The intersection of Washington Street and Inner Belt Road in Somerville, Massachusetts is largely unassuming. Steps away from the interstate and an Orange Line stop, a pizza joint sits opposite a Holiday Inn.
At the very edge of the hotel parking lot, a statue stands behind a fence, the hotel signage looming large behind it. The statue depicts Paul Revere, positioned there to mark his historic ride down this road 250 years ago.
To author and independent historian Catherine Sasanov, this spot represents a little-told Black history event that happened about two decades before Revere rode by. It centers on an enslaved man named Mark.
Sasanov said most people first hear of Mark through a single, grim mention in Revere’s famous testimony: “After I passed Charlestown Neck, and got nearly opposite where Mark was hung in chains.”
He was hanged for conspiring with two other people to kill his enslaver, a retired ship captain named John Codman. Then, Mark’s body was left to rot in public in a metal cage — a grisly practice known as gibbetting.
University of Utah Professor Jaimie Crumley estimated the human remains would have been suspended there for 12 to 15 years after Mark’s execution.
“They just allowed the body to slowly decompose,” she explained. “So this was a really gruesome landmark.”
By studying Mark, both Sasanov and Crumley have been able to learn more about the complex history of enslaved people in pre-revolutionary Massachusetts.
Some of the roughly 900 enslaved individuals in Boston might have experienced more flexibility than those in the plantation South or Caribbean, said Crumley.
A few, like Mark, were allowed to live and work in a different area of town — as long as they sent wages back to their enslavers.
Historians believe Mark lived in Boston with a wife, and sent his earnings to the Codman estate in Charlestown.
At the same time, many enslaved people in Boston worked in an enslaver’s home.
Two other people whom Codman enslaved, named Phillis and Phoebe, lived in Codman’s home. They joined Mark in the conspiracy against Codman — who was known to have treated them brutally.
Sasanov said it’s hard to know the true extent of Codman’s mistreatment. “Every secondary source that comes out, they were ratcheting this up,” she said.
Some secondary accounts indicate that Codman raped his female slaves. Mark, Phillis and Phoebe — apparently pushed to their breaking point — hatched a plot to burn down Codman’s barn, creating enough financial strife to force him to sell his slaves to a new — and hopefully less brutal — enslaver.
When the act of arson failed to bring about change, the three then turned to poisoning their enslaver, leading them to get caught.
‘The Last and Dying Words of Mark’
Sasanov is writing a book about Mark. The bulk of the documents she’s spent the last decade poring over are housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society — including Mark’s last words.
They’re written in an execution broadside, a popular item sold during a sensationalized trial featuring a defendant’s final statement and other biographical information.
“The printer’s hoping to make some money,” Sasanov said. “It would be oftentimes rolled out the day before, and on the day. But then peddlers would also carry it into the interior and sell them.”
In many ways, Mark’s execution broadside was predictable, according to Sasanov. He admitted to killing Codman, then apologized for having “grievously sinned.” Sasanov said that’s because with him in the courtroom were Christian ministers, and appealing to religion may have helped him garner public sympathy. She said it’s hard to tell what was authentic about his confession, and what was coerced.
Yet records of Mark, Phillis and Phoebe’s interrogations show a complex conspiracy operating right under the noses of Boston slaveowners — revealing that this incident was one of many.
“This gets revealed during the interrogation that there may be these other slaves who are just walking around with new masters who killed the one they had,” Sasanov explained.
She suspects Mark was used as an example, to make sure other enslaved individuals would think twice before trying the same.
‘Profound unfreedom’
Crumley said there are parallels between this conspiracy and the small acts of rebellion by the Patriots against British rule a few years later, including “that aspect of network building, which is something that secretly Revere and others were also doing in the lead-up to the American Revolution.”
Massachusetts abolished slavery only in 1783 — almost 30 years after Mark’s execution.
“It was so compelling to me that at this moment that we think about Paul Revere, and this moment in which the United States was really becoming a nation and breaking away from British tyranny, that at the same time we also see this story of really profound unfreedom,” Crumley said.
