Despite Horton's impressive list of "firsts," his birth and death dates are not known. George Moses Horton was born as a slave on the farm of William Horton in Northampton County, North Carolina, near the falls of the Roanoke River. The year of his birth is generally believed to be 1797 or 1798, mainly on the strength of a statement in the introduction to his book The Hope of Liberty (1829), which says that the author was thirty-two years old in the summer of 1829. Biographer Richard Walser suggests that Horton may have been born before 1797. The birth of a slave child was almost never recorded in the courthouse records and only rarely in the master's family Bible, and, therefore, the exact date of George Moses Horton's birth probably will never be known.

In 1800 William Horton moved his agricultural operations about a hundred miles southwest into the hills of Chatham County to what is now the community of Bynum, less than ten miles from the towns of Chapel Hill and Pittsboro (then Pittsborough), to the north and south respectively. In that setting young Horton's earliest lasting impressions were formed. Horton states explicitly that his mother and all her children were slaves of William Horton. He does not say much about his father except that he was his mother's second husband and that she had left him before George began to show an interest in reading. Horton's mother may have been compelled to leave her husband "behind" in Northampton as the slave of another family when her master relocated in Chatham.

Horton himself was to have a similar experience in his adult life; his own wife and children were the property of a Chatham farmer named Snipes and carried the surname of their slavemaster rather than Horton's. The poet later commented on the forced separation of slave families in such poems as "Division of an Estate," "A Slave's Reflection on the Eve Before His Sale," and "Farewell to Frances."

While growing up on the farm in Chatham County, and between chores, Horton was able to cultivate a love of learning. With the aid of his mother and her Wesley hymnal, some pages of schoolbooks he was able to get from white children, and some friendly competition from his brother, Horton learned to read. He did not learn to write until years later, but his inability to commit his thoughts to paper did not keep him from composing original, mostly religious, verses. Under the influence of the Biblical psalmists, the Wesleys, and possibly some other pious poets whose works he had read, Horton was soon able to fashion such verses as: "Rise up my soul and let us go/Up to the gospel feast; / Gird on the garment white as snow,/To join and be a guest." Two stanzas of the poem are extant, but he says there were more; they had never been recorded, and it was impossible for him to recall completely his early compositions in later years. Horton said that some of the pieces which subsequently slipped from his memory may have been better than the ones he was able to recall.

Although George Horton's earliest poetic efforts were religiously inspired, his earliest "professional" writings were of a very different nature. In 1814 William Horton's son, James, became George's new master (although William was still alive). Some time between 1814 and 1820, George started taking part in a weekend ritual which evidently was a well-established practice among the black servants within walking distance of the town of Chapel Hill, site of the state university. On Sabbath days (the slaves' traditional "day off"), some servants would take fruits to sell to the students and other possible buyers "on the Hill." George Moses Horton became one of these weekend fruit vendors, and his contacts with Chapel Hill led rather quickly to his literary career.

The students seem to have had a custom of requiring the prospective salespersons to entertain them before they would agree to buy their wares; one fellow reportedly entertained would-be customers by breaking planks over his head. When Horton was called upon to entertain his prospective clients, he burst into streams of oratory. This entertained the audience, but it did not produce the serious effect Horton considered desirable. When he began to recite his poetry, the collegians' reactions ranged from astonishment to incredulity.

Some of the students were openly skeptical of his ability to compose original verse. However, he gave incontrovertible proof to all the bystanders through what he called "the experiment of acrostics." Horton provides no details regarding the "experiment," but it probably consisted of someone's spelling out a name or some other word upon which basis the slave would compose rhymed acrostical verse.

Horton became a man in demand on the campus. The undergraduates began offering twenty-five cents each for the lyrical productions of "Poet Horton"--a name Horton still liked to use in the 1880s. Some students gave Horton fifty cents or even as much as seventy-five cents to compose a love letter and accompanying poem to be sent to the customer's sweetheart. Horton claims to "have composed love pieces in verse for courtiers from all parts of the state, and acrostics on the names of many of the tip top belles of Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia."

On weekends, he would go to Chapel Hill, where he would take "orders" for love poems to be delivered the following weekend. During the week, while performing his tasks on the farm, he would compose the commissioned love lyrics (often a dozen or more) and recite them to the respective commissioners on his next trip to the Hill.

Some of his customers gave him books; others gave him clothes; still others gave the slave poet copious drafts of corn whiskey. Horton's experiences with alcohol may have been at least partly responsible for his later composition of a particularly witty poem on the dangers of drinking entitled "The Intemperance Club." Among the books he received were Lindley Murray's English Grammar , an abridged version of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, the Columbian Orator, and collections of poetry by John Milton, Homer, Virgil, William Shakespeare, George Gordon Byron, Thomas Campbell, and others. Horton reportedly was especially fond of the poetry of Byron. It is also reported that he studied Campbell's poems assiduously, completely memorizing his Pleasures of Hope.

Perhaps equally as valuable to Horton's poetic career as any books he might have read was his acquaintance with Caroline Lee Hentz, who was in Chapel Hill from 1826 to 1830. From Lancaster, Massachusetts (although Horton mistakenly reported her hometown as Boston), Hentz was a writer of poetry and of such fiction as Lovell's Folly (1833) in which one of the characters was a black slave poet named George. Hentz noted in the novel that the character was based on an actual slave poet that she had known.

Hentz helped Horton with his writing techniques, transcribed some of his work, and assisted him in getting his work into public print in the North as well as in North Carolina. In spring 1828 she sent two of Horton's poems, "Slavery" and "Liberty and Slavery," to her hometown newspaper, the Lancaster Gazette. The one entitled "Slavery" was reprinted six years later in William Lloyd Garrison's widely-read Liberator, where it served to rekindle the interest of some northern abolitionists in the plight of the poem's author.

However, even before the appearance of Horton's "Slavery" in the Liberator in 1834, some northern and southern abolitionists were already aware of his plight, and they had engaged in two unsuccessful attempts to purchase his freedom. The campaigns on Horton's behalf in 1828 and 1829 brought together the efforts of some diverse people and agencies: Hentz; James Henderson, a Chapel Hill physician; English-born newspaper editor Joseph Gales and his son, Weston Raleigh Gales; the native Carolinian polemicist, David Walker, then residing in Boston; and a "philanthropic gentleman" whose identity has never been determined. The North Carolina Colonization Society, the North Carolina Manumission Society, Freedom's Journal of New York (the first American newspaper edited by blacks), and the Raleigh Register, edited by the Gales family, were active organs in the work for Horton's release.

The first of the two campaigns evidently began with a news story about Horton in the 8 August 1828 edition of Freedom's Journal. This campaign lasted three months, but although Horton's master was offered "$100 more than any person of sound judgment should say I was worth," Horton wrote, "To this my master would not accede." Horton characterized his master as "a man who had no regard for liberty, science or genius." In 1829 the North Carolina Colonization Society joined forces with Hentz, the Gales family, and other interested Carolinians in a new project designed to bring about Horton's manumission.

The project involved a plan to publish and sell a book of Horton's poems. It was projected that the money derived from the sales of the book and from contributions which sympathetic readers would send to Weston Gales would enable the project's sponsors to make James Horton an offer he could not refuse, especially since the Colonization Society stood ready to guarantee the newly-freed bard's speedy departure for Liberia via the earliest available vessel. M.A. Richmond suggests that the proviso that the freed poet emigrate to Liberia constituted the proponents' chief basis for hope that their plan could succeed where the earlier one had failed.

The Hope of Liberty did not fulfill the wish expressed in its title; however, it did accomplish some interesting "firsts," the complex ironies of which cannot possibly be overemphasized: a slave had published a book. The slave's book was published in a slaveholding state, and while teaching a black man to read and write was not yet a crime in North Carolina--it was declared illegal in 1830--it certainly was not a common practice. The book's purpose was to get its author out of slavery, against his master's wish, and people residing in this state were expected to give of their monies in order to get Horton out of the "peculiar institution" which the state's laws declared to be his rightful place. But in order for the slave poet to avail himself of the freedom thus offered, he would have to agree to leave the land of his birth, and the people, black and white, whom he had esteemed during his lifetime, which had spanned nearly a third of a century.

Regardless of the ironies involved in its publication, Horton's The Hope of Liberty was the first book of poetry by a black American in more than half a century. It was the first such book of any kind by a black person in the South, and as Horton's biographer states, "It was the first poetic protest by any slave anywhere of his status."

The Hope of Liberty contained twenty-one poems, the subject matter of which was largely confined to love, death, religion, and slavery. Three of the poems were overt antislavery pieces; four were religious lyrics; ten dealt with romantic love in one way or another, including three on the seasons of spring, summer, and winter; two were on death; and the others were philosophical musings set in verse, one entitled "To the Gadfly" and the other "On the Poetic Muse." The collection provided a good sampling of Horton's talents, although the publishers explained that they had excluded a number of the slave poet's offerings in order to keep down printing costs.

Two of the love poems in The Hope of Liberty are worthy of note: "Eliza" and "Love." The first of these was probably commissioned by one of Horton's Chapel Hill patrons. The final stanza reads, "Eliza, I shall think of thee--My heart shall ever twine about thee;/Fare thee well--but think of me,/ Compell'd to live and die without thee./'Fare thee well!--and if forever,/Still forever fare thee well.'" The quotation marks on the last two lines indicate Horton's conscious borrowing, in this case from Byron. Horton borrowed extensively in many of his poems.

While "Eliza" was evidently written for a particular person, "Love" could have been reworked with slight modifications (and resold) a number of times. The poem begins: "Whilst tracing thy visage I sink in emotion./For no other damsel so wondrous I see;/Thy looks are so pleasing, thy charms so amazing,/I think of no other, my true-love, but thee."

Both poems are designed to communicate in the language of love. The words are not particularly important; the sentimentality is more valuable than the sentiment, which is a prime consideration for Horton, since the poems were to be sold to people in love.

Horton's antislavery poems had a different audience than did his love lyrics. The poem called "On Hearing of the Intention of a Gentleman to Purchase the Poet's Freedom" is probably the most important work in the volume. The poem's title is a reminder of the mysterious "philanthropic gentleman" who was involved in the project to free Horton in 1828. The poem, fifty-two lines of iambic pentameter couplets arranged in four-line stanzas and one of the longest pieces in the book, recounts some of the emotional vicissitudes experienced by the poet. The lows resulted from his condition of slavery, the highs from the prospect of manumission. The second and third stanzas summarize the contrast:

Tyrannic storms arose upon my soul,

And dreadful did their mad'ning thunders roll;

The pensive muse was shaken from her sphere,

And hope, it vanish'd in the clouds of fear.

At length a golden sun broke thro' the gloom,

A calm ensued, and birds began to sing,

And lo! the sacred muse resumed her wing.

The influences of the Old and New Testaments and of the Wesley hymnal are apparent in The Hope of Liberty . Strains of the hymnal resound loudly in these lines from "On Liberty and Slavery," a protest poem: "Alas! and am I born for this,/To wear the slavish chain?/Deprived of all created bliss,/Through hardship, toil and pain!"

The book that carried Horton's hopes of liberty in 1829 also employed several of the main themes and techniques that would be typical of his work in later years. While Horton would write about new subjects and use more complex verse forms in subsequent volumes, the influences of the Bible, the hymnal, and several British poets would always be part of his poetic repertoire.

The book's appeal evidently fell upon deaf ears, for it did not achieve the desired result. The book seems to have been largely ignored until 1837 when Philadelphia abolitionist Lewis Gunn had it reprinted with the title Poems by a Slave. The following year, Poems by a Slave was reprinted in Boston in the same volume with Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley , a North African and a Slave. The author probably knew nothing about these northern editions of his book.

In 1830 Hentz left Chapel Hill, and Horton lost a teacher and champion. Another of Horton's champions, David Walker, published his Appeal in Four Articles, Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens Of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly to Those of The United States of America. In his Appeal, Walker cited history and scripture in his condemnation of American slavery as unnatural and unlawful. He predicted that practitioners of slavery would feel the wrath of a just and vengeful God. The reactions among slaveholders and proslavery sympathizers ranged from more stringent restrictions on their own slaves to the offering of a $1000 reward for the capture of the renegade Walker, "the amount to be ten times as much if he is taken alive." That same year, the North Carolina legislature enacted a law requiring any slave, upon being freed, to leave the state and never return. The lawmakers also passed a law making it a crime to teach black people to read and write.

The newspapers in Raleigh, Chapel Hill, and other North Carolina cities and towns had made Horton into such a celebrated local figure that the newly imposed strictures on slaves' activities apparently did not seriously impair his business as an author and retailer of love poems. Nevertheless, these strictures must have made his hopes of gaining his freedom seem even more frail than they had seemed in the previous year. Furthermore, outside of the Chapel Hill-Raleigh area, his local celebrity status meant nothing.

The poet's reactions to the events of the 1830s are difficult to assess accurately, since most of the poetry he wrote during those years evidently never got into public print. The work which was preserved (by his customers and by local newspapers and magazines) was the least personal and least critical of his situation. Moreover, Horton's own autobiography, which he wrote in 1845, breaks off at the year 1830 with the departure of Hentz from Chapel Hill. Nowhere in his truncated autobiography does he mention any attempts to gain (or even any strong desire for) his freedom.

Despite the strictures of the time, Horton succeeded, in 1832, in arranging to live in Chapel Hill, where he could be closer to his business interests. James Horton agreed to grant this special kind of quasi freedom for twenty-five cents a week.

As generations of students came and went, the legend of George Moses Horton continued to grow. A Mississippi man named W.H. Thomson wrote a letter to his son, Ruffin Thomson, who was a student at the University of North Carolina in the 1850s. Ruffin had evidently written something to his father regarding the slave poet. The father states that he also had known Horton when he had been a student at the university a quarter of a century earlier. One apocryphal story about Norton that evolved was that the first student to purchase a poem from him was James Knox Polk, who later became president of the United States. Another part of the legend was the joke which said that Horton actually owned James Horton and just about owned Dr. Joseph Caldwell, president of the university.

During the time he lived in Chapel Hill, Horton continued his attempts to attain freedom. He tried to enlist the aid of northern abolitionists and liberals, such as William Lloyd Garrison and Horace Greeley. He kept importuning Caldwell and later, Caldwell's successor, ex-governor David Swain, to help him in his freedom-seeking enterprises. And, finally having learned to write, he even wrote letters to James Horton (and later, James's son, Hall Horton) trying to arrange a "deal." Living in Chapel Hill intermittently from the 1830s until the Civil War, Horton became a daily presence on campus instead of a weekly visitor, and he was no longer a novelty. The interest of the situation had worn off for the poet also, and he began to drink.

Sometime in the 1830s or 1840s Horton married a slave woman from the farm of a Chatham County resident named Franklin Snipes. The marriage evidently was not a happy one. It is unlikely that the poet's wife would have shared much of his enthusiasm for literature, history, and other academic subjects. There is no evidence that she had any opportunity to pursue such interests if she had them. Furthermore, with Horton living at Chapel Hill or on the Horton farm, it is hard to imagine how the couple could have spent much time together. Nonetheless the Hortons had a boy and a girl. The children as well as their mother retained the surname of Snipes. According to one source, the son, Free Snipes, died in 1896; the daughter, Rhody Snipes, was living in Raleigh and married to a man named Van Buren Byrum in the early twentieth century. Horton himself never mentions his wife or his children in any of his writings, unless the verbal barbs he hurls at women in some of his poems published in the 1860s are to be taken as references to his own wife, as one researcher, Mattie Lakin, suggests.

Horton never stopped writing poems; a few even appeared in local periodicals. In 1843 two of his pieces were sent by Professor William Mercer Green to the prestigious Southern Literary Messenger , which printed them. They were entitled, "Lines to My ..." and "Ode to Liberty." The "Ode," ostensibly a paean to the freedom and greatness of "Columbia," actually calls upon "liberty," the "dove of peace," to release Columbia's "pris'ners" and "fan Columbia free." The mention of "pris'ners" provides extra clarity and emphasis for the poem's refrain: "All nations should be free"; Horton was poetically protesting against slavery even though he could no longer be as explicit with his complaints as he had been in The Hope of Liberty.

There is no way of estimating how many antislavery poems Horton may have composed after the publication of The Hope of Liberty. It is obvious that he could not have expected to find buyers for such poems as readily as he could find buyers for love lyrics and odes to such national figures as Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson. However, it is known that one of the "books" he had in hand before 1840 was a compendious manuscript which he called "The Museum." There is no evidence that "The Museum" was ever published as a book, and no extant copies of the manuscript have ever been located. Nevertheless, printer Dennis Heartt, in the introduction to Horton's Poetical Works (1845), refers to "The Museum" as a work with which some readers of Horton's poetry might have had some familiarity. Heartt says of Poetical Works, "It is entirely different from his other work entitled The Museum, and has been written some time since that, and is not so large."

What Heartt meant when he called Poetical Works "entirely different" from "The Museum" is not clear. Perhaps "The Museum" contained antislavery poems which the state authorities would have considered objectionable. If so, this would explain why former governor Swain refused to assist Horton's efforts to publish it. (Swain's name does appear on the subscription list of Poetical Works.) Heartt's announcement that this book was "entirely different" from "The Museum" may have served as a tacit signal to readers who had heard of or seen Horton's "Museum" manuscript that Poetical Works had been purged of offensive matter. Thus they could lend their names in support of Horton, without any fear of being branded abolitionists or troublemakers.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about The Poetical Works of George M. Horton, The Colored Bard of North Carolina (1845) is that it was ever published at all, since the fact that Horton was writing anything was a crime for which he could have been publicly flogged. If it was ruled that his writings tended to express or foment dissatisfaction with slavery, then the offense would have been compounded. It is not surprising then that both the poet and his backers were careful about which of the slave's writings were released to public scrutiny during those years.

Significantly, the word "liberty" never appears in the title of any poem in Horton's Poetical Works. Neither do the words "slavery," "slave," "free," or "freedom" appear in any of the titles. In view of the frequency with which these words occur in the titles of poems in Horton's other two published volumes, not much imagination is required to infer that a special kind of editing (or censorship) went into the preparation of the Poetical Works manuscript.

The poet himself evidently had little or no voice in the decisions regarding what to include in compiling Poetical Works. The way Horton's autobiography, which serves as a preface to Works, ends in the early 1830s indicates that Horton left some of the most interesting years out of his life story. It is possible that Horton did write more but had it edited out for him before the book was printed.

Although Heartt or someone else may have taken care to see that nothing of Horton's dissatisfaction with slavery was in his autobiography and that no poems with titles suggesting antislavery sentiment got printed in Works, some antislavery sentiment within the poems themselves slipped past the editors (or was deliberately allowed to remain). For example, the agony slave families and friends experienced when their relationships were forcefully sundered is suggested in these lines from "Farewell to Frances": "Farewell! alas, the tragic sound/Has many a tender bosom torn;/While desolation spread around,/Deserted friendship left to mourn." The idea of forced separation does not dominate the poem in its entirety; in fact, the idea of the breaking up of a slave family, embedded in this stanza, might escape the notice of the casual reader altogether. Such is not the case in "Division of an Estate," however, the only unquestionably antislavery poem printed in Poetical Works.

Although it lacks the forthrightness of many of Horton's protest poems, "Division of an Estate" could be judged Horton's best antislavery poem on the basis of its merits as a work of literary art. Louis D. Rubin says that this poem "embodies a subtlety and a complexity of imagery that are considerably more interesting from a literary standpoint than Horton's hymnal-inspired lyrics most usually found in the anthologies of Black American poetry." The poem certainly deserves more critical attention than it has received. In the first six and a half blank verse lines of the poem, Horton describes a plantation, the master of which is dead or dying, in terms of a human body that has been decapitated:

It well bespeaks a man beheaded, quite

Divested of the laurel robe of life,

When every member struggles for its base,

The head; the power of order now recedes;

Unheeded efforts rise on every side,

With dull emotion rolling through the brain

of apprehending slaves.

In the ensuing ten and a half lines, the poet depicts the chaos that reigns on the plantation by describing the disorientation of the farm animals which are either wandering aimlessly or dashing about frantically. In the next fifteen lines, the center of the poem, the heavens seem to be taking part in the proceedings: the expiring master of the estate is portrayed as a setting sun being succeeded by a horde of evening stars (the heirs). The heirs do not seem particularly distressed by the loss of the source of their erstwhile light; they are interested in claiming their respective portions of "the wide empire of fortune."

A very different state of affairs prevails among the slaves, however:

but O, the state,

The dark suspense in which poor vassals stand,

Each mind upon the spire of chance hangs fluctuant;

The day of separation is at hand;

Imagination lifts her gloomy curtains,

Like ev'ning's mantle at the flight of day,

Thro' which the trembling pinnacle we spy,

On which we soon must stand with hopeful smiles

Or apprehending frowns; to tumble on

The right or left forever.

The impending fate of the "poor vassals" is not mirrored in the evening sky with its emerging stars. Rather, it is to be found on the mundane plane in the growing shadows and gloom. If the slaves looked up, they would see only the "spire of chance" or the "trembling pinnacle," symbols of the auction block, on which they must stand to have their futures decided by others who have no regard for their worth as humans.

Only in the last four lines of the poem does Horton make use of the pronoun "we." As the suffering of the slaves becomes more acutely focused, the poet identifies with them more completely. When the slaves' feelings were dull and indeterminate, the persona maintained an aesthetic distance; at the poem's conclusion it has disappeared completely. The irrevocable finality of the word "forever" at the end of "Division of an Estate" sums up and accentuates the despair and anxiety which had been accumulating in the slaves' consciousness from the beginning.

While the slaves share the human emotions and aspirations of the heirs, they are treated like the animals and apportioned or sold with other items of farm property. This poem presents a powerful cry against slavery in a volume which shows strong evidence of having been edited in order to exclude such protest.

Other themes in Poetical Works are religion, patriotism, money, drinking, fame, scholarship, poetry itself, and love--the subject that had served Horton so well for nearly a third of a century. The collection even contains an example of a coveted Horton love letter, appropriately titled "A Billet Doux." It consists of a 220-word letter in prose, directed simply to "Dear Miss," and a fifteen-line poem.

Although Horton's Poetical Works did not make money for him, the poet continued to write, and in the 1850s and 1860s some of his poems appeared in the campus literary magazine at the university. Some of these poems were signed with Horton's name or initials. Other poems, which looked remarkably like them, bore the names of different authors.

Horton's prospects for freedom did not improve until news of the war reached the central North Carolina area. Students and faculty members left the college to become soldiers, and Horton was forced to return to the Horton farm for lack of patrons. When he heard that a detachment of Union troops was in Raleigh, Horton managed to travel the thirty miles to get there. He also managed to find himself an enthusiastic sponsor, Capt. Will Banks, a cavalry officer from Michigan. The young officer and Horton began making plans for the publication of more books by the poet.

Shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War, in 1865, Banks and Horton did succeed in getting a book of Horton's poems published. The title of the volume was Naked Genius. The title page proclaimed its author as the "author of The Black Poet." However, there is no evidence that Horton's "Black Poet" book was ever published. At any rate, the title-page proclamation was patently premature, as Captain Banks placed in the back of Naked Genius an advertisement designed to drum up financial support for the publication of The Black Poet. Evidently, the advertisement was unsuccessful. Naked Genius itself was not successful as a money-making venture for Horton and Banks, possibly because they and William B. Smith and Company, the publishers, were not successful in making Naked Genius look like a literary work worthy of admiration and support. The book abounds with typographical errors and other evidence of haste.

Despite its flaws, Naked Genius is an important work, for it is by far the largest extant collection of Horton's poetry, comprising some 133 pieces, 41 of which had appeared in Poetical Works in 1845, a few others in periodicals. Predictably, the book contained poems about love, death, religion, famous people, and the art of poetry. However, there are two innovations in Naked Genius : humorous pieces and poems that rail against women.

In a few poems, Horton is able to blend humor into his complaints about women, as in "Snaps for Dinner." The three-stanza piece begins:

Come in to dinner squalls the dame,

You need it now perhaps;

But hear the husband's loud exclaim,

I do not like your snaps;

'Tis snaps when at your breakfast meal,

And snaps when at your spinning wheel,

Too many by a devilish deal,

For all your words are snaps.

Most of Horton's antifemale poems, however, are more angry than playful. More than half a dozen poems in Naked Genius are misogynistic. One, ironically entitled "Connubial Felicity," says that marriage is a trap, providing only a fleeting illusion of true bliss. Another, "The Treacherous Woman," begins:

Woman, thou bloom of every danger,

From whom all my sorrows rise,

To thee I'd live and die a stranger;

He who shuns thee must be wise.

Another change in Horton's work in 1865 comes in the tone of his slave protests. His earlier protests had been plaintive, but never really angry or vindictive. In poems like "Slavery" and "The Slave," in Naked Genius, Horton referred to the "master class" as thieves and murderers, equated the white man with Cain, and called upon God to smite the "rebels" and set the slaves free. At least two of Horton's angry protest poems were written after the Civil War; the others may well have been written earlier but withheld from public print.

With the war ended and the former slave poet a free man, Horton's literary career did not take the upward flight which might have been expected. Captain Banks went home to Michigan, and George Horton went north to Philadelphia. Nothing is known of Horton's Philadelphia years except that he sought, unsuccessfully, the aid of the Banneker Institute in attempting to get some of his work published.

Collier Cobb, a professor at the University of North Carolina, claimed to have spoken with Horton in Philadelphia in 1883. Cobb said that Horton had been writing short stories based on cleverly adapted plots from Bible stories. No specimens of these stories have been found. Horton is believed to have died in 1883, but the time and place of his death are uncertain.

During Horton's lifetime, several articles were written about him; however, Horton's contemporaries did not make any critical comments on the poetry. It must have seemed to them to be enough that a black slave could write poetry at all. In the 1930s J. Saunders Redding, Benjamin Brawley, and Vernon Loggins wrote critical appraisals commending Horton's work. In 1966 Richard Walser wrote The Black Poet: The Story of George Moses Horton, A North Carolina Slave, the first comprehensive critical biography of Horton. Since then other important studies on Horton have been written, including one by William Edward Farrison (CLA 1971), and a study by M.A. Richmond in Bid the Vassal Soar (1974). George Moses Horton's vanity and arrogance, as well as his wit and intellect, make him a most interesting subject for future critical evaluations.

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