Horton, George Moses

Horton, George Moses (b. 1797, Northampton County, N.C.; d. 1883, Philadelphia, Pa.), African American poet.

George Moses Horton, who was enslaved for most of his life, has been called the first professional black poet in America. Even as a slave, Horton made money by composing poems for students at the University of North Carolina and became the first African American in the South to publish a book, receiving local fame as "The Colored Bard of North Carolina." But Horton's creative potential was continually frustrated by the limits on his freedom.

Horton was the property of three generations of the same North Carolina family before Emancipation in 1865. He had no formal education, but began creating poetry by composing verses in his head. His earliest patrons, university students, commissioned him to compose love poems for their sweethearts. Horton had not yet learned to write, but he dictated, the students transcribed, and he was paid in money and books.

Horton's talents were eventually noticed by white novelist Caroline Lee Hentz, who helped him learn to write, and by several professors at the university, who helped him publish his work. Hope of Liberty (1829) and Poetical Works of George Moses Horton, the Colored Bard of North Carolina (1845) were both issued in the hopes — never fulfilled — of raising enough money to purchase his freedom.

Horton's last collection, Naked Genius (1865), was published at the end of the Civil War, when he became legally free. Many of his poems dealt with traditional subjects such as love, religion, and death, but some, especially in later years, expressed antislavery themes. When Emancipation came, Horton was 70 years old and no longer able to pursue the career he might have had. He moved to Philadelphia and is thought to have died there in 1883. .