ABSTRACT
In 1790 the total number of blacks in the United States was approaching three quarters of a million or nearly twenty percent of the country's aggregate population. The closing decades of the eighteenth century found black Bostonians in both the North and West Ends of the city. In the pre-War years blacks in the Commonwealth and those in its capital city experienced a parallel development. On the eve of the Civil War the nearly half-million free blacks in the nation were all but evenly divided between the North and the South. Moreover, the Commonwealth's black population, again paralleling national trends, showed a progressively urban orientation with a marked increase in population density as a result. Blacks in the Bay State modestly but consistently added to their numbers after 1790. The progressive concentration of blacks in and about the capital district in the first half of the nineteenth century was hardly an isolated phenomenon.
