out their ideas of beauty and elegance, as they would have done in different circumstances. But she thought she would make an effort to tarry with them one night, though that seemed to her no desirable affair. But as soon as she saw that accomplished, literary and refined persons were living in that plain and simple manner, and submitting to the labors and privations incident to such an infant institution, she said, “Well, if these can live here, I can.” Afterwards, she gradually became pleased with, and attached to, the place and the people, as well she might; for it must have been no small thing to have found a home in a “Community composed of some of the choicest spirits of the age,” where all was characterised by an equality of feeling, a liberty of thought and speech, and a largeness of soul, she could not have before met with, to the same extent, in any of her wanderings. (Truth 1850, “Another Camp Meeting”)
The commune did not last, and Truth’s feelings of contentment and security there wore off as well.
When we first saw her, she was working with a hearty good will; saying she would not be induced to take regular wages, believing, as once before, that now Providence had provided her with a never-failing fount, from which her every want might be perpetually supplied through her mortal life. In this, she had calculated too fast. For the Associationists found, that, taking every thing into consideration, they would find it most expedient to act individually; and again, the subject of this sketch found her dreams unreal, and herself flung back upon her own resources for the supply of her needs. (Ibid.)
Over its four and a half years of existence, more than two hundred people joined the commune. Largely because they could not operate the silk mill at a profit, the community disbanded in 1846 (Collaborative for Educational Services 2009c). According to Truth and her biographer, however, the NAEI also failed because individualism corrupted the communal spirit. All members, including the African American members, moved on, but they recalled the experiment fondly, though also with disappointment.
Black communes or independent communities, such as Nashoba Commune in Tennessee and the Combahee River Colony of Black women in South Carolina, experienced both success and failure.
The Nashoba Commune
The Nashoba Commune was planned as an organized Negro community that practiced communitarianism in Tennessee in 1825. Founder Frances Wright, an early women’s suffragist and an admirer of New Harmony, the Owenite utopian community in Indiana, planned to buy fifty to a hundred enslaved African Americans, set them up in a community, divide their time between manual work and academic study, train them for freedom, and provide for their colonization outside the United States (Pease and Pease 1963; Curl 1980).2 All African American members were responsible for paying their own way, purchasing their own freedom, and paying the cost of eventual colonization. Slave owners were to be compensated, and the money invested in the community was to be paid back. According to Curl, “While Owen’s concept strove toward the liberation of all people from wage-slavery, Wright tried to apply the concept to chattel-slavery. She considered it one last hope for the liberation of black people short of violent insurrection” (1980, 11).
Wright bought three hundred acres near Memphis. Once established, the Nashoba Commune actually became an interracial community of free persons—enslaved people were no longer invited to join unless they were original inhabitants and their masters moved with them. Sometimes called a cooperative and sometimes a commune, the community struggled socially and politically for three years. African Americans were not allowed to hold leadership positions. Local racists also harassed the community (Curl 1980, 11). In 1828, when Wright returned from convalescence in Europe, the community was suffering from the national economic depression, as well as mismanagement. In 1829 Nashoba members could not pay their mortgages and disbanded. Wright sent the original African American inhabitants whom she was responsible for, including the enslaved members whom she still owned, to freedom in Haiti (Pease and Pease 1963, 36–37). According to Curl, Wright then became active in the New York Workingmen’s Party, “giving up the socialist community strategy as impracticable at the time” (1980, 11).
The Combahee River Colony
The Combahee River Colony had a much different beginning and purpose. The colony was located in a remote area where African Americans established their own settlements and remained relatively self-sufficient and semiautonomous: the Gullah/Geechee communities in the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands. The Combahee River Colony in South Carolina consisted of several hundred African American women during the Civil War whose men had gone to join the Union Army. They occupied abandoned farmland where they “grew crops and cared for one another” (Jones 1985, 52). They refused to work for Whites and were proud of their handicrafts and cotton crop, as well as their independence. The community became relatively well known as an example of Black women’s independence, perseverance, and collective spirit.
Fit to Be Free
Pease and Pease describe these “organized Negro communities”—“designed to prove that the Negro was fit to be a free man”—as “impressive undertakings,” both in the goals set and “in the dedication, zeal, and vision of those who devoted themselves to” them (1963, 160). They were political and economic havens for escaped enslaved people and impoverished freedmen, operating under ideals of Jeffersonian agrarianism and, later, urban-industrial entrepreneurship. These communities provided academic and vocational education, as well as citizenship and political training for moral and spiritual improvement and leadership development. Although collective in practice, the ideals promoted most by the White organizers (and many of the Black leaders) were the ultimate achievement of middle-class culture, individualism, and capitalist development. Individuals and their families did benefit. During the time they lived there, and while the communities were successful, members were able to make a living collectively, to provide themselves and their children with a good education and other training, and often to own their own land. While the examples show that there were benefits from and positive aspects of these communities, they were also based largely on paternalistic relationships between White benefactor-managers and Black residents. These communities suffered many hardships, missteps, frauds, and failures. Pease and Pease observe that “often settlements looked less like co-operative community enterprises than like isolated reservations” (1963, 162). The goal was to create gentleman farmers out of ex-enslaved people, to have them work the soil to improve their character. Most of these communities succeeded in training Blacks to adjust to and integrate into White society, but not in changing White attitudes, making systemic changes, or even operating in separate utopian societies. The Combahee River Colony stands out as one of the few that had genuine strong African American leadership and were largely autonomous of White oversight. Pease and Pease conclude pessimistically that “the results were, on the whole, . . . tragically inconsequential” (160).
Nevertheless, these experiments in communal living provided training in and collective memory of democratic communities and attempts at cooperative economics among African Americans. Some of the communities, especially those organized by African Americans for their own independence, such as the Combahee River Colony, were much more separatist in desire and collective in practice. DeFilippis notes that some socialist communes were radical:
While the black communes emerged in the 1830s and were explicitly geared toward reproducing agrarian and mercantile capitalism in black communities, there was a parallel and yet completely different history of nineteenth-century communes and collectives that were oriented toward exactly the opposite goal—creating places outside the constraints and structures of the emergent industrial capitalist world of wage slavery and employment-based production. These “utopian” communities were attempts at local-scale communism, and they were largely divided between secular and religious communes, although there was a good deal of overlap. (2004, 39)3
Although none of the Owenite communes were predominantly African American—most had no Black members at all (because Blacks and Whites were not supposed to live together)—an exception was the Northampton Association of Education and Industry. As noted above, the
