SOURCE: “George Moses Horton: Slave Poet,” in The Southern Workman, Vol. XLIII, No. 10, October, 1914, pp. 571-77.

In the following essay, Weeks offers a brief overview of Horton's life and literary works.

“Honor and shame from no condition rise; Act well your part, there all the honor lies.” 

Thus wrote Alexander Pope, and his lines had a unique fulfillment in the life of George Moses Horton, a slave of Chatham County, N.C., who has been recently characterized by a modern North Carolina scholar as “a slave who owned his master; a poet ignorant of the rules of prosody; a man of letters before he learned to read; a writer of short stories who published in several papers simultaneously before the day of newspaper syndicates; an author who supported himself and his family in an intellectual center before authorship had attained the dignity of a profession in America.”

The...