George Moses Horton

George Moses Horton (1798–1884) was an African-American poet and the first African American poet to be published in the Southern United States. His book was published in 1828 while he was still enslaved; he remained enslaved until he was emancipated late in the Civil War.

Horton was born into slavery on William Horton's plantation in Northampton County, North Carolina. He was the sixth of ten children, though the names of his parents are lost to history. As a very young child in 1800, he and several family members were moved to a tobacco farm in rural Chatham County, when his owner relocated. He was given as property to William's relative James Horton in 1814. In 1819, the estate was broken up, and George Moses Horton's family was separated (the poem "Division of an Estate" reflected on the experience years later).

Horton disliked farm work and in his free time he taught himself to read using spelling books, the Bible, and hymnals. Learning poetry and snippets of literature, Horton composed poems in his mind. As a young adult, Horton delivered produce to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he composed and recited poems for students, some of whom transcribed his compositions. Horton also composed poems, usually love poems, by commission for the students at 25 or 50 cents each. Considering the difficulty of earning income from poetry, Horton was likely one of the few professional poets in the South at the time.

In 1829, his poems were published in a collection titled The Hope of Liberty, which was intended to raise funds for his release from slavery. The book, funded by the politically-liberal journalist Joseph Gales, appeared the same year as David Walker's An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Horton is believed to be the first Southern black to publish poetry. Though he knew how to read, he published the book before he learned how to write. As he recalled, "I fell to work in my head, and composed several undigested pieces."

By 1832, he had learned to write for himself, having learned with the aid of Caroline Lee Hentz, who was the wife of a professor and a writer herself. She also assisted in publishing at least two of his poems in a newspaper. Horton had composed a poem on the death of Hentz's child. As he recalled: "She was extremely pleased with the dirge which I wrote on the death of her much lamented primogenial infant, and for which she gave me much credit and a handsome reward. Not being able to write myself, I dictated while she wrote." She sent one of Horton's poems to her hometown newspaper in Lancaster, Massachusetts, where it was published on April 8, 1828, as "Liberty and Slavery".

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