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Hall, Prince
soldier, pamphleteer, educator, merchant-craftsman, and founding member of the African Masonic Lodge No. 459. Born on the island of Barbados, Prince Hall forged his reputation in the burgeoning free black community of Boston during the 1770s, 1780s, and 1790s. His birth and early life have been the subjects of much debate. He was reputedly born free in 1748, but Hall's birth may have occurred as early as 1735. He was a child of mixed-race parents: his father was English, and his mother was a free woman of color. Hall journeyed to Boston in 1765 and worked in the leather trade. Like his birth date, Hall's status in colonial Boston has aroused scholarly debate. Although he was technically the slave of the Bostonian William Hall, Prince Hall was said to have believed that he was free, as his manumission papers noted. In any event, Hall secured his liberty and began working as a leather merchant. He supplied leather goods to the Continental army in 1777 and may have fought at the battle of Bunker Hill. According to records, he served in the Massachusetts militia. Hall worked several other jobs too—including peddler and dealer of dry goods, soap maker, and leather dresser—and he purchased a home and workshop. He also became a lay Methodist preacher. Hall was married three times, in 1763 to Sarah Ritchie, a slave; in 1770 to Flora Gibbs; and in 1798 to Sylvia Ward. He had two sons: Prince Africanus, with Flora, and Primus, with a woman named Delia. Perhaps Hall's most famous and sustaining achievement was the creation of the first black Masonic lodge in American society. Although Hall's “African lodge” was sanctioned in 1784, his participation in Masonic activity dated to at least 1775. In March of that year Hall and fourteen other free black men were initiated into a lodge of British masons stationed in Boston. Subsequently denied permission to form an African Masonic lodge under American auspices, he applied to the Grand Lodge of England. When the certificate granting Hall official status as a Mason belatedly arrived from England in 1787, Hall served as inaugural master of the African Masonic Lodge No. 459. In the early nineteenth century Boston's black Masons renamed the African lodge Prince Hall Grand Lodge, in honor of its founder. Similarly, the African Grand Lodge (formed in 1808) was referred to as the Prince Hall Masons. Masonic groups formed in other free black communities as well, most notably in Philadelphia and New York City. As scholars of free black life and protest note, Hall's African lodge served as a vital institution for the broader black community. Hall's lodge No. 459, James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton write, “became a center for community mutual aid, political action and catalyst for other black Masonic organizations.” Hall's lodge sponsored speeches aimed at racial uplift and racial justice. As his leadership in the Masons illustrates, Hall was a charter member of what historians now refer to as the black founding generation. Made up of free people of color and former slaves, the black founders emerged in a variety of American cities and towns just as the new American nation took shape at the end of the eighteenth century. Black founders like Hall, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones of Philadelphia, and William T. Hamilton of New York City had a dual focus. First, they sought to build community-based institutions (churches, insurance organizations, burial societies, and eventually schools and debating clubs) that would help African Americans thrive as free citizens in the new Republic. Not only did Hall form the African Masonic lodge with benevolent ends in mind but he also led two petition campaigns to the state legislature seeking the formation of black public schools. Failing in this, Horton and Horton write, “they organized the private African School in 1798,” meeting in the home of Hall's son, Primus.
Bill of sale from Prince Hall to a Colonel Crafts; it indicates that Hall made five leather drumheads for the Boston Regiment of Artillery in April 1777.
Courtesy of Massachusetts Archives.
Courtesy of Massachusetts Archives.
Bibliography
- Hall, Prince. A Charge (1792, 1797). In Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature, 1790–1860, edited by Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Philip Lapsansky. New York: Routledge, 2001.
- Horton, James Oliver, and Lois E. Horton. Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1999.
- Horton, James Oliver, and Lois E. Horton. In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
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