George Moses Horton

George Moses Horton was born about 1798 — some records say 1797 — enslaved on William Horton's tobacco farm in Northampton County, North Carolina, and carried as an infant to Chatham County. He taught himself to read from a worn speller, a Wesley hymnal, and the Bible; writing came only years later, so for decades he composed poems in his head and spoke them out to be taken down.

From about his twentieth year he walked the eight miles to Chapel Hill, selling fruit and verses — acrostic love poems for the university's students at twenty-five, fifty, and seventy-five cents — and hiring his own time from the men who claimed him. The novelist Caroline Lee Hentz transcribed his poems and carried them to the newspapers; his "Liberty and Slavery" saw print in 1829, and that year Joseph Gales's press at Raleigh issued The Hope of Liberty — twenty-one poems, the first book published by an African American in the South, its proceeds meant to purchase the poet's freedom. The purchase was refused, the fund fell short, and the poet stayed bound another thirty-six years, writing on.

Poetical Works followed from Hillsborough in 1845. When the Union armies reached North Carolina in April 1865 he walked to their lines a free man at last, and with Captain Will H. S. Banks of the 9th Michigan Cavalry compiled Naked Genius that same year. Philadelphia held his last years, writing stories for Sunday schools.

He died about 1883 — some sources say near 1880 — probably in Philadelphia; the details went unrecorded, as the world then kept few records of such men. His state remembers now: a hall at the university that once bought his verses bears his name, the first building there named for an enslaved person. Honored be George Moses Horton, who sold love poems to the sons of his captors and spent the earnings seeking himself.