On January 13, 1777, Prince Hall and seven other African American men—most of them probably free—submitted a petition to the Massachusetts General Court, which at that time consisted of the Massachusetts Revolutionary Council and the House of Representatives. This petition sought freedom for “a great number of Negroes who are detained . . . in the Bowels of a free & Christian Country.” The petition was one of several that African Americans in New England submitted during the late eighteenth century. This one was particularly noteworthy because it challenged the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’s government to live up to the human rights principles that had been set forth less than a year earlier in the Declaration of Independence. Little is known of Prince Hall before 1780, and there are conflicting stories of his origins, but what we do know of Hall’s life points to him as the leader of this effort. The Massachusetts legislature failed to pass any laws in response to this petition; however, the Quock Walker v. Jennison case, in which an African American filed a claim of unjust enslavement, soon resulted in a jury decision in 1781 and an upper-court ruling in 1783 that spelled the end of slavery in Massachusetts. In the coming years, other northern states passed laws that ended slavery gradually and thus avoided what many whites viewed as the socioeconomic chaos that could have been brought on by immediate abolition. While these governmental actions are usually credited with having ended slavery above the Mason-Dixon Line, the petition of January 1777 and similar formal appeals played critical foundational roles in the process. These petitions also to some extent represent the starting point for the establishment of organized African American communities in New England and elsewhere in the North.