ABSTRACT
Scottish visionary Frances Wright had a long career as a social reformer and orator in the nineteenth-century United States and has several publications to her name. Wright's approach to slavery is also distinct from her British travel-writing peers: British travel writers often used their comments on slavery to emphasize British superiority. In the early nineteenth century, political and agricultural factors in Britain spurred thought about, travel to, and settlement in the United States for many British citizens. Grece warns emigrants that en route to the West travel "through a land of slavery" was necessary, unless traveling through Canada; he criticizes Birkbeck for not informing his readers that extreme heat in the Wabash country makes agricultural labor challenging for those of European constitutions, requiring slaves for the work. Wright and Birkbeck sought active ways to be voices against slavery in 1824. Slavery was a definite presence in the English Prairie region; the settlement neighbored the slave states of Kentucky and Tennessee.
