Domestic Manners of the Americans

From Latin and French roots meaning “common” or “to share,” a commune is “a small group of persons living together, sharing possessions, work, income, etc., and often pursuing unconventional lifestyles” (“Commune.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster. Accessed 19 Mar. 2024.). Fanny Wright used the term to describe her community of formerly enslaved African Americans in Nashoba, Tennessee, in which the residents were to be given a basic education in preparation for living in mainstream society.

Short for stagecoach, this was a horse-drawn carriage that traveled regularly over a fixed route with passengers and/or cargo in the 17th through the 19th centuries. Trollope travels by stagecoach over much of the terrain covered in the book and provides vivid descriptions of the discomfort and inconvenience often encountered in stage travel.

These terms were used in the 19th century as ethnic or racial classifications of Americans, which Trollope uses in Chapter 2 during her visit to New Orleans. Creoles were descendants of Louisiana’s white French settlers, while quadroons were people having one-fourth black ancestry. Trollope refers to the latter group as “the excluded but amiable Quadroons” (16) and emphasizes that these groups had each had a fixed place in the race-based hierarchy of New Orleans.