Frances Wright had founded the Nashoba Commune…

Frances Wright had founded the Nashoba Commune in 1825, intending to educate slaves to prepare them for freedom.

Wright had hoped to build a self-sustaining multiracial community comprised of slaves, free blacks, and whites.

Nashoba (now the modern-day city of Germantown, Tennessee, a suburb of Memphis) had been partially based on Owen's New Harmony settlement, and had lasted until Wright became ill with malaria and moved back to Europe to recover.

The interim management of Nashoba had been appalled by Wright's benevolent approach to the slaves living in Nashoba; rumors had spread of interracial marriage and the Commune had fallen into financial difficulty, which had eventually led to its demise.

In 1830, Wright frees the Commune's thirty slaves and accompanies them to the newly liberated nation of Haiti, where they can live their lives as free men and women.

Wright's opposition to slavery contrasts to most other Democrats of the era, and her activism for workingmen distances her from the leading abolitionists of the time.