Fanny Wright Unmasked by her Own Pen. Explanatory Notes, Respecting the Nature and Objects of the Institution of Nashoba, and of the Principles Upon which it is Founded, Addressed to the Friends of Human Improvement, in all Countries and of all Nations (New York: Printed for the Purchasers [1827] 1830)

Nashoba was an experimental settlement in Tennessee, founded in November 1825 by Frances Wright, in order to enable the gradual emancipation of American slaves. Born in Scotland into an upper-class, liberal family, Wright was a freethinker, a feminist and an abolitionist who saw Robert Owen’s communitarian schemes as a potential solution to the slave-based plantation system. After she acquired Nashoba, Frances Wright purchased fifteen slaves. Frances Wright’s Explanatory Notes, penned in 1827 and published the following year in an anti-slavery paper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation, were written to find financial backers, recruit new trustees and defend her and her friends’ own distrust of the institution of marriage. She argued in favour of co-operative production, or “united labour” as the only viable economic alternative to slavery, and also advocated mixed-race unions as the answer to America’s system of racial and political inequality. The community disbanded by January 1828, and two years later, Wright took the now emancipated slaves to Haiti.