Ocean State Libraries

For his humanistic religious verse, his poignant and deeply personal antislavery poems, his folk verse, and, above all, his lifelong enthusiasm for liberty, nature, and the art of poetry, George Moses Horton merits a place of distinction among nineteenth-century African American poets. Enslaved for sixty-eight years - from his birth until the close of the Civil War - he was the first American slave to protest his bondage in published verse, the first...