SOURCE: “Roots of Our Literary Culture: George Moses Horton and Biblical Protest,” in Obsidian, Vol. 7, Nos. 2 and 3, Summer/Winter, 1981, pp. 18-28.

In the following essay, O’Neale analyzes Horton's poem “The Slave” to argue that Horton used biblical symbolism to voice his antislavery sentiments.

George Moses Horton, the Nineteenth Century Slave poet who is known as the antebellum Black bard of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had the most romantic style among the three Early Black American poets—Horton, Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley—who published before the Civil War while they were still in slavery. That is ironic when one considers that unlike those two elder poets, Horton did not have the comparatively easier life of a Northern house servant or administrative slave worker. No, Horton's creative drive was marred by rough agrarian tasks and unrelenting Southern servitude. Of all the poets in the...