Prince Hall was enslaved in Massachusetts and trained as an artisanal leatherworker. He was apparently granted a great deal of physical and mental freedom by his enslaver, as he managed to join a Congregational Church and start his own Freemasons Lodge. When the fighting started in the American War of Independence, Hall became a prominent voice in the cause of freeing all those enslaved in the colony. Hall was also an early advocate of the “back to Africa” movement, wanting to return to a continent he had probably never been to. As such, he wanted to fight for the cause of American independence, expecting it to lead to African American independence too. The colonists’ war to secure what they saw as their natural rights raised the obvious question of the natural rights of enslaved people in the British colonies too, and Hall was inspired by the rhetoric found in the Declaration of Independence to ask the Massachusetts Legislature to grant the freedom of all those enslaved in the colony.