is taken away by all the cares, anxieties, and troubles of matrimony and a family of children being entirely removed by the Community educating, supporting, and providing for them." * Hitherto the Community had been singularly prosperous. Emigrants had come in so fast that to provide them with lodgings had been found impossible, and those contemplating settlement had been warned to wait. But now all was changed. Discord took the place of harmony, and in a little while three communities-New Harmony, Macluria, and Feiba Peven, a name which was gibberish for the latitude and longitude of New Harmony-existed on the land Owen bought from Rapp. Before another six months elapsed Owen was selling property to individuals, sign-boards were appearing, shops were opening, fences were going up, and New Harmony was taking on all the characteristics of a village of the unregenerated sort. Before a year had passed, Owen, discouraged by the wreck he saw about him, bade his followers farewell, and left them to their fate. Many remained and formed little communities on lands held on long leases. Some were driven off as worthless. Numbers went home, or settled at Nevillsville, in Ohio. To-day the traveller who visits New Harmony can find no trace and scarce a reminiscence of the days of the Owenite Community of Equality. # While these things were happening at New Harmony, other communities of a like kind were springing up on the frontier. Some enthusiasts at Cincinnati, carried away by the eloquence of Owen, bought land and founded the Yellow Springs Community in Ohio. Others were started at Blue Springs, Indiana; at Forestville, Indiana; at Kendal, near Canton, Ohio; at Pittsburg; at Coxsackie, New York; at Haverstraw, New York; at Valley Forge,◊ Pennsylvania; and at Maclure's letter is printed in the United States Gazette, September 27, 1826. # For satires on the Owenite movement, see Paulding's Three Wise Men of Gotham, and a dramatic piece, The New Lights of Harmony. Brief accounts of most of these are given in Noyes's American Socialism. A This community disbanded within a year. New England Palladium, Janu ary 10, 1826. Preamble and constitution of the Friendly Association of Mutual Interests. 1826. FRANCES WRIGHT. 97 Nashoba, in Tennessee, which in many respects exceeded them all in interest. The foundress was Frances Wright, one of the early advocates in our country of what would now be called woman's rights. She was born at Dundee, in Scotland, but at the age of nineteen, animated by a strong desire to see the great Republic, she came to the United States and passed two years in New England. From girlhood she had been a devoted admirer of republics and the rights of man, an admiration which her life in New England intensified, and which she fully expressed on her return to England, in 1820, by publishing her views of society and manners in America. From England she went to France, and spent three years in the family of Lafayette. There, if possible, her partiality for our country was yet more increased, and in 1824 she returned to the United States, landed at a southern port, and, if her biographer may be trusted, became aware for the first time that slavery existed in the Republic she had fondly believed was founded on the rights of man. Horrified at the discovery, she set herself the task of finding some way of showing the people of the South that it was not impossible to gradually abolish slavery. She had been assured on every hand that the negro was incapable of education, that he would never work unless forced to, and that the whites would never be safe in the midst of a population of free Africans. To dispel this delusion, Miss Wright bethought herself of applying to the slave the same system of social education that Owen had applied to the laboring classes in Scotland. With this end in view, she visited the Rappites, made a study of the system of the Shakers, was present at New Harmony when the Rappites left and the Owenites began to arrive, and in the course of 1825 framed a plan of action. She proposed that sections of the public domain, or Congress land, as it was called, should be purchased in the cotton States; that colonies of one or two hundred slaves should be settled on each; that a system of co-operative labor on the community plan should be introduced, and the negroes and their children educated and made fit for freedom. The labor performed by each slave was to be rated at its full market value; the cost of food and clothes was to be deducted and the surplus set aside as a fund for the purchase of his freedom and that of his children, who meantime were to be trained in a "school of industry." * That an example of such a community might be set, Miss Wright, in the autumn of 1825, purchased a tract of twentyfour hundred acres on the Wolf river, thirteen miles from Memphis, and there planted a town which she called Nashoba. Her purpose was threefold: She wished to found a community in which the negro slave should be educated, trained, and made fit for freedom; she wished to emancipate him when educated, and so set an example which, if followed, would in the end abolish slavery in the South; and she wished to bring together in one village men and women of all nationalities who were eager to devote their lives to the search for truth and rational happiness. Money was freely given, and the experiment was tried. But Nashoba shared the fate of New Harmony, and in 1829 Miss Wright took her negroes off to Hayti, whither another abolitionist, Benjamin Lundy, was entreating his countrymen to send their manumitted slaves. After the failure at Nashoba, Miss Wright went to New Harmony, and with Robert Dale Owen edited the Nashoba and New Harmony Gazette. But in the autumn of 1828 she entered the lecture field and made a tour of the chief cities, delivered courses of free lectures on education, manners, morals, and religion, and shocked her auditors by the boldness of her projects and the immorality of her teachings. Some were horrified at the appearance of a woman on the lecture platform; some thought her opinions on free education and the wisdom of co-operation little better than the vagaries of a lively imagination; but when she urged the abolition of the marriage rite, told her audiences that incompatibility of temper was good ground for divorce, and that no distinction ought to be made between legitimate and natural children, the cry for her suppression grew so fierce that it soon became almost impossible to secure a lecture hall, a church, a courthouse, or a school in which to deliver her lectures. Yet she * Genius of Universal Emancipation. United States Gazette, December 16, 28, 1829. WORKING-MAN'S PARTY AT NEW YORK. 99 was not without followers. "Fanny Wright Societies" were formed in many towns and cities, the reforms she advocated were seriously undertaken, and New York city made the centre of the new movement. There an old wooden church was purchased, and, under the name of Hall of Science, it became the headquarters of the sect. To it in 1829 the New Harmony Gazette was removed and issued as the Free Enquirer. It claimed to be a weekly newspaper under the influence of no religious sect, controlled by no political party, and muzzled by no fear of lack of patronage. It was to be free to inquire into every social abuse; free to express any opinion it pleased on any subject social, moral, religious, or political; and was to be the friend of the working-man in his efforts to secure his rights. Scarcely was the Free Enquirer established when the campaign opened and the working-men were summoned to meet and organize for defence of their rights. Hundreds responded, and before adjournment a committee of fifty was appointed to prepare a plan of organization and an address. At another meeting a month later an Assembly ticket was put in the field, and resolutions, which did duty as the platform of the Working-man's party, were adopted.* On this occasion Robert Dale Owen was present, acted as secretary, and was accused later with having had much to do with drafting the platform. This he denied, but the anti-religious, the communistic, the agrarian doctrines it contained leave no doubt that the Free Enquirers were in control, and had used the name of the working-man to make popular a social system which concerned him but little. In the opinion of the reformers, the first appropriation of the soil of New York to private possession was "barbarously unjust." It was feudal in character, for those who were given enormous grants were in reality lords, and those who received little or nothing were no better than vassals. The hereditary transmission of wealth on the one hand, and of poverty on the other, thus provided for, had brought down to the generation then living all the ills of feudalism, and these were the * The meeting was held October 19, 1829. causes of present calamities. Banks and bankers were next denounced. A hundred broken banks, a thousand kinds of counterfeit notes, an army of bankers, "the greatest knaves, impostors, and paupers of the age," who had promised to redeem thirty-five million of papers with four million of specie, admonished the people to destroy banks altogether. A third form of privilege which ought to be destroyed was the exemption from taxation of churches, church property, and the property of priests under fifteen hundred dollars, for it was nothing short of a direct and positive robbery of the people. Auctions ought also to be regulated. As then conducted, they were a source of immense and unjust revenue to the auctioneers, who, without any return to the public beyond a small tax, divided two and even three millions of dollars among them each year. When the resolutions were adopted, an "Association for the Protection of Industry and for the Promotion of National Education" was formed, and every member pledged to support no man at the polls who would not support the cause of the people in the Legislature. The seriousness of this movement, and the eagerness with which laborers, mechanics, clerks, men who belonged to every class of the great body of toilers, hastened to give it encouragement and support now brought into existence a new journal, and in October, 1829, the first number of The Workingman's Advocate made its appearance. The editors were two young mechanics who had caught the spirit of the age and were eager for the reform of society. "We think," said they in the prospectus of the Advocate, "we see in the existing state of society around us something radically wrong. We see one portion living in luxury and idleness. We see another engaged in employments which are useless or worse than useless. We see a third part-and it is the most numerous-groaning under the oppressions and miseries inflicted on it by the other two, and we see all suffering from the effects of vice produced by luxury and indolence, and of ignorance caused by poverty. We are therefore opposed to monopolies, exemptions, exclusive privileges. We consider it an exclusive privilege for one part of the community to have the means of education in college while another is restricted to the common schools, or |