ABSTRACT
Frances Wright began with the prime requisite for an omniscient do-good; she inherited an independent income before she was twenty-one. She was also a woman of immense energy, of a natural oratorical talent, and with a natural craving for the limelight. If one were obliged to select a single specimen or case history to exemplify what happened to liberalism in the nineteenth century, how the name was appropriated and exploited by strictly authoritarian reformers, life and works of Frances Wright might stand for all the tribe. Her education as a young lady omitted all mention of the American Revolution. When she came upon a history of it, in Italian, she wasn't quite sure if it were fact or romance. She followed the fashion, proposing to devote her colony to the solution of one special problem, slavery. Her idea was to buy Negro slaves, educate them for freedom, and meantime have them work out the price of their redemption.
