George Moses Horton was a poet enslaved in the Chatham County and Chapel Hill areas of North Carolina from his birth in the late eighteenth century until well after Emancipation. Horton started taking his eight-mile walks to UNC-Chapel Hill as a teenager. He had already taught himself to read with a New Testament, his mother's Wesley hymnal and bits of poety that he would find. He becames a popular figure with the students, who paid him between 25 cents and 75 cents to come up with love poems. Horton made about $3 to $4 every week, at a time when meat cost 5 cents a pound and eggs were 10 cents a dozen.

Horton had been walking to Chapel Hill for about 10 years when he became acquainted with Caroline Lee Huntz, the wife of a professor and herself a writer and poet. She was impressed with his poetry and she began writing it down as Horton dicatated. She sent these writings to various newspapers in the state and in the North with resounding effects. Shortly thereafter, Horton's work appeared in Raleigh's newspaper, a noted proponent of colonizing black people back to Africa. The success of his work helped Horton to publish his first collection of poetry, Hope of Liberty. With his second publication, The Poetical Works of George Moses Horton in 1845, Horton hoped to use the profits to buy his freedom.

But the money he earned was never enough. He sought help from his admirers on the Chapel Hill campus, including university president David Swain. In a letter dated 1852, Horton asked Swain to buy him, in order to save him the eight-mile commute from Chatham County. Horton wrote, "Sir, my object for this is my distant walk to attend to my business, which chiefly lies on the Hill. The price is $250, which I cannot but think I am worth." Swain apparently never replied, and Horton stayed a slave until the end of the Civil War. (from: The Augusta Chronicle Online, May 26, 1998)

(http://augustachronicle.com/stories/052797/fea_slavepoet.html)