Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the community's social make-up. It explains the black population in the Commonwealth in the period 1750—1865, and its progressive migration toward the capital. The book examines the self-help groups and associations beginning with eighteenth century developments in this area and deals with the increasingly separatist political activity brought on by the crises which occurred, seriatum, in the decade of the 1850's. It explores the community's demographic profile and focuses on the age structure of the population, the sex-ratios in its make-up, and the nativity of the nearly twenty-five hundred souls who comprised antebellum Boston's black community on the eve of the Civil War. The book provides an overview of black and white mortality and longevity between 1705 and 1865. Statistical sources alone would have yielded a stilted, abstract view of institutions in the black community.