Nashoba Community

Sketch of Nashoba, from Domestic Manners of the Americans, 1832

The Nashoba Community was an experimental project of Frances "Fanny" Wright, initiated in 1825 to educate and emancipate slaves. It was located in a 2,000-acre (8 km2) woodland on the side of present-day Germantown, Tennessee, a Memphis suburb, along the Wolf River. It was a small-scale test of her full-compensation emancipation plan in which no slaveholders would lose money for emancipating 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.[1]

  1. ^ Bederman, Gail. "Revisiting Nashoba: Slavery, Utopia, and Frances Wright in America, 1818-1826," American Literary History, vol. 17, no. 3 (2005), pp. 438-459.