The Nashoba community

The idea of slavery is abhorrent to us these days but for those campaigning for its abolition in the United States in the first half of the 19^th century it was a long, hard struggle which ended in a brutal and bloody civil war. Aside from moral and ethical considerations, two very practical considerations  concerned abolitionists – how to prepare slaves for their liberation and how to compensate slave-owners for the loss of their “property.”

The Nashoba community, which occupied around 2,000 acres of land in what is now Germantown in Tennessee, was Frances Wright’s attempt to find a solution to these two pressing concerns. The starting point for Wright was an article she published in the New Harmony Gazette in October 1825, entitled, rather long-windedly, A Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in the United States, without Danger of Loss to the Citizens of the South. The underlying premise of Wright’s plan was that slave owners were anxious “to manumit their people, but apprehensive of throwing them unprepared into the world.” If their financial loss was compensated for, there would be a queue of owners willing to give their slaves their freedom.

The aim of Nashoba, at least as Wright conceived it, was to provide a half-way house whereby slaves could earn their freedom through honest labour, whilst learning the necessary skills to make a success of their freedom, and then they would be transported to places such as Liberia and Haiti. Wright believed if her Commune was a success, it would provide a template to be used across the States. She set about raising money and members. One of her recruits was the Englishman, George Flower, who had established another community in Albion, Illinois. But funds were slow to roll in and membership failed to take off – at its height there were only around twenty members – and Wright had to dig in to her own resources to fund the purchase of the land.

Although Wright thought of the commune as an interracial, egalitarian utopia, it was anything but. The fundamental problem was that the slaves were still slaves until they had earned enough to buy their freedom and had no say in the running of the commune. Francis Trollope visited Nashoba in 1827 and wrote about her visit in Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in 1832. She noted of Wright, “I never saw, I never heard or read, of any enthusiasm approaching hers, except in some few instances, in ages past, of religious fanaticism.”  But, zeal was not enough. Trollope went on, “When we arrived at Nashoba, they were without milk, without beverage of any kind except rain water; the river Wolf being too distant to send to constantly. Wheat bread they used but sparingly, and to us the Indian corn bread was uneatable.”

Wright contracted malaria and went to England to convalesce, appointing trustees to manage the commune. They instituted the concept of free love within the commune but it did not improve the lot of the slaves and just increased Nashoba’s problems, fuelling rumours of interracial relationships and causing funding to dry up. Before Wright had got back to the commune in 1828, it had collapsed. At least Wright did the right thing by the remaining 31 slaves, giving them their freedom, shipping them off to Haiti where they were put under the protection of Lafayette and were assured of their liberty.

Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: Demise fo the Nashoba Commune, Domestic Manners of the Americans, Frances Wright, Francis Trollope, Haiti and Liberia as destinations for freed slaves, Lafayette, manumission of slaves, The Nashoba Commune