George Moses Horton on the Internet

George Moses Horton merits a place of distinction among nineteenth-century African-American poets. Enslaved from birth until the close of the Civil War, the self-taught Horton was the first American slave to protest his bondage in published verse and the first black man to publish a book in the South.

More than 200 years after his birth, there is new interest in Horton, and lots of material to explore on the internet.

The Black Bard of North Carolina: George Moses Horton and His Poetry
Edited by Joan Sherman and published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1997. You are visiting the website for this book, which includes a book description, excerpts from the Introduction, and selected poems. See the links at the bottom of this page.

The George Moses Horton Society for the Study of African American Poetry
An effort to encourage sustained scholarly focus on the works of African American poets and to foster presentation and publishing opportunities for that scholarship.

George Moses Horton's Autobiography
Horton's autobiographical sketch from The Poetical Works, his first volume of poetry. This autobiography and the collection of poems below are part of the ambitious Documenting the American South project, the work of Natalia Smith and her colleagues at the Academic Affairs Library at UNC-Chapel Hill.

For the SGML/TEI encoded version of this text and others, see the description of the digitized ninteenth-century autobiographies available from the UNC-CH collections.

George Moses Horton's Poems
A collection of poems from The Poetical Works of George M. Horton, the Colored Bard of North Carolina, to which is Prefixed the Life of the Author, written by himself., Hillsborough, Heartt, 1845.

For the SGML/TEI encoded version of this text and others, see the description of the digitized library of southern literature available from the UNC-CH collections.

Facsimiles of Horton's Poetry
Prepared by Tim Pyatt, curator of manuscripts at UNC libraries, this exhibit features facsimiles of Horton poems that are in the Southern Historical Collection.

Biographical Information
The biography of George Moses Horton from The Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, published by the University of North Carolina Press.



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