The Poetry of Horton by George Moses Horton
"The Poetry of Horton" by George Moses Horton is a significant work in the context of early African American literature, marking Horton as the first Southern black poet to publish a volume of poetry in the United States. Born into slavery in 1797 in North Carolina, Horton taught himself to read and developed his poetic talent despite the societal barriers surrounding him. His work is notable not only for its artistic merit but also for its role as a voice of protest against the institution of slavery, making him a pioneer in this regard among black poets.
Horton's poetry spans a variety of themes, including love, nature, and personal experience, often reflecting his struggles and aspirations for freedom. He gained some recognition while selling his poetry to university students, earning a modest income that supported his literary endeavors. His first published collection, "The Hope of Liberty," appeared in 1829, although it did not generate enough funds for his emancipation.
Despite remaining a slave until the end of the Civil War, Horton continued to write and publish, ultimately producing three volumes of poetry throughout his life. His literary contributions include both commissioned love poems and powerful anti-slavery verses that articulate the pain and indignities of enslavement. Horton’s works are characterized by their emotional depth and craftsmanship, revealing the complexities of his identity as both an artist and a man seeking liberty.
The Poetry of Horton by George Moses Horton
First published:The Hope of Liberty, 1829; The Poetical Works of George M. Horton, 1845; Naked Genius, 1865
Type of work: Poetry
A Slave Poet
In the history of early African American literature, George Moses Horton occupies an indisputably prominent position. Like Phillis Wheatley, he was a slave poet whose verse earned him renown and respect, and while New Englander Wheatley was the first black writer to have a volume of poems published, Horton was the first southern black poet to have a volume of poems published in the United States. In addition, Horton’s was the first black poetic voice of protest against slavery. Horton was also the first black author to earn money from his writings. In fine, “the Colored Bard of North Carolina,” as he used to refer to himself occasionally, is a seminal figure in the annals of African American literature.
Horton was born a slave in 1797 on the plantation of William Horton in Northampton County, North Carolina. Of pure African parentage, a fact in which he took great pride, he was one of ten children. When Horton was three years old, his master sold his plantation and moved to a farm in Chatham County, one hundred miles away, taking young Horton and most of his other slaves with him. Horton would spend the next sixty-five years of his life on the farm, where he taught himself to read and discovered and developed his gift for writing poetry.
Growing up, Horton devoted what little spare time he had to teaching himself to read, and in doing so he acquired a deep interest in poetry. He soon recognized that he had a talent for “versifying” and began to compose poems. Although Horton had taught himself to read, however, he still could not write and thus had to commit his poems to memory. In his attempts to improve himself intellectually and culturally, Horton, unlike Phillis Wheatley, had no one to support him—not his fellow slaves, who derided his efforts and tagged him “a vain fool” (to use Horton’s own words), and certainly not his master, whom Horton viewed as “a man who had no regard for liberty, science, or Genius.” “No cultivating hand was found,” he writes in an autobiographical poem titled “The Obstructions of Genius,” “to urge the night improving slave.”
What he did have, though, was a nearby college. Fortunately for Horton, his master’s farm was located only eight miles or so from the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina, at that time a fledgling university, only twenty-five years old and with a student body of only one hundred, but nevertheless the state’s center of learning and culture. Convincing his master that it would be profitable for him to sell some of his goods at the school, Horton obtained permission to travel to the campus weekly. Hence, on Sundays Horton would walk the eight miles from his master’s farm to the university, where he would sell his master’s fruit and farm produce (corn, wheat, and dairy products) and mingle with the students.
Selling Love Poems to Students
Before long, Horton started selling more than produce. What he started peddling were poems, “love pieces,” as he termed them. His customers, the students at the Chapel Hill campus, whom he had impressed with his talent for versifying, would eagerly commission him to compose love poems for them, poems which they would send to their ladyloves, passing off those poems as their own. Horton can thus rightly be termed the black Cyrano de Bergerac, for like Edmond Rostand’s soldier-poet Cyrano, Horton ghostwrote “love pieces” for Cupid-smitten, less-articulate youths, who took full credit for those poems. “I have composed love pieces in verse for courtiers from all parts of the state,” he relates in his autobiographical narrative, “and acrostics on the names of many of the tip-top belles of Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia.” An acrostic poem is one in which the first letter of the first word in each line combines to spell out a word or a name when read downward. It is a particularly difficult kind of poem to write, and it is a tribute to Horton’s ingenuity that he was able to compose so many of them (hundreds) and to craft them so well. Moreover, the conditions under which he had to compose these acrostics were grueling and degrading. He reveals that “many of those acrostics I composed at the handle of the plough and retained them in my head (being unable to write) until an opportunity offered, when I dictated whilst one of the gentlemen would serve as my amanuensis.” Horton, as one scholar has put it, stands as “one of the most prolific romantic ghostwriters in our history.”
By Horton’s own account, business was very good. He relates that his poetic talent was acknowledged on campus “as an incontestable fact . . . [and] my fame . . . circulated like a stream throughout the college.” For his poems, Horton charged from twenty-five to seventy-five cents, earning from these “love pieces” at least four dollars a week (a far from paltry sum at that time). He also earned the admiration of his customer-students, who often gave him books and clothes.
The students at Chapel Hill were not the only ones who admired Horton. Joseph D. Caldwell, the university’s president, was also impressed with him, so much so that the two became close friends. Horton’s most ardent admirer at Chapel Hill, however, was Caroline Lee Hentz, a New Englander who arrived at the school in 1826 with her husband, a professor hired to teach modern languages. Mrs. Hentz was to have a profound impact on Horton. A poet herself, she taught him to write, encouraged him to continue to compose, and suggested to him how to improve his poetry. Mrs. Hentz, in fact, was responsible for getting three of Horton’s poems published in her hometown newspaper, The Lancaster Gazette, in 1828—the first time that any of Horton’s poems appeared in print.
Publishing in Hope of Liberty
It was an auspicious beginning, for July of the next year, 1829, saw the publication of Horton’s volume of poems entitled The Hope of Liberty. Consisting of twenty-one poems, the volume has the distinction of being the first ever published by a black southern poet and the first published in America by a black writer. (Although Jupiter Hammond had a few poems published in the United States well before Horton, he never had an entire volume published.) The book is aptly titled, for liberty is precisely what Horton hoped that the money from the sales of the volume would buy him. Sadly, the volume did not sell well enough to raise a sum sufficient to purchase Horton’s freedom from his master. (Even if enough money had been raised, Horton’s master would not likely have parted with him; Horton had become valuable “family property.”)
Horton thus labored on, working in his master’s fields, spending as much time as possible at the university, and continually writing poetry. Caroline Hentz left the university in 1830, and her departure left a void in Horton’s life. Sometime during this period, Horton got married. There are no records of his wife’s name; all that is known is that she was the slave of one of the nearby farmers. The union produced two children but was evidently a loveless one and short-lived. In 1845, Horton published a second volume of poems, The Poetical Works of George M. Horton. The volume consisted of forty-five poems and was prefaced by a detailed autobiographical narrative, an account that has proven valuable to Horton biographers and scholars. Horton remained a slave until 1865, when Union troops freed him. His elation at being emancipated is captured in his poem “The Flag of the Free”:
Lift up thy head, exhausted slave,
One of the Union officers, Captain William Banks, was so impressed with Horton and his poetic talent when he met him that Banks assumed the role of Horton’s patron-editor and encouraged him to increase his creative activity. The result was Horton’s third and final volume of poems, Naked Genius. Published in the fall of 1865, it was also his lengthiest, containing 132 poems (one-third of which had previously appeared in The Poetical Works of George M. Horton twenty years earlier).
Emancipated after sixty-eight years of slavery, Horton took advantage of his newfound freedom and traveled to Philadelphia, where he spent the last seventeen years of his life. Unfortunately, not much is known about his life in Philadelphia. Horton died in 1883 at the age of eighty-six, but it is not known whether he died in Philadelphia or back in North Carolina.
The Business of Poetry
As a poet, Horton was the perfect fusion of the artist and the pragmatist. He was the poet as businessman and the poet as craftsman, and nowhere can these two sides be seen more clearly than in his love poems. Fittingly enough, Horton’s love poetry can be neatly divided into two categories—those poems commissioned by the students at the Chapel Hill campus and those written for Horton’s own artistic satisfaction. Many of the commissioned love poems are clever acrostics; unfortunately, not many of these acrostics are extant. The ones that have survived, however, are remarkable for their smooth craftsmanship. Given the grueling conditions under which he composed these poems, as well as the inherently difficult form of the acrostic, Horton’s achievement in this area is nothing short of outstanding.
One of these acrostics, untitled, nicely illustrates Horton’s mastery of form and content. Like most acrostics, this one spells out a name—in this case, “Julia Shepard.”
Joy, like the morning, breaks from one divine—
Another example of Horton’s skill is a “double acrostic” written at the request of Chapel Hill student Sion Hart Rogers and addressed to Mary E. V. Powell. Discovered by Horton scholar Richard Walser in 1975, the piece is actually two separate poems, one spelling out Rogers’s full name and the other spelling out Powell’s name. The two poems, however, are skillfully woven into one complete whole, indicating Rogers’s hope that his future and Powell’s would similarly be woven together forever. Such a poetic fusion is an ingenious approach on Horton’s part.
Not all Horton’s commissioned love poems were acrostics, though. Many were conventional love lyrics. Typical of these is the poem entitled, simply, “Love.” The poem is an engaging expression of heartfelt love designed to win over the heart of one of the many belles Horton referred to in his autobiographical narrative. Shrewd businessman-poet that he was, Horton frequently recycled many of his non-acrostic poems; if a particular poem proved successful, Horton would sell that same poem to other students.
While Horton composed a multitude of commissioned “love pieces,” he also wrote love poems for his own gratification. A noteworthy example of Horton’s noncommissioned love poetry is “Early Affection.” Moving in its declaration of intense, enduring love and relatively sophisticated in its controlling metaphor (sunrise, sunset), “Early Affection” anticipates some of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s love poems, most notably Dunbar’s “Love’s Apotheosis.”
I loved thee from the earliest dawn,
A Voice for the Voiceless
Horton, however, by no means confined himself to composing only love poems, for despite the financial profit and emotional satisfaction he derived from writing such poems, he never forgot what he was—a slave. Nor did he let the world forget that fact, for in much of Horton’s verse one hears for the first time in African American poetry the voice of protest against slavery. In poems such as “Slavery,” “The Slave’s Complaint,” “Liberty and Slavery,” and “On the Death of Rebecca,” Horton voices his anger and frustration—and at times his despair—at being enslaved and expresses his equally intense desire for freedom. In “Slavery,” depicting his condition as wretched and painful, Horton questions the very reason for his existence and laments ever having been born:
Why was the dawning of my birth
The poem ends somberly, with a death wish: “Then let me hasten to the grave,/ The only refuge for the slave,/ Who mourns for liberty.” Death, Horton goes on to say in the poem, is a kind of blessing—a “sweet and favored friend,” as he calls it in another of his antislavery poems—affording peace and relief from the pain of oppression.
In “The Slave’s Complaint,” Horton again bemoans his condition. He is “a wretch confined,” and his life is a “dreary maze,” dark and painful. Darkness, in fact, is the poem’s controlling image. Like many of Horton’s antislavery poems, “The Slave’s Complaint” ends with the poet presenting death as a release from “Slavery’s night”: “And when this transient life shall end,/ Oh, may some kind, eternal friend,/ Bid me from servitude ascend,/ Forever!”
In still another poem entitled “Slavery,” Horton begins by recounting the kidnapping of his African “fathers from their native land” and briefly alludes to the arduous Middle Passage. Instead of dwelling on the barbarity of slavery, however, or on the slave’s misery, the poem is chiefly concerned with predicting divine vengeance falling upon slavemongers. The poem opens by questioning what kind of God would allow slavery to happen, but it concludes by affirming that God is neither absent nor indifferent but is, on the contrary, just and wrathful—a God who “hurls the vengeance with his rod,/ And thunders, let the slave be free.” Given its portrait of a righteously angry God whose maledictions “pervade the dwindling world we see,” the poem is certainly the most hopeful of Horton’s antislavery pieces.
By far the most effective of Horton’s treatments of the slave’s condition is found in “Death of an Old Carriage Horse.” In it, Horton uses the extended metaphor of a workhorse driven mercilessly until it dies from overwork. With its refrain, “Push along, push along,” coming at every fourth line, the poem forcefully conveys the animal-like treatment and existence of the slave, who is, the poem argues, a literal beast of burden. Through this metaphor, Horton accurately captures—for the first time in African American poetry—the racist conception of slaves, and by extension black people as a whole, as subhuman, a motif that pervades African American literature. Horton’s poem thus anticipates by more than a century Richard Wright’s assertion that to a racist white America “we blacks were not considered human anyway.”
In addition to his love lyrics and protest poems, Horton also wrote poems centered on themes such as nature and religion, poetry and death, marriage and women, the Civil War and the historical figures who were a part of it—and even poems about himself. In the final analysis, Horton’s poetry is nothing less than remarkable in terms of both quality and quantity. Diverse in subject matter and in several respects ahead of its time, Horton’s poetry, like the man himself, commands attention and appreciation.
Bibliography
Andrews, William L., ed. The North Carolina Roots of African American Literature: An Anthology. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Includes a selection of Horton’s poetry, edited and introduced by Amanda Page.
Cobb, John L. “George Moses Horton’s Hope of Liberty: Thematic Unity in Early American Black Poetry.” CLA Journal 24 (June, 1981): 441-450. Contends that in Horton’s 1829 volume of poems The Hope of Liberty, the motif of flight, of escape, gives the collection a fundamental thematic unity and an artistic cohesion.
Farrison, Edward W. “George Moses Horton: Poet for Freedom.” CLA Journal 14 (March, 1971): 227-241. Highly instructive critical article chronicling Horton’s life and poetic career. Provides a splendid delineation of the people and forces that shaped Horton’s poetry.
Loggins, Vernon L. The Negro Author: His Development in America to 1900. 1931. Reprint. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1964. Early, classic study of African American literature. Gives a brief overview of Horton’s life and an assessment of his literary stature and poetic achievement.
Richmond, Merle A. Bid the Vassal Soar: Interpretive Essays on the Life and Poetry of Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Joint study of Horton and Phillis Wheatley, with equal emphasis given to both. Excellent biographical account of Horton, with insightful interpretations of his poetry.
Sherman, Joan R. Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Contains a chapter on Horton identifying him as one of many neglected (“invisible”) nineteenth century African American poets. Gives a capsulized but enlightening account of Horton’s life and an in-depth, perceptive analysis of his poetry.
Sherman, Joan R., ed. The Black Bard of North Carolina: George Moses Horton and his Poetry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Study of Horton’s poetry and of his experience of and poetic representation of slavery.
Walser, Richard. The Black Poet: Being the Remarkable Story (Partly Told by Himself) of George Moses Horton, a North Carolina Slave. New York: Philosophical Library, 1966. Groundbreaking study of Horton’s life and times. Detailed and vastly informative, drawing heavily—and adeptly—on Horton’s brief autobiographical narrative published with The Poetical Works of George M. Horton in 1845.