Prince Hall was a formerly enslaved leatherworker who became the leading voice of Boston’s free Black community in the Revolutionary era. In 1775 he and fourteen other Black men were initiated as Freemasons, and the lodge they built, chartered from London as African Lodge No. 459, became the foundation of Prince Hall Freemasonry, the oldest continuously active organization founded by African Americans. Through the lodge and a series of petitions to the Massachusetts legislature, Hall pressed for abolition, public schooling for Black children, and protection from kidnappers.
At a Glance
- Born
- c. 1735 (sources range as late as 1748), birthplace unknown
- Died
- 4 December 1807, Boston, Massachusetts
- Known for
- African Lodge No. 459 (chartered 1784); 1777 petition to end slavery in Massachusetts; petitions for Black schooling (1787) and against kidnapping (1788)
- Fields
- Organizing · Abolition · Education
- Era
- Revolution & Early Republic
Early Life
Much of Hall’s early life is undocumented, and much of what was once written about it is legend. His birth year is usually given as about 1735, though some sources, including a Library of Congress guide, give about 1748. His birthplace is unknown. A nineteenth-century Masonic tradition that he was born in Barbados to an English father and a free mother of African descent has no documentary support, and historians treat it as invention. Research is further complicated by the fact that several men named Prince Hall appear in Massachusetts records of the period.
The most reliable early evidence places him in Boston in the household of William Hall, a leather dresser, who held him in slavery. A manumission document dated 9 April 1770 records that William Hall freed him after more than twenty years of service. Hall worked afterward as a leatherworker. Whether he served in the Continental Army during the Revolution cannot be established with confidence, because records of the period list more than one man of that name.
Life and Work
On 6 March 1775, with Boston occupied by British troops, Hall and fourteen other free Black men were initiated into Freemasonry by a military lodge, No. 441 on the Irish register, attached to a British regiment stationed in the harbor. Boston’s white lodges had refused to admit them. When the British army evacuated Boston in March 1776, the departing lodge left the Black Masons a limited permit to meet and to bury their dead, but not to initiate new members. They organized as African Lodge under Hall’s leadership; sources date the lodge’s formal organization to July 1775 or July 1776.
Hall also turned to the legislature. On 13 January 1777 he and seven other Black men submitted a petition to the Massachusetts General Court on behalf of “a great number of blacks” held in slavery. Written in the language of natural rights that white revolutionaries were using against Britain, it argued that enslaved people shared a God-given right to freedom they had never forfeited, and asked the legislature to abolish slavery and free the children of enslaved people at age twenty-one. The petition, which historians regard Hall as the likely author of, failed, but slavery in Massachusetts was undone within a few years by freedom suits under the state constitution of 1780.
Seeking full legitimacy for his lodge, Hall petitioned the Grand Lodge of England, which issued a warrant on 29 September 1784 constituting African Lodge No. 459; the document did not reach Boston until 1787. In 1791 Hall was named Provincial Grand Master, and African lodges were later organized in Philadelphia and Providence under his authority. The lodge functioned as a mutual-aid society and as the organized political voice of Black Boston.
Hall and his fellow Masons petitioned repeatedly on public questions. On 17 October 1787 they asked the legislature to provide schooling for Black children, whose parents paid taxes but whose children were excluded from Boston’s public schools; the request was denied. On 27 February 1788, after three free Black men were lured aboard a ship in Boston Harbor and carried to the West Indies to be sold, Hall led a petition protesting the kidnapping. Together with petitions from Quakers and Boston clergy, it helped bring about a law passed on 26 March 1788 prohibiting Massachusetts residents from participating in the slave trade. In 1797 he delivered A Charge, Delivered to the African Lodge, June 24, 1797, at Menotomy, published as a pamphlet, which described the insults Black Bostonians endured in the streets and urged patience, solidarity, and self-respect.
Legacy
Hall died in Boston on 4 December 1807. After his death the African lodges he had organized were renamed in his honor, and African American Masonic lodges throughout the country came to be known as Prince Hall lodges. For much of their history, white American grand lodges refused to recognize them, and the Prince Hall lodges developed as a parallel institution.
Prince Hall Freemasonry grew into one of the most durable institutions in Black American life, with dozens of grand lodges and thousands of local lodges today. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries its halls served as meeting places for abolitionists, mutual-aid societies, and civil rights organizations, and its members have included Thurgood Marshall and many other leaders. Hall’s petitions, preserved in the Massachusetts Archives and published collections, place him among the first Black Americans to use the Revolution’s principles to demand abolition, equal education, and the protection of the law.
Hall’s career also documents the limits of freedom in post-Revolutionary New England. Massachusetts had ended slavery, yet Black Bostonians remained shut out of public schools, exposed to kidnappers, and subject to open harassment. Because Hall’s petitions and lodge addresses record those conditions from the perspective of the people who endured them, historians rely on them as some of the few surviving Black-authored sources on the city in the 1780s and 1790s.
Prince Hall used the language of the American Revolution and the institutions of free Black Boston to demand abolition, schooling, and protection under the law at the moment the new nation was defining who belonged. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- c. 1735 Born; birthplace unknown.
- 9 April 1770 Freed by William Hall of Boston.
- 6 March 1775 Initiated as a Freemason with fourteen other Black men by a British military lodge.
- 1775–1776 Organizes African Lodge in Boston under a limited permit.
- 13 January 1777 Signs petition asking the Massachusetts legislature to abolish slavery.
- 29 September 1784 Grand Lodge of England warrants African Lodge No. 459.
- 17 October 1787 Petitions for schooling for Black children in Boston.
- 27 February 1788 Leads petition against the kidnapping of free Black Bostonians.
- 1791 Named Provincial Grand Master.
- 4 December 1807 Dies in Boston.
Sources and Further Reading
- Library of Congress, Prince Hall Freemasonry: A Resource Guide. Link
- Massachusetts Historical Society, “Petition for Freedom (manuscript copy), 13 January 1777.” Link
- Massachusetts Historical Society, “Petition of Prince Hall to the Massachusetts General Court, 27 February 1788.” Link
- Prince Hall, A Charge, Delivered to the African Lodge, June 24, 1797, at Menotomy (Boston, 1797).
- Corey D. B. Walker, A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).
- Massachusetts 250, “A Cornerstone of Black History: African Lodge No. 459’s 250th Anniversary.” Link
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