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I've always thought it interesting that Joseph Davis, brother of Jefferson Davis, became enamoured of Robert Owen and tried to make his plantation into a kind of utopian community. He encouraged his slaves to govern themselves and set up a court run by the slaves. After emancipation Davis's former slaves moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, where they maintained a self-governing community more or less isolated from the rest of the state through segregation. The source is Janet Sharp Herman, The Pursuit of a Dream (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). Christopher Waldrep Department of History San Francisco State University
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