SOURCE: “George Moses Horton: Poet for Freedom,” in CLA Journal, Vol. XIV, No. 3, March, 1971, pp. 227-41.

In the following essay, Farrison intersperses biographical information about Horton with commentary on his poems about antislavery and freedom.

During his sixty-eight years in slavery in North Carolina, a mode of existence by no means conducive to an interest in literature, George Moses Horton managed to study poets and the art of poetry and to publish three remarkable collections of original verse. Of pure African parentage, it has been said, he was born on the plantation of William Horton in Northampton County, North Carolina, in 1797. When Horton was about six years old, William Horton moved his family and slaves to a new farm in Chatham County, about ten miles southwest of Chapel Hill. From that time until the end of the Civil War, Horton's home—as far as a slave could be...