Құлдарды азат етуге дайындаған утопиялық қоғамдастық

Utopian community to prepare slaves for emancipation

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.

The commune was to create a demonstration of Wright's emancipation plan: to create a place to educate slaves and prepare them for freedom and colonization in Haiti or Liberia. Wright believed that if she could arrange emancipation without financial loss to slaveholders, planters of the South would use it. She believed that slaveholders were "anxious to manumit their people, but apprehensive about throwing them unprepared into the world." Wright imagined that if her experimental community was successful, its methods could be applied throughout the nation. Wright raised funds and recruited people. Among the first were the Englishman George Flower and his family, who had founded another settlement in Albion, Illinois. Wright could not raise sufficient monetary support however and ended up using a good portion of her own fortune to buy land and slaves. Nashoba is remembered as an egalitarian, interracial community, but it did not reach these goals. the slaves in the community were her property until they could buy themselves out. Nashoba is described briefly in Frances Trollope's 1832 book Domestic Manners of the Americans. She visited Nashoba with Wright in 1827 and lived in the United States for a few years. Her work was critical of American society for its lack of polish. She thought residents at Nashoba lacked both sufficient provisions and luxuries.

The interim managers of Nashoba instigated the concept of free love within the commune. In practice, it was interracial, but far from egalitarian. The Twin Oaks Community, founded in 1967, is an intentional community of 100 members in Virginia. All the buildings are named after former communities, and one residence has been named for Nashoba. Additionally, the Neshoba Unitarian Universalist Church, founded in 1992 in the area where the commune was located, is named after Nashoba. The name Nashoba (sometimes spelled "Neshoba") is still used in the Germantown area for place names, such as Neshoba Road running between Kirby Parkway and Kimbrough Road. It was also briefly the name of Germantown during World War I as a sign of "protest" against the country of Germany.