ABSTRACT
The first and only independent census of the black population in the Commonwealth was that authorized by the General Court in 1754 to determine "the exact number of negro slaves both males and females sixteen years old and upwards." Blacks were counted in the second and third censuses but again without distinguishing either age or sex. Dr. Josiah Curtis, like Lemuel Shattuck a distinguished member of the coterie of outstanding physician-statisticians living and working in Boston, spoke for the lot of the city's demographers in attesting to the importance of accumulating and analyzing statistical data. Every civilized nation, Josiah Curtis wrote in his report on the municipal census of 1855, regarded "statistics is pertaining to the numbers of the people, and their social, moral, industrial and educational condition" as all but indispensable. The 1860 census showed the black geriatric population to have been very small, numbering only 254 persons or 2.8 percent of the state's total black population.
