A Site of Memory: Christ Church, Middletown, and the Execution of the Enslaved

Christ Church, Middletown, Historic American Buildings Survey.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The current campus of Christ Church Middletown is built on top of the former town execution site, which was also the location of the original Middletown jail.[1] This kind of association was typical in churches of this era that were connected with the elite members of society, many of whom held positions of authority in government including as judges,[2] sheriffs,[3] Colonels,[4] etc. The connection with the organs of the local “justice” system were viewed as salutary, even as those systems enforced slavery,[5] allowed rape of slaves,[6] and protected enslavers from the consequences of their actions.[7]

The leadership and elite members of Christ Church, Middletown were certainly among the most connected members of the town and, by extension, with this system of “justice.” In its earliest life, the Church was given land by men fully enmeshed in the plantation economy of the time. Rev. Alexander Innes was one of these,[8] as was William Leeds, a “wealthy planter” who gave a huge glebe donation.[9] In fact the endowment from the Leeds gift was still paying the priest’s salary at Middletown as late as the 1920s.[10]

There were at least four executions of enslaved people at Middletown that show the operative dynamics of this system of relations between Anglicans, the enslaved, and the administration of “justice” is reported by many historians,[11] but among them the former rector of Christ Church, Middletown, Ernest W. Mandeville. He writes:

As early as 1691, four negroes, Jeremy, Tom, Mingo, and Caesar, were tried for murder in the county court house, which was located just back of the jail… and executed [at] the present site of the Episcopal Church. Their cruel and horrible sentence read: ‘That their right hands should be cut off and burned to ashes, in a fire before their eyes, after which they were to be hanged by the neck until they were dead, Dead, DEAD,’ after which their bodies were to be burned to ashes. Tradition states that the hanging took place… in front of the jail.[12]

The particular crime that Jeremy was accused of was the murder of Lewis Morris, of Passage Point,[13] the cousin and business partner of Col. Lewis Morris, the committed Anglican who went on to become governor (and who at this time was head of the local council). Morris had been killed in retaliation for his murder (and possibly rape) of a woman he enslaved,[14] a crime which the New Jersey courts had declined to investigate in spite of petitions from other enslaved people.[15] The punishments meted out to the four executed men were obviously meant to serve as a statement designed to inspire terror in other enslaved Black people, and prevent further rebellion. Elite Anglicans were intimately involved in this act of “justice” and in enforcing the brutal system of enslavement that supported their plantation economy. 

            That Christ Church, Middletown was built on the site shows that, at the time of construction, the association with such history was viewed as a positive aspect of the site choice, or at the very least, an inoffensive one.

Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.

Reparations Commission Historian

Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey

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[1] Ernest W. Mandeville, The Story of Middletown: The Oldest Settlement in New Jersey (Middletown, NJ: Christ Church, 1927), 101.

[2] E.g. Episcopal judge Jacob van Wickle.

[3] E.g. Anglican sheriff of Monmouth County, William Nichols. 

[4] E.g. the influential and politically connected Col. Lewis Morris.

[5] Sheriffs in New Jersey sought to catch and return escaped slaves. For instance, see the runaway slave advertisement published by Monmouth County sheriff William Nichols in The Pennsylvania Gazette on July 4, 1729 (republished in Richard B. Marrin, ed., Runaways of Colonial New Jersey: Indentured Servants, Slaves, Deserters, and Prisoners, 1720-1781 [Westminster, MD: Heritage Books, 2007], 268).

[6] As evidenced in parish registers at the time. The parish register of Christ Church Shrewsbury shows evidence of baptisms of 4 “bastards” and 12 “mulatto” “servants,” suggesting impregnation by Anglican heads of household. Parish register of Christ Church, Shrewsbury, N.J. See also Robert M. Kelley, “Slavery Evidenced in the Parish Register,” Christ Church Shrewsbury (January 2019): https://christchurchshrewsbury.org/?page_id=3459.

[7] As the following episode will demonstrate.

[8] Mandeville, The Story of Middletown, 102.

[9] Mandeville, The Story of Middetown, 104-105. Profits from glebes at this time were almost without exception the product of the use of enslaved labor.

[10] Mandeville, The Story of Middetown, 55.

[11] Some of the accounts vary in some details from Mandeville’s, including the date of the execution, the names of the enslaved, and the crime of Morris’s they were seeking to avenge. See, for instance, Graham Russell Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North: African Americans in Monmouth County, New Jersey, 1665-1865 (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1997), 23; Franklin Ellis, History of Monmouth County New Jersey (Philadelphia: Peck, 1885), 299-400; Henry C. Reed, “Chapters in a History of Crime and Punishment in New Jersey,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1939), 126.

[12] Mandeville, The Story of Middletown, 52.

[13] A location within nearby Shrewsbury.

[14] Daniel J. Weeks, Not for Filthy Lucre’s Sake: Richard Saltar and the Antiproprietary Movement in East New Jersey, 1665-1707 (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2001), 113.

[15] Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North, 23.