During the American Revolutionary War, all of the colonies in British North America maintained slavery as an institution. New Hampshire in particular made a major profit off slave trafficking because the colonial government did not impose a tariff on enslaved people brought from Africa, thus encouraging slave traffickers to bring their captives to the colony to be distributed throughout the Atlantic coast. The hypocrisy of colonists fighting for their natural rights while enslaving Africans was not lost on many people in British America, however. In 1779, twenty Africans in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, brought from Africa into slavery, demanded their freedom based on the religious and political principles espoused by the British colonists. One of the petitioners, Prince Whipple, had fought at the Battle of Saratoga along with his enslaver, William Whipple, one of New Hampshire’s signers of the Declaration of Independence.