George Moses Horton sought freedom with poetry

At a time when it was illegal for enslaved people to read and write, Horton, who spent years around UNC-Chapel Hill, became a prominent 19th century poet. (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)

George Moses Horton wasn’t from Chapel Hill, but the enslaved man born in the late 1790s and raised in nearby Chatham County decided it was where he needed to be.

To sell his poems. To fight for his freedom.

In the process, he made history. Horton, who sold love poems to UNC-Chapel Hill students, grew in popularity and developed a reputation as an ingenious poet in the 19th century. His collection of poems, “The Hope of Liberty,” became the first publication in the South by an African American in 1829.

“There’s Phillis Wheatley, and there’s George Moses Horton, as far as two of the first Black poets published in the United States,” said Sarah Carrier, as she laid out several of Horton’s works on a table at Wilson Library, where she works as the North Carolina subject librarian.

Horton’s “Poems by a Slave” was included in the third edition of “Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley.” (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)

Horton, for whom the University named a residence hall in 2007, was also the first known enslaved person to pen a poem (“On Liberty and Slavery”) protesting slavery:

Come Liberty, thou cheerful sound,
Roll through my ravished ears!
Come, let my grief in joys be drowned,
And drive away my fears.

Part of Horton’s genius and one reason he became so popular — not only in North Carolina but throughout the South and East Coast — is the way he delivered and sold his poetry.

Growing up, Horton taught himself to read with primers, the Bible and hymnals, but he did not learn to write until later in life. Instead, he memorized poems, reciting them to buyers who transcribed each line, and eventually became known as “the Black Bard of North Carolina.”

Horton had a special talent for acrostics, spelling out a word or name with the first letters of each line of verse. For instance, “An Acrostic on the Pleasures of Beauty,” spells the name of its recipient, Julia Shepard, over the opening 12 lines.

“It’s really clever for him to have done that completely in his head,” Carrier said of the poem housed at the Wilson Special Collections Library.

Another of his love poems, “Departing Love” — commissioned by Rev. Henry A. Dixon for his future wife, Martha — now hangs framed in Horton residence hall.

One of Horton’s poems hangs in the South campus residence hall named after him. (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)

At a time when it was illegal for slaves to read and write, Horton’s creativity and poetry prowess were directly related to his unrelenting desire for freedom. His visits to Chapel Hill were key to his pursuit of freedom, Carrier said.

On campus, he could sell his poetry to a steady stream of students and also interact with influential individuals. The wife of a faculty member, Caroline Lee Hentz, taught Horton how to write. Horton met University president and former governor David Swain and tried to convince him to purchase his freedom. Horton also worked jobs around town, Carrier said, to rent out his time to his owner in Chatham County.

“The more his fame increased and the more he was able to publish and raise money, the closer he could potentially get toward emancipation,” Carrier said. “It was a core drive of his.” But Horton didn’t secure his freedom until after the Civil War. He later moved to Philadelphia before heading to Liberia.

Through her work at University Libraries, Carrier has collaborated with English literature professors and students interested in researching Horton to learn more about Southern poetry and slavery.

Horton is worth studying and remembering because he’s important to Carolina history and his life gives a glimpse of the broader experiences of enslaved people.

“As an individual, he’s really just fundamentally fascinating,” Carrier said. “But he also tells us so much about slavery because of his drive toward freedom.”