Revisiting Nashoba
A critical review of a recent historical article
I have been thinking a lot about the freethinkers lately. Especially those of the Atlantic world in the first half of the nineteenth century. It strikes me that they were living in a fraught time and trying to create a new way of thinking and living, to deal with it. The Revolution of republicanism in America had given way to rule by coastal elites and Alien and Sedition laws. The philosophical radicals of Great Britain had been driven back into the shadows of academic discourse by the French Revolution and war with France. And yet, on both sides of the Atlantic, people tried to continue the push for freedom of thought and expression -- often talking directly to the lower classes through penny-press papers and broadsheets.
So it's always exciting when another historian writes something about these events and people. I was interested to discover that Gail Bederman is in the final stages of preparing a book for publication. Better yet, it deals with birth control -- a subject that interests me a lot! Bederman is a member of the History faculty at Notre Dame University who focuses on gender and sexuality. She is apparently writing a two-volume work on the earliest advocates of contraception in Britain and the US. the first volume is under contract and nearly finished, according to her web page. The second is apparently in the earlier stages of writing, but this article about Frances Wright ("Revisiting Nashoba: Slavery, Utopia, and Frances Wright in America, 1818-1826" American Literary History, 2005) is taken from it. I have to admit, reading this has significantly reduced my enthusiasm for her project.
In this article, which was selected by the OAH for its anthology of the Best American History Essays 2007, Bederman depicts Frances Wright in a very negative light, in my opinion. The issue seems to be that Wright was not as evolved as we are today, and did not believe all the things we do in exactly the right combination. She was too naively optimistic about America, where we are correctly cynical. She believed that slaves should be freed, but that slaveowners could be convinced to support emancipation by being compensated for the loss of their property, where we believe they should have been punished. And when Nashoba failed, Wright moved to New York and continued advocating for her ideals and for freethought, rather than going down with the ship in Tennessee. The article left me wondering what exactly was the point of Bederman examining Wright's career? Was it to explore the past, or to chastise the past and, by implication, the present?
Bederman begins by describing Wright as someone who “chafed at the British political repression of the 1810s and viewed the US, in contradistinction, as a utopia of liberty; she planned Nashoba accordingly. She wanted to get rid of the US's slaves, so the world's only true bastion of liberty could flourish” (438).
Although Wright was very young (17) when she read Carlo Botta's 1809 History of the War of Independence in the United States and (23) first visited the US, Bederman may be overplaying her naivete. I can accept that, excited by reading and by a series of contacts with elite Americans, she may have imagined the US as "the perfect republic--the opposite of 1810s British political corruption". But I'm not sure I buy the idea that "she misrecognized slavery as a vestigal remnant of British colonial tyranny rather than an intrinsic part of US political culture." That said, I can also imagine her being charmed by statesmen such as Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and even Jackson on her second trip with Lafayette, and being taken in by their hypocritical assurances that slavery was a problem they seriously wished to solve.
However, I don't think it's fair to say that "In founding Nashoba, Wright was motivated not by interracial sympathy, but by a profound political, racial, and civic identification with the patriots of 1776, especially republican slaveholders such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison" (439). And I wonder what Bederman's motivation is, for this assertion and for her attitude toward Wright more generally?
Bederman says that in 1825 when Wright began to plan for Nashoba, she was articulating a political philosophy that was radical in Britain but "absolutely mainstream in the US". She describes the philosophical radicalism of Bentham, Godwin, Priestley, and Wollstonecraft, which had been suppressed since war had broken out with revolutionary France. But I don't think that from a US perspective, Wright's "political enthusiasms were quite ordinary--even old-fashioned-- and echoed Revolutionary-era republicanism." Bederman cites Halevy's The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism to support this claim, which seems to relate to the British element of her point, but not necessarily the US (but I'll check it out and see).
Wright was not allowed to enter Glasgow University as a student, but her uncle James Mylne got her access to the library for at least three years. Bederman also mentions that "Wright also imbibed an anachronistic, 1790s version of Anglo-American republicanism from a woman she soon began to call 'Mother,' Robina Craig Millar. In 1795, Millar, related by marriage to Wright's uncle Mylne, had settled in Philadelphia as part of the great emigration of radicals who, like Joseph Priestley, fled to the US to escape anti-Jacobin repression. Millar and her husband had been part of Benjamin Rush's Pennsylvania circle of British expatriates, until John Millar's unexpected death 18 months later had forced Robina to return to Scotland, where she continued to see herself as a patriot and to correspond with Rush until he died in 1813" (440). This is an interesting lineage of radicalism that I should explore further. The number of radicals who crossed the Atlantic in the 1790s deserves a closer look. Probably, the United Irishman do as well.
Bederman suggests Wright may have been influenced by Millar to blame Britain for American slavery, mentioning that Jefferson had tried to blame King George in his long list of royal offenses, but slaveholding interests had prevailed on him to excise the passage from the Declaration of Independence. Is it that difficult to imagine an older Jefferson doubling down on this claim, in conversation with Lafayette and young Frances? Bederman chides Wright for optimistically reporting that the US government had eliminated the Atlantic slave trade and that many northern states had abolished slavery. But aren't these positive developments? Are we too obsessed today with binary, either-or choices and defining people as either saints or villains?
Bederman then tries to describe Wright as believing "that American negroes as a class, like ignorant European peasants, were intrinsically inferior to America's white 'citizen philosophers'. (443)" This seems particularly unfair to Wright, who seems from other accounts to have believed something close to Robert Owen's environmental determinism. If enslaved people in America were prevented from learning to read and subjected to the worst conditions, who would reasonable expect them to be philosophers? Bederman does at least admit that this "inferiority...stemmed not from intrinsic racial character but from the lasting degradation caused by slavery." If this is the case, why try to portray Wright as a racist? Perhaps it's unfashionable today to be a well-meaning white person -- Bederman next makes light of the interest Jeremy Bentham took in Wright and her project.
Bederman also seems annoyed by the fact that Wright's anti-slavery sentiments were irreligious. There were other white women interested in abolition, she mentions, describing the literature, petition-drives, and fund-raising conducted by respectable ladies in Britain during Wright's youth. Bederman says "there is no evidence that Wright knew or cared about any of these"(445). Worse, "unlike most other female abolitionists, Wright scorned religion as irrational and unnatural". Is this the real problem?
Bederman then narrates Wright's 1824-5 visits to Washington DC and to Monticello, where she discussed colonization with Jefferson. She also spent several days with James and Dolley Madison on their plantation, which apparently supported the idea that "Americans sincerely wanted to rid their country of slavery but lacked the means" (446). Sometime during this year, she also seems to have discovered the Rappite Harmony community in Indiana--possibly as Robert Owen was purchasing the town to begin his own experiment. Both Owen and Wright seem to have been convinced that the "united labor" practiced by the Rappites was so much more effective than the typical organization of the US economy that its adoption would unlock levels of production that would support cooperative societies and, Wright believed, allow enslaved people to work their way to freedom.
Bederman seems critical of Wright's belief that slave-holders should be offered an emancipation path that "would not cause them any pecuniary sacrifice" (447). This may seem odd to us now, but there was extensive precedent. As Thomas Piketty documents in A Brief History of Equality, Britain and France both basically paid reparations to the slave-owners rather than the slaves when they eliminated slavery. Bederman also faults Wright for not concerning herself that the land she acquired with the help of Andrew Jackson had been part of a forced cession by the Chickasaw in 1818.
Wright was unable to attract subscribers to her plan, so she poured $10,000 of her own money -- equivalent to nearly three hundred thousand dollars today and a quarter of her assets -- into the plan. She bought somewhere between one section of land and two (accounts differ), along with eight slaves. Although she continued to hope that people would begin supporting the project once she got it off the ground, this was not the case. Although Bederman seems to insist on portraying everything Wright did in the worst possible light, she may be correct that this disappointment broke the rose-tinted glasses Wright had viewed America through, and turned her into an "American radical" (451).
In December 1826, Bederman says Wright "publicly abandoned both her plan and her now shattered faith in the US as utopia by signing three deeds that transformed Nashoba from a privately owned model farm into a utopian community and philanthropic trust" (451). This doesn't seem to track -- she DID continue Nashoba as a cooperative community like New Harmony. Bederman seems to object to the fact that the eight enslaved people were not immediately emancipated and made members in equal standing as the whites who had presumably contributed some funds. According to the trust, the goal was still for the enslaved people to earn the funds to purchase their freedom, so despite the lack of large numbers, Wright and her partners seem to have continued to believe they would be able to achieve this goal, albeit on a smaller scale.
Bederman concludes that "even in this new 'utopian' phase Nashoba was no 'egalitarian interracial community'" and describes Wright as being "as unwilling to lose her substantial monetary investment as any other slaveholder". She further describes Wright as endorsing the trustees "quasi-Godwinian free love regime", although she admits Wright was in Europe trying to recruit new supporters while the sexual scandals were unfolding (452). Finally, she criticizes Wright's attack on the institution of marriage and her proposal of "racial amalgamation--miscegenation-- as the solution to the US's race problems" (453). Miscegnation is an extremely charged word these days, so I wonder what motivated Bederman to use it? Is it that ridiculous to suggest that having children together might break down the walls between peoples over time?
Bederman reports that when Wright returned to Nashoba in 1828 she found the community in chaos. After several months Bederman says Wright spent "mourning the utter demise of her plans...she finally concluded that no useful political work could be done in rural Tennessee, delegated the care of Nashoba and its slaves to other hands, and moved on to other types of radical projects." The citation for this derogatory narrative includes Lori Ginzberg's 1994 article "The Hearts of Your Readers Will Shudder", which I will review shortly (Spoiler: I wasn't that impressed and Ginzberg certainly fits into this theme of bashing freethinkers). Almost lost in this depiction of her subject as a feckless dilettante is the mention that "in January 1830, Wright chartered a ship and--at great personal and financial cost--transported them to Haiti. Once there, she emancipated them."
Bederman's goal in this article seems to have been to skewer "utopian fantasies of Nashoba [and] our desire to see heroism" (454). Our problem, she concludes, is that "we long to find some project--some insightful radical--who escaped the painful racial realities that have always been interwoven with Americans' republican love of liberty". Frances Wright did not succeed in freeing all of America's slaves, so she should be written off as a naive dreamer or condemned as a hypocrite. Some of her ideas were wrong, so apparently there is no value in looking at any of them. Is this how historians are supposed to engage with the past now? Is this what the two volumes of her forthcoming opus will do? If so, is it going to be a contribution to the growing history of birth control advocacy? Or several pages of complaints about how wrong people in the past got it, even when they tried to improve their societies?
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