Isaac Mason

Isaac Mason was an American abolitionist, community leader, and author of the slave narrative Life of Isaac Mason as a Slave (1893). Born enslaved in Kent County, Maryland, under the name William ("Will") Thompson, Mason escaped in December 1846 and eventually settled in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he was one of the city's most prominent African American citizens for nearly five decades. He was active in the anti-slavery movement, the Republican Party, and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and participated in James Redpath's Haitian emigration program in 1860 before returning to publicly denounce it. His autobiography, self-published in Worcester in 1893, is among the most detailed firsthand accounts of slavery in nineteenth-century Maryland. In 2025, the Chestertown, Maryland, house from which Mason escaped was designated a site on the National Park Service's National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.