George Moses Horton, Proto-type Hip-hop Performer.

George Moses Horton (1797-1883) was the Ishi of black culture--the last leavings of an ancient way of
thinking that the present world will never see be seen again.
His poetry falls into two divisionscategories: poems written before he could write (The Hope of Liberty)
and poems written after he learned to write (Poetical Works, 1845). His work charts the disappearance
of the African worldview (oral) and the appearance of modernity (writing).
Born in 1797 to a slave master William Horton, the poet was a cowboy for ten years, and learned the
alphabet in secrecy.
One of his duties as a slave was to walk eight miles every Sunday to sell fruit to the students at the
University of North Carolina. on Sundays.
The students begin would to prank with him and he would stand on a pedestal and sprout i.e.
rap free style rap poetry.
I would stand forth and address myself and extempore before them, he later wrote.
When the students began to make fun of his attempts, he was humiliated. I abandoned my foolish
harangues, he later recalled, and began to speak poetry which lifted the students still higher on he
wings of astonishment.
Affirming To prove that he could compose orally, he accepted their challenge to compose an acrostic,
the--a most difficult feat in oral composition.
Seeing Hortons gift for verbal improvisation, oOne student from Georgia, Augustus Alton, offered him
$.25 to improvise a on his girlfriends name, which was Julia Shepard.
To the amazement of the onlookers, Horton improvised a poem in which each sentence began with a
letter in Julias name. This acoustics is a form of verse that only a gifted rapper freestyle or oral poet
could achieve with ease.
Before long, other young students were paying Horton to improvise acrostics on their girlfriends
name. In a short time, Horton became famous on the cCampus of UNC Chapel Hill, which was one of
the only three universities in the South. (University of Virginia and University of George.)
Soon, Horton was earning $12 a week writing and reciting poems. He became a kind of Jay-Z on the
campus of University North Carolina from the years 1822 to 1865. One could buy an acre of land for
two dollars and twenty-seven cents. Although a slave, Horton became a super star among the students
and his admirers, that includeincluding Polk, the 17 US President.
In four years, as one scholar claims, Horton went from being a fruit peddler to an orator to an amateur
versifier to a professional poet. BeingAs the first African-American to earn a living from his poetry,
Horton earned enough money to buy his freedom several times over, but the his master wouldnt sell
him.
Instead of hoping for freedom, he began to hire his time by paying his master enough money to hire
for other slaves to work in his stead on the Horton plantation in Pittsboro, N.C.
A white woman, Carolina Hentz, wife of a French professor, heard Horton recite his poetry and
suggested that he allow her to write down his poems down on paper.
Horton eagerly agreed. Mrs. Hentz, herself a well-known poet and novelist, sent two of Hortons
poems back to Lancaster, Massachusetts to the Lancaster Gazette, which published them: Liberty and
Slavery (April 28,), and On Poetry and Music, (June 24). This was to be the first poetry ever
published by a slave. William Lloyd Garrison's published the first of these poems on the front cover of
his magazine The Liberator, the famous anti-slave abolitionist journal.
Asn an reaction to this abolitionist publication, the North CaroliniaCarolinan Governor Zebulon B.
Owens decided to allow Horton to publish a book of poems, The Hope of Liberty (1829).
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Those in support of Hortons liberty hoped to raise funds for The money from the sale of the book was
to which was to pay Hortons passage back to Africa, to libraryLiberia by selling his book. Horton,
however, did not want to go to Liberia.
The project to buy his freedom was crushed and Horton remained a slave until the Union Army freed
him in 1865.
One of the lieutenants in the army was William Banks who, upon meeting Horton, disbanded his
troops and devoted the rest of his service in the army to seeing that Hortons last book, The Naked
Genius, was published.
Upon the publication of the book, Lieutenant Banks returned to his wife and two children in Michigan,
drops out of History, and has never been heard of since.
Digital humanities can help us reconstruct the world of George Moses Horton; by evoking the aural and
auditory world in which most of his compositions occurred, digital technology allows us to experience
his poetry in its truest form possible.. Horton learn to compose orally before he could write, digital
technology can help evoke his aural and auditory world.
Using the tools of audio technology, we can reconstruct what Horton must have sounded like to his
audience. ApplyingBy utilizing map geospatial technology, we can discover the hidden secrets of
geography in excavatingretrieve Hortons world and world of the University of North Carolina at that
time.
After Horton did learn to read, he produced a book of poems (Poetical Works) in 1845.
If we compare his first book ( with oral) with and his later works (chirographically produced), we will
share in a rare opportunity to see how the human mind traverses from the oral to the literate state of
perception.
This is an opportunity to study the influence of oral technology and digital technology on the
production of literary art.
Horton had a contemporary's view of slavery. For example, he said, The privation of liberty brutalizes
and dulls the enterprising spirit It is a death blow to the pleasures of human life.
By using digital technology, we can rediscover a world that has been lost to human environment and
contemporary and early American life.
Studying Hortons work, we have the opportunity to discover a new worldview that has recently
elevated a slave poet to the pantheon of great American poetry.
When he died in 1883, there was no notice of his passing or the circumstances of his demise; and one
knows for sure where he is buried. Digital Humanities can provide map studies of the 350 miles from
Pittsboro to Philadelphia, from the heights of sSlavery to the beginnings of the 19 century, modernity
of electricity and streetcars.
Essentially, we can use Digital Humanities to assemble a more unifying view of Hortons world.
Are there any authentic images of Horton?
Can handwriting analysis can tell us something about the composition of his poetry? ( We have many
handwritten examples of his poems and speeches.)
What can digital technology tell us about who wrote Hortons poems down? Who are these white men
who so loved Horton and held him so high in their judgement? Perhaps Digital Humanities can shed
some light on this important figure in American Culture.
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