims against said Estate. Those who neglect to exhibit the same to the Subscriber within that Time will be legally debarred of their Demands. All Persons indebted to the Estate are requested to make Payment, to
GEORGE STARR, Administrator.
Middletown, Feb. 5, 1796.

COMING UP: The fallout.

Valuing the Philip Mortimer Estate’s Human Property

After Philip Mortimer’s death, his executors began to work through his substantial estate in Middletown, Connecticut.

As quoted yesterday, executors Elihu Starr and George Phillips advertised for creditors and debtors to come settle their accounts with George Starr, acting as their attorney. And also for people to bring back any borrowed books.

In August 1795 the executors submitted Mortimer’s will and codicil to the probate court. The man’s estate was appraised at almost £5,000.

That legal paperwork included another list of the people Mortimer had enslaved, most of whom his will freed according to one schedule or another:

• Briston, aged 60, called Bristol in the will
• Jack
• Dublin, not mentioned in the will
• Prince, “sick with the yaws”
• Peter, “on board man of war and likely dead”
• Sophy, labeled a “girl” like the following two but old enough to have three sons; the Barbour collection says she was born in 1752 
• Silvy, born 1773 
• Peg, born 1777 as Margaret—though other documents estimate her to have been about 20 years old in 1794
• Lester, born 1787, first of three sons of Jack and Sophy
• Dick, born 1789 as Richard 
• John, born 1790
• Rachel, a “girl child,” born 1793, perhaps the daughter of Hagar, mentioned in the will, or Amarillas, born 1770

As property, all these people were assigned a monetary value. But those low values reflected how Connecticut was turning away from slavery. Mortimer was the state’s biggest single slaveholder in 1790, but his human property comprised less than .1% of his estate.

Jack was valued at £10, Sophy and the three boys at £5 each. The women Silvy and Peg were each valued at £1. The other four men and the little girl were assigned a market value of zero. That makes sense for Peter, who was out of reach in at least one way, but those prices suggest the appraisers thought any purchaser would have a hard time compelling most of the other people to work, or getting more value out of them than the cost of maintaining them.

In contrast, back in 1740 the inventory of Daniel Jones of Colchester valued a “young man” and a “negro wench” at £150 each, “an old negro man” at £40, and a boy at £25. Two years later, Samuel Allyn of Windsor priced his “servants, Cyrus and William,” at £100 apiece.

Almost all of the people listed in Philip Mortimer’s inventory appear to have still been living on his estate or nearby, continuing their work in his ropewalk or fields or house. Indeed, Jack and Sophy had another baby, Charles, in 1795; the local vital records assigned him to the Mortimer household even though the patriarch was dead.

The one exception among those workers was Peter. Mortimer mentioned him in the 1792 will and 1794 codicil, meaning he was still in Middletown then. Had he left for the sea after the old man’s death? If so, he was exercising the freedom Mortimer promised, but the appraisers didn’t think that had turned out well for him.

The probate court accepted Philip Mortimer’s will. It even accepted his codicils, one unsigned and the other unwitnessed. Though he was in his tomb, the man’s wishes still carried some authority in Middlesex County, Connecticut.

But there was one wrinkle: George Starr asked the court to relieve him of his job as executor.

TOMORROW: That freed Starr to contest the will.

The Last Last Will of Philip Mortimer

After Philip Mortimer completed his six-page handwritten will, he signed it in front of three witnesses, all neighbors in Middletown, Connecticut: Timothy Starr, Joseph Sage, and Elihu Starr.

Elihu Starr was also one of the three men Mortimer designated as his coexecutors, along with George Phillips and George Starr, the husband of his niece. At least two of those men would need to agree on any action regarding the estate.

As noted yesterday, the will also granted Elihu Starr the labor of Peg, an enslaved young woman, until she turned twenty-six.

In October 1793 Mortimer wrote a codicil to that will, micromanaging his estate a bit more. At the top of his list of people to be freed were the couple Jack and Sophy. He added two provisions for their benefit:

• Sophy should receive “my chest which I had made at the beginning of the late War, also my wash kettle who contains about four or five gallons, also one small kettle which contains about eight gallons, also so much of the furniture as either two of my coexecutors shall see fitt to give her.”
• Jack and Sophy could “use and enjoy the Interest I have in a Fishing Place in Chatham…during their Natural Lives,” with their three sons inheriting that right.

Then in March 1794 Mortimer, now in his mid-eighties, started to copy the entire will. Unable to complete the task himself, he called in Elihu Starr. Mortimer made only one revision: to grant the two ropemakers Prince and Peter their freedom on his death rather than three years later.

Mortimer signed the papers that Elihu Starr had written for him. Starr didn’t add his own signature, however, nor did anyone else.

The old man died just a few days later on 15 Mar 1794. One week later the Middlesex Gazette reported:

Died, on Saturday last, Capt. PHILIP MORTIMER, of this City, aged 84.—His Funeral was attended, on Tuesday last, with all the honors becoming his most worthy and respectable Character.

On 30 August this notice appeared in the same newspaper:

TWELVE Months from the Date being allowed, by the hon. Court of Probate for the Creditors to the Estate of PHILIP MORTIMER, Esq. deceased, to being in their Claims; those who neglect to exhibit them within the Time will be debarred Recovery. All indebted to said Estate are requested to make immediate Payment, to GEORGE STARR, Attorney to the Executors.

ELIHU STARR, GEORGE PHILLIPS, Executors.
Middletown, August 25, 1794.

ANY Person who may have borrowed BOOKS of the Deceased, in his Life, are desired to return them to George Starr.

TOMORROW: Tied up in court.

“Verging fast towards its Last Period in this Stage of Existence”

In 1792, Philip Mortimer, having turned eighty, drew up his will.

In doing so, Mortimer appears to have aimed to preserve his good name in Middletown, Connecticut, in three ways:

• He bequeathed land and money to the city to build a granary and to stock it with two thousand pounds of grains. He also left land for a cemetery; Middletown still has a Mortimer cemetery.
• He promised freedom to all the people he held in bondage, under various conditions, in tune with Connecticut’s general turn against slavery (but not yet).
• He left his mansion, ropewalk, and other property to Philip Mortimer Starr on the condition that that boy—then nine years old—legally take the surname of Mortimer when he came of age.

Little Philip was Mortimer’s great-nephew, son of his niece Ann and her husband George Starr. Mortimer and his wife had had no children of their own, so he had brought that niece over from Ireland. The Starrs had named their children Martha Mortimer Starr and Philip Mortimer Starr after her benefactors.

In the will Mortimer wrote of having adopted both Ann and young Philip. In his study of Prince Mortimer, A Century in Captivity, Denis R. Caron made much of how Mortimer had never formally adopted those relatives. But such arrangements weren’t so formal in the eighteenth century as more recent law demands.

Caron also interpreted Philip Mortimer’s will as expressing hostility toward George Starr since it didn’t leave his estate to Ann (and thus to her husband as well) but merely let them use it until their son was old enough to inherit. But to me it looks like Philip Mortimer’s driving motivation was to give that boy the maximum incentive to carry on the Mortimer name. And there were plenty of precedents for that sort of bequest.

According to the legal analysis of the will, if young Philip didn’t take steps to become a Mortimer, then the estate would go to a son of his older sister (then only fifteen) as long as that youth would change his surname. And if the family still didn’t come up with a boy willing to carry on the name Mortimer, then everything would go to the Episcopal church.

As for the enslaved workers, Mortimer tailored his grants to each family unit:

• Bristol and Tamer: freedom for Bristol (no emancipation mentioned for Tamer, so she might already have been free) and the use of their “Garden Spot and House thereon as it is now fenced” for the rest of their lives, after which the land would revert to the estate.
• Hagar and her daughter: freedom plus £5 to “buy her Mourning” for his funeral.
• Jack and Sophy, and their three sons: freedom and use of “one and three-quarters Acres Land” during their lives, after which that land would be divided equally among their sons Lester, Dick, and John, all still under age fourteen. Those boys were to be “kept to School until they arrive at the age of Fourteen Years then put to Apprentice by my Executors, the two Eldest to be put to House Joiners until they arrive to the Age of Twenty-one Years and then give them their Freedom.”
• Amarillas and her children: freedom and “one Rood Land,” probably a quarter-acre.
• Silvy: freedom.
• Peg: freedom when she turned twenty-six; until then she was supposed to work for Elihu Starr, one of the executors.
• Peter and Prince, ropemakers: freedom in three years, but until then “both be kept at spinning” and “to live with and serve Capt. George Starr.”

Back in February 1790, George Starr had advertised in the local Middlesex Gazette asking people to settle their debts since he “purposes to carry on the Rope-Making Business one Year more.” But he decided to stay in the business. Receiving three years of free labor from two experienced ropemakers would be a windfall.

TOMORROW: Legalities.

Independence and Enslavement in Middletown

At the end of the Revolutionary War, lots of things changed in Middletown, Connecticut.

In 1784, Hugh White left that town to start surveying an area of upstate New York that would become Whitestown. Relatives and neighbors would follow. The central part of that area would take the name Whitesboro and for a long time have an unfortunate town seal.

Other Middletown residents also moved west to lands made available by the U.S. victory over Britain and its Native allies. Retired general Samuel Holden Parsons became a director of the Ohio Land Company. He traveled to western Pennsylvania in November 1789 and drowned while canoeing.

There were also legal changes at home. The area around the Connecticut River port, where the merchants and ship-builders lived, incorporated itself as a city in 1784. Instead of a town meeting with nearly every farmer eligible to vote, the city of Middletown had a mayor, four aldermen, and ten “common-council-men” chosen from the upper class.

The first set of aldermen included two former generals—Comfort Sage and the ill-fated Parsons—plus Col. Matthew Talcott and, for old times’ sake, former militia captain Philip Mortimer.

Among the first common-council-men was the husband of Mortimer’s favored niece, George Starr, as well as Col. Return Jonathan Meigs.

Also in 1784, the state of Connecticut passed a Gradual Emancipation Act—so gradual that it didn’t actually emancipate anybody for another twenty-five years. Children born into slavery after 1 Mar 1784 would become free on their twenty-fifth birthdays.

The 1790 U.S. Census counted 2,648 people enslaved in Connecticut, alongside 2,771 free blacks. The person who owned the most other people in the state—eleven by official count—was Philip Mortimer.

Back in Boston, as we know from newspaper advertisements, Mortimer employed at least one Irish teenager at ropemaking in 1738, and he imported young indentured servants from Ireland in 1740 and 1741. Maybe he enslaved Africans then, too, but he was doing so in a big way (by New England standards) in 1790.

That number grew to seventeen by July 1792. Mortimer then listed the people working for him for free as:

• Bristol, married to Tamer
• Hagar and her daughter
• Jack, Sophy, and Sophy’s sons Lester, Dick, and John, all under age fourteen
• Amarillas and her children
• Silvy
• Peg, still under the age of twenty-six
• Peter and Prince

That first census also found that Mortimer was the only white person on his estate, the biggest in Middletown. Most of the people he claimed as property must have been his household and farm help. But Peter and Prince worked at his ropewalk as spinners.

TOMORROW: Freedom, but not yet.

“He will do every Thing any Man can do towards a full Supply”

Philip Mortimer was not from an old New England family and he was Anglican, two traits that might have made him more likely to support the Crown in the pre-war political conflict.

Instead, Mortimer served on the Middletown, Connecticut, committee of correspondence. On 6 Mar 1775, the Connecticut Courant announced that he and George Philips would oversee the public sale of molasses and coffee brought in from Jamaica “agreeable to the 10th Article of said Association.”

That part of the Continental Congress’s boycott agreement said that goods landed between 1 Dec 1774 and 1 Feb 1775 could “be sold under the direction of the committee” covering that region, with “the profit, if any, to be applied towards relieving and employing such poor inhabitants of the town of Boston, as are immediate sufferers by the Boston port-bill.”

Mortimer was also a selectman for the first two years of the war and a justice of the peace.

In 1781, French troops on their way to Yorktown camped on Mortimer’s land in Middletown, according to an article by Allen Forbes for the Massachusetts Historical Society.

The young merchant who married Mortimer’s niece Ann Catharine Carnall, George Starr, was even more active in supporting the American cause. In 1778 Starr, who had the militia rank of captain, became a deputy commissary of hides for the Continental Army. On 26 October Gen. Samuel Holden Parsons wrote to the commander-in-chief from Middletown:

I find Capt. George Starr of this Town is appointed by the Board of War to take Charge of the Leather belonging to the Continent, purchase Shoes, Cartouch Bozes & other Military Accoutrements, by the inclosd Order you will find the Board have impowerd him to contract for those Articles in Exchange for raw Hides; I am fully Satisfied he will do all that any Man can do in that Department;

he informs me he Shall be able to send on about Twelve Hundred pair of Shoes within four Weeks about Seven Hundred of which are now On Hand & will be forwarded as soon as he can procure Buckles for about 300 or 400 Cartouch Bozes which are made and with the Shoes will compleat A Load for One Waggon; he Says he will take every Measure in his Power to procure a large Quantity of Shoes & thinks tis probable he Shall be able to furnish about 1000 or 1500 Pair a Month if the Leather can now be had in exchange for Hides as he is a Man very assiduous in his Business I have no Doubt he will do every Thing any Man can do towards a full Supply—

As to Caps he Says tis impossible to make an Estimate of the Quantity of Leather on Hand suitable for that Business which is not fit for Shoes or to be Usd for Accoutrements or in the Quarter Master’s Department as ’tis not in whole Sides, but part of most of the Leather in working is found unsuitable for other Business which will well Answer for this.

Starr did that job for three years. Even after stepping down he sent George Washington two pairs of boots for his personal use in 1783, though the general was unsatisfied.

TOMORROW: The new postwar order.

(The photo above shows Samuel Holden Parsons’s house in Middletown, now gone, from Damien Cregeau’s article “Top Ten Demolished Houses of Revolutionary War-Era Connecticut” for the Journal of the American Revolution.)

Marriages in the Mortimer Household

According to the story Charles Collard Adams told in Middletown Upper Houses (1908), young William Keith was supposed to marry his mentor’s niece Martha soon after she arrived from Ireland in the early 1770s.

That mentor, Philip Mortimer, sent Keith off to Boston with a coach to pick up Martha and bring her back Middletown, Connecticut.

But things didn’t go according to Mortimer’s plans. On 10 May 1775, William Keith (c. 1749–1811) married Mary Lions Callahan (c. 1748–1820) of Cork, remembered as the niece’s maid Polly.

Other records say that on 25 June 1775 Philip Mortimer’s Irish-born niece, Ann Catharine Carnall (c. 1745–1817), married another Middletown businessman, George Starr (1740–1820).

The Keiths had their first child, named John after his paternal grandfather, who had died suddenly in February, on 4 December. That was about eight months after the marriage. In his book, Adams pushed the wedding date back to a more respectable January.

I suspect the account in Middletown Upper Houses, delicious as it is, had been massaged into more dramatic shape over the decades. It looks like Adams had the wrong name for the niece, and that woman probably arrived in New England years before the marriages, perhaps as early as 1760.

But I also suspect there’s a seed of truth in this tradition. As a teenager William joined the Mortimer household, which might already have included Ann. People might have expected the two young people to marry.

Instead, William married Polly, and a few weeks later Ann married George.

Were those couples happy? William and Polly Keith had five more children between 1777 and 1786. They remained prosperous as William opened his own ropewalk in Middletown.

George and Ann Starr had two children, Martha Mortimer (1777–1848) and Philip Mortimer (1783–1857), named after her aunt and uncle. He also remained wealthy, and he also owned a ropewalk in Middletown.

TOMORROW: What they did in the war.

Go Together Like a Horse and Carriage

In 1773, as recounted yesterday, Philip Mortimer of Middletown, Connecticut, lost his wife Martha and both the brothers he had left behind in Boston.

Philip and Martha had had no children, but he appears to have tried to create a family through informal adoptions.

Mortimer had some business ventures with a Scottish-born merchant in Hartford named John Kieth. This man had started as a ship captain, at one point carrying British troops to the Caribbean. Like Mortimer, he was an Anglican in a Congregational colony.

Both he and his wife were born around 1700, so by midcentury it was clear they weren’t going to have any more children (if they’d had any already). Capt. Kieth adopted a boy named William, born about 1749.

According to local lore, as a teenager William Keith moved in with Philip Mortimer to learn the ropemaking business.

On 10 Feb 1775, the Connecticut Courant reported this news from Hartford:

Last Wednesday, (being Fast Day [1 February]) as Capt. JOHN KIETH of this Town, was attending Public Worship in the North Meeting-House, he was seiz’d with an apoplectic Fit, and expired in a Moment. His Remains were carried to Middletown the Friday following, and decently deposited in Capt. Mortimer’s Tomb.

Mortimer became “Acting Executor” of Kieth’s estate.

That death was no doubt shocking, but Mortimer was already augmenting his household further. Charles Collard Adams’s Middletown Upper Houses (1908) stated: “Capt. Philip Mortimer, being childless, sent to Ireland for his neice, Martha, to become his adopted daughter.”

However, other sources say Mortimer’s favored niece was named Ann Catherine Carnall, born about 1745. As quoted back here, Mortimer had worked with a ship captain named Thomas Carnall to bring Irish youth into Boston in the 1740s; perhaps that man was a brother-in-law. I’m going with the name Ann.

According to Adams, people understood that Mortimer hoped that his niece would marry his protegé, William Keith. He sent the young man “to Boston with a coach and four” to meet Ann and bring her back to Middletown, presumably proposing along the way.

But Ann had come with a maid named Polly Lions Callahan, also in her mid-twenties.

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?

“Departed this life deservedly lamented”

The year 1773 must have been a hard one for Philip Mortimer of Middletown, Connecticut.

He didn’t suffer business reverses, but he lost members of his family.

First Martha Mortimer, his wife of more than thirty ears, died. The 16 March Connecticut Courant reported:

On Saturday the 27th of February last, departed this life deservedly lamented, the amiable consort of Capt. Philip Mortimer, of Middletown, and on Tuesday following was decently inter’d in Mr. Henshaw’s tomb, attended by a numerous concourse of people of all ranks, from that and the neighbouring towns.

Benjamin Henshaw (1730–1793) was another merchant who had moved from Boston to Middletown. His grave is now marked with an obelisk. It’s possible that in 1773 he owned a tomb, and Martha Mortimer’s body was laid there in the middle of winter before being moved to a grave her husband owned.

That wasn’t the only loss Philip Mortimer suffered, however. The 31 August Connecticut Courant said:

Last Tuesday se’nnight departed this life at Boston, Mr. James Mortimer, aged 69:—

On Saturday following, his Relict, Mrs. Hannah Mortimer, aged 81:—

And on Sunday, under the same roof, their Brother, Mr. Peter Mortimer, aged 58.—

They were the only surviving brothers of Capt. Philip Mortimer, of Middletown, in this Colony.——

These industrious, peaceful, happy Citizens were sober, just, religious. As they had served God faithfully in the small Circle to which Providence had appointed them, and were tenderly united in their lives, he granted them the singular Favour not to be divided in their death.

The Boston newspapers noted the three quick deaths in one household but didn’t mention any epidemic disease or other cause for the public to worry about. 

All three Mortimers had funerals in Trinity Church and were buried in the Copp’s Hill Burying Ground. The elaborate gravestone of James and Hannah Mortimer appears above.

TOMORROW: Building a new family.

Philip Mortimer, from Waterford to Boston to Middletown

The Mortimer brothers arrived in Boston from Waterford, Ireland, in the early 1700s. They appear to have come with a bit of money since they quickly set themselves up in businesses.

James Mortimer (c. 1704–1773) was a tallow chandler. On 16 Aug 1741 at King’s Chapel he married another arrival from Waterford: Hannah Alderchurch, twelve years his senior.

James Mortimer advertised “Good Dipp’d Tallow CANDLES” and “the best of IRISH BUTTER by the Firkin” from his shop near Clark’s Wharf, later Hancock’s Wharf. He prospered enough that by the 1760s he owned at least one enslaved worker, named Yarrow, and Apple Island in Boston harbor.

Peter Mortimer (c. 1715–1773) was a ship’s captain.

The middle of these three brothers, Philip Mortimer (c. 1710–1794), was a ropemaker. He married Martha Blin (1716–1773) on 14 Nov 1742, also at King’s Chapel. Though she was said to be “of Boston,” she came from a Wethersfield, Connecticut, family.

Philip Mortimer had a higher profile than his brothers. He was in Boston by 1735, when he witnessed a deed. Two years later, he was one of the founders of the Charitable Irish Society. On 17 Oct 1738 Philip Mortimer shared an advertisement with two other ropemakers, each seeking the return of a teen-aged indentured servant.

On 11 Aug 1740, the Boston Gazette carried this notice:

Just Imported and to be Sold by Edward Alderchurch and Philip Mortimer, on board the Schooner Two Friends, Thomas Carnell Master, now lying at the Long Wharfe near the upper Crane, Choice Welch Coal, a Parcel of likely Boys and Girls; good Rice, Virginia Pork, good Cordage, Cod-Lines and Twine, all at a very reasonable Rate, for ready Money.

A year later a similar ad appeared in the Boston Evening-Post, this one adding that the “likely Boys and Girls” were “fit for Town or Country; the Girls can spin fine Thread, and do any sort of Houshold Work.” They were evidently more indentured youths from Ireland.

By 1749, according to the American-Irish Historical Society’s Recorder in 1901, Philip and Martha Mortimer had moved from Boston to Middletown, Connecticut. As the name implies, that was an inland town, halfway between the towns of Hartford and Wethersfield and the Connecticut River’s mouth at Saybrook. Nonetheless, Middletown had small shipyards, and Philip Mortimer saw the potential to build a ropewalk running perpendicular off the main street.

Mortimer quickly became a big fish in that small pond: town official, militia captain, Anglican church warden, Freemason. He owned the grandest house in town, shown above.

Eventually Philip Mortimer also owned an enslaved rope spinner named Prince. If the man later known as Prince Mortimer was indeed born in 1724, as calculated from his reported age when he died, and brought to Connecticut as a child, then he was in his late twenties and had been worked in Middletown for almost two decades before Philip Mortimer arrived. On the other hand, if Prince Mortimer was born later, then he could have arrived at the ropewalk as a child or teenager, fresh from being kidnapped and transported across the Atlantic, and immediately put into training to make rope.

COMING UP: Deaths and marriages.

Walking in Prince Mortimer’s Footsteps

Last week Connecticut Public reported how Middletown, Connecticut, renamed a street after Prince Mortimer, a man enslaved in that town before and after the Revolutionary War.

Prince Mortimer Avenue was once a walkway connecting the Irish-born trader Philip Mortimer’s mansion and his ropewalk, where he assigned his bondsman Prince to work as a spinner.

In 2006, Denis R. Caron published a book about the enslaved ropemaker: A Century in Captivity: The Life and Trials of Prince Mortimer, a Connecticut Slave.

More recently, John Mills has delved into Prince Mortimer’s life, sharing his work on his nonprofit website and at Enslaved.org. Mills led the push for memorializing Prince Mortimer, as the Middletown Press reported in 2023.

In a Commonplace review, Watson Dennison complained that Caron’s book about Prince Mortimer actually had very little to say about him, and a lot more about the Connecticut prison system in which he spent the last years of his life after being convicted of attempted murder. Dennison also felt that Caron mistakenly portrayed slavery in Connecticut as “a benign institution,” based on outdated analyses.

Studying the latest scholarship is something an author can control. Having detailed sources isn’t. For example, Caron found that no record of Prince Mortimer’s criminal trial survives. So unfortunately there’s no way to recount, much less assess, the evidence in that case.

The sources we do have can also be shaky. The earliest author to write about Prince Mortimer was Richard H. Phelps, who in 1844 published the first edition of his Newgate of Connecticut. Having grown up near that notorious prison made from the Simsbury copper mine, Phelps seems to have created this book for the edification of tourists.

Apparently Phelps conversed with Prince Mortimer himself before his death in 1834. He said the aged inmate was “supposed to be 110 years old,” having been born in Guinea and kidnapped to America as a child. But of course we don’t have records to corroborate that age.

Phelps also described Prince Mortimer as an a war veteran:

He was a servant to different officers in the Revolutionary War—had been sent on errands by General [George] Washington, and said he had “straddled many a cannon when fired by the Americans at the British troops.”

Again, there’s no other record of such service. (And that’s not a safe way to fire a cannon.)

On the one hand, we want to respect the personal statements of Prince Mortimer, wrenched away from his family and terribly victimized through life. On the other hand, exaggerating one’s age, military service, and proximity to the beloved Washington were common fibs for old men in the early 1800s, white or black. Such claims might be most understandable coming from an old man forced into prison after a lifetime of slave labor who needed all the sympathy he could get. 

The earliest contemporaneous evidence about Prince Mortimer appears to be Philip Mortimer’s will, signed in 1792. That document makes clear that “my Negro Prince” was a valuable asset. While the merchant bequeathed freedom to most of the people he enslaved on his death, he wanted Prince and another man, Peter, to “be kept at spinning” in the ropewalk for the benefit of his niece’s husband, George Starr, for another three years.

It might be a mistake to accept Phelps’s 1844 statements as facts and anchor all other evidence about Prince Mortimer’s life to them. Caron and Mills describe Philip Mortimer sending his enslaved man Prince to war in 1780. Even though that man’s skills would probably have made him more valuable, to both his owner and the American cause, in the ropewalk. And even though he was, in their analysis, in his fifties and in poor health. And even though there’s no record of such an action.

At the same time, there’s solid contemporaneous evidence that Philip Mortimer enslaved Prince Mortimer in Middleton, making him work in the ropewalk. He did walk the path now known as Prince Mortimer Avenue as an enforced laborer.

TOMORROW: The Mortimers of Boston.