[GEORGE MOSES HORTON] (ODELL, Margaretta Matilda.) . Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, a Native African and Slave; also,Poems by a Slave [i.e., George Moses Horton]. saac Knapp, Boston: 1838. Third edition of this work, containing the Memoir by Odell and a reprint of the 1773 edition of Wheatley's Poems. This is the first edition to contain Horton's Poems by a Slave (first published separately the previous year, the second edition of the author's rare first book Hope of Liberty, printed in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1829), this being the issue with pp. 25-36 on different paper and in the remainder binding (Sabin 103133: "about 200, copies completed by reprinting a few missing pages, were placed on sale in 1864"). Horton (ca. 1797-1883) was born a slave of William Horton in Northampton County, North Carolina and moved with his master to Chatham County at an early age. "He began to teach himself to read and started composing lines in his head based on the meter and rhyme of Wesley hymns. At nearby Chapel Hill, where he was sent to sell farm produce, he proudly recited his poems to the startled university students, who, serving as his amanuenses, thereafter commissioned him for a fee to write acrostics on their sweethearts' names. Caroline Lee Hentz tutored him in poetic composition and 21 of his poems were published in 1829 to raise money to send him to Liberia. This first book by a southern black contained verses decrying the slave's condition. For the next thirty years he was employed in and around Chapel Hill, 'buying his time' from several Horton masters, with money earned from the well-paying acrostics" (Rubin's Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary, pp. 232-233). He saw two more collections of poems published, one in Hillsborough, North Carolina, in 1845 and the other in Raleigh in 1865, when he left the state for Philadelphia and was little heard from thereafter. The four separate works by Horton published during his lifetime are all rare; as his first book is known by a single copy only, this volume is virtually the only obtainable 19th-century edition of his poems; in it the Horton section comprises pages 117-155. Sabin 56712. Thornton 14712 (for this edition). Thornton 6427 (for the 1837 Poems by a Slave, "title page wanting"). Thornton 6428 (for the 1845 Hillsborough Poetical Works). Hope of Liberty (Raleigh, 1829) and Naked Genius (Raleigh, 1865) are unrecorded by Thornton. 12mo. 155 pp. Engraved frontispiece portrait of Wheatley. Publisher's pebbled black cloth, gilt title on spine; persistent light foxing, but a very good copy. Price: USD 4,000.00 other currencies   order no. 45899    inquire

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