Nashoba Community

The Nashoba Community was an experimental project of Frances "Fanny" Wright, initiated in 1825 to educate and emancipate slaves.

Instead, Wright proposed that, through a system of unified labor, the slaves would buy their freedom and then be transported to Haiti or the settlements which would become Liberia.

[4] Wright could not raise sufficient monetary support however and ended up using a good portion of her own fortune to buy land and slaves.

"[1] When the compensated emancipation plan failed to produce results, Wright turned Nashoba into a kind of utopian community.

[1] As rumors spread of inter-racial marriage, the Commune encountered increasing financial difficulty, eventually leading to its collapse in 1828.

On her journey, she wrote "Explanatory Notes Respecting the Nature and Objects of the Institution of Nashoba, and of the Principles upon which it is Founded."

[1] Her plan outlined in "Explanatory Notes" was never put into effect, however; Nashoba had already failed when Wright arrived back in the US.

Wright had progressive ideas of liberty and equality for her time, but the burden of leadership and financial hardship proved too much for the community.

In 1963 Edd Winfield Parks published Nashoba, described as "a novel about Fanny Wright's gallant utopian experiment to emancipate the slaves".