Prince Hall

The long-repeated claim that Prince Hall was born free in Barbados in 1748 does not hold up. His death notice in the Boston Gazette of December 1807 gave his age as 72, pointing to a birth around 1735; an interview with historian Dr. Jeremy Belknap suggests about 1738.

He was not freeborn. A Certificate of Manumission dated 9 April 1770, signed by William Hall and members of his family, granted Prince Hall his freedom after twenty-one years of service. He called himself an African, most likely taken from West Africa as a boy and sold into slavery in New England.

A leather-dresser by trade, he was received into the Congregational Church on School Street, Boston, in November 1762. He was well read in the early Church Fathers, corresponded with the Countess of Huntingdon, and tirelessly petitioned Boston and the Massachusetts legislature to provide schools for Black children.

The earliest record of Freemasonry among African Americans is a single sheet in the archives of African Lodge, dated 6 March 1775, weeks before the first shots at Lexington. It lists fifteen men made Masons by "Marster Batt."

The evidence points to Irish Military Lodge No. 441, attached to the 38th Regiment of Foot, where Sergeant John Batt was registered as a member in 1771. Critics have long argued the initiation broke an Irish regulation against army lodges making townsmen Masons. But that rule applied only where an Irish town lodge existed (none ever did in Massachusetts), and its sole penalty was a one-guinea fine on the lodge, never a declaration that the Masons made were irregular.

Without a warrant, the brethren met as a lodge under a "Permet," attributed by Prince Hall to Provincial Grand Master John Rowe, allowing them to walk in procession on St. John's Day and bury their dead with Masonic honors. When a Boston paper described their 1782 St. John's Day feast as a "splendid entertainment," Prince Hall wrote back that it had instead been an agreeable one, held in brotherly love, signing as Master of African Lodge No. 1.

In 1784 Prince Hall wrote twice to Brother William Moody in London, asking him to carry the lodge's petition to the Grand Lodge of England. Having declined to seek a warrant from France, he turned to England instead:

"

We now apply to the Fountain from whom we received light for this favour.

The Grand Lodge of England (Moderns) issued a warrant to African Lodge No. 459 on 20 September 1784. It did not reach Boston until April 1787, carried by Captain Scott from London, and the lodge was constituted in May. It was the last warrant the Moderns issued to a lodge in what is now the United States, granted at a time when the American doctrine of exclusive jurisdiction did not yet exist, and when Massachusetts itself had two rival Grand Lodges.

In 1797, answering a request from Peter Mantone and brethren in Philadelphia who had been refused by white Masons, Prince Hall agreed to set them to work under African Lodge's charter. A second warrant followed for Hiram Lodge in Providence, Rhode Island. In doing so he followed clear precedent: Lodge Fredericksburg in Virginia, George Washington's lodge, had itself chartered lodges before holding a warrant of its own.

Through all of this, African Lodge still regarded itself as a private lodge under England, sending returns and fees and writing letters that went unanswered for years. It never learned it had been renumbered in 1792, nor struck from the register at the Union of 1813.

Prince Hall remained Master until his death, succeeded by Nero Prince, a Boston baker who later served at the court of Emperor Alexander of Russia. On 18 June 1827, African Lodge declared itself free and independent, ending its one-sided tie to England.