Isaac Mason was born into slavery on May 14, 1822 in Kent County, Maryland to Sophia and Zekiel Thompson. Despite the fact that Mason's father was free, his mother was enslaved by Hannah Woodland and a house worker on one of her two homesteads. Isolated from his family at an early age, Mason made due under a few harmful bosses until he made his break to Delaware in 1847. After two years he married and worked to build a life in Philadelphia. Dreading the Fugitive Slave Law, Mason moved farther north to Worcester, Massachusetts. He sought better work inCanada, but returned to Worcester in July 185. Nonetheless, in 1860 he made a trip to Haiti as a component of finance manager James Redpath's resettlement program, which professed to move and build up African Americans in Haiti. In the wake of experiencing appetite and ailment, Mason got back to the United States to uncover the genuine states of the settlement. Late in his life he self-published his memoir, The Life of Isaac Mason, A Slave, in 1893.

The autobiographical Life of Isaac Mason is extraordinary because so few accounts of slavery by formerly-enslaved authors exist. The book describes the cruelties and barbarities of slavery in vivid detail. There were many times when slaves were forced to bed on an empty stomach with only the ache and burn of the whippings they most likely received earlier to keep them company as they slept. A passage from Mason’s memoir reveals the morbid nature of slavery:

“Some persons may suppose that by accomplishing all this work in one day would satisfy an employer, master or mistress, but satisfaction was hard to find. I was only the property of another, working to pay the debt of another, who I suppose thought he ought to receive interest on his bill; and that interest had to be paid by me in addition to the daily labor, by receiving a whipping every day besides losing a meal - either a breakfast, a dinner, or a supper - according to their best judgment. Some may wonder which I regretted most, the whipping or the meal. I sorrowed the loss of the meal more than anything else. To me this certainly was a great punishment.”

– Kelly Atud

Click "Four Centuries" below to return to the main page or "Continue" to read more about this topic.