Revisiting Nashoba: Slavery, Utopia, and Frances Wright in America, 1818-1826

Abstract

In 1825, Frances Wright, British author and protégée of the aging Marquis de Lafayette, proposed an antislavery experiment that became known as Nashoba. Although Nashoba soon failed, it has made its way into the broad narrative of US history (and many US history textbooks) as an inspiring interracial utopia—a noble, if transient, step on the road to abolitionism and racial equality. As one recent textbook puts it, “Influenced by Robert Owen and New Harmony, Frances Wright established an interracial utopian community, Nashoba, near Memphis, Tennessee” (Clark et al 459). Another characterizes Nashoba as “a bold plan to set up a utopian community of whites and freed slaves who would live together in full equality” (Henretta et al. 336).1 Although this optimistic description fits nicely into textbook depictions of US history moving inevitably toward ever-increasing freedom, it bears little relationship to Nashoba’s actual character, nor to Wright’s true aims in establishing her “utopia.” Wright’s original goal was never to form an interracial community. Rather, she hoped to perfect American liberty by ridding the US of both slavery and former slaves, through a complex financial scheme that would support universal colonization. An English radical, Wright chafed at the British political repression of the 1810s and viewed the US, in contradistinction, as a utopia of liberty; she planned Nashoba accordingly. She wanted to get rid of the US’s slaves, so the world’s only true bastion of liberty could flourish.