Frances Wright of Nashoba

Lithographer Charles Joseph Hullmandel British
 After Auguste Hervieu French
 Sitter Frances Wright British

Not on view

In 1826, Frances "Fanny" Wright founded the Nashoba Commune in Tennessee to test her theory of emancipation. Although she aspired to found an interracial, egalitarian utopia, it was a fundamentally flawed scheme that required enslaved people to work to buy their freedom. When, ultimately, the community could not sustain itself, she took the remaining residents to the newly independent nation of Haiti in 1830, where President Jean-Pierre Boyer welcomed them as free citizens and gave them land. The artist of this portrait, Auguste Hervieu, accompanied the author Frances Trollope to America in 1827 as a tutor to her children. He later served as illustrator for her book "Domestic Manners of the Americans" (1832), which briefly describes their stay at Nashoba.

Frances Wright of Nashoba, Charles Joseph Hullmandel (British, London 1789–1850 London), Lithograph

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