A History of American Literature

Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 145

A poem called “Division of an Estate,” for example, is remarkable for the sympathy

it inspires for its subjects: slaves being sold at auction after the death of their master.

There is irony here. The slaves, as property, are rhetorically linked to other property:

“the flocks and herds” of sheep and cattle, the “bristling swine,” howling dogs, and

“sad horses” that are left, for a while, “void of an owner.” And there is also pathos, as

the poet asks the reader to behold “the dark suspense in which poor vassals stand”

on the auction block. The mind of each, he points out, “upon the spine of chance

hangs fluctuant,” knowing that “the day of separation is at hand.” Presumably, in this

case, the distinction that many white Southerners were willing to make between

slavery and the slave trade allowed Horton to emphasize the pathos. It was, at best, a

false distinction, since slavery could not have existed without the slave trade: but it

gave the poet some room for rhetorical maneuver. Horton was, fortunately, never to

experience the horrors of the auction block himself. He was freed toward the end of

the Civil War, and published a third and final volume called Naked Genius just after

the fall of the Confederacy. This collection of 133 poems, most of them previously

unpublished, continues the themes of his earlier work. In the poems on slavery,

however, Horton does move from complaining about the pains and sadness the

peculiar institution involves to attacking its fundamental injustice. And in one

remarkable piece, “George Moses Horton, Myself,” he offers a fragment of

autobiography that explores the difficulties of being both a black slave and a poet.

“My genius from a boy, / Has fluttered like a bird within my heart,” he tells the

reader, “But could not thus confined her powers employ, / Impatient to depart.” “She

like a restless bird, / Would spread her wings, her power to be unfurl’d, /” he

concludes, “And let her songs be loudly heard, / And dart from world to world.” It is

an apt summary of the torment he had suffered, both as a man and a poet: a torment

that he hardly ever dared openly to confess. And it announces a problem, of being a

black writer imprisoned in a predominantly white culture and language, that many

later African-American poets were to explore.

Abolitionist and pro-slavery writing

Among the white writers who were noted abolitionists were Wendell Phillips

(1811–1884), Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911) and, most famously,

William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879). Garrison worked with Benjamin Lundy on a

periodical titled The Genius of Universal Emancipation for several years. But he broke

with Lundy and the paper over the position Lundy held, that slaves should be

emancipated gradually and removed to Africa. He began to argue for immediate

emancipation, without colonization of the freed or compensation for their former

masters, and to argue his case he founded The Liberator at the beginning of 1831.

Inspired by the beliefs of the Great Awakening, Garrison was convinced that the

kingdom of God could be created on earth by men and women actively committed to

eradicating evil and injustice. That led him to support the temperance movement,

women’s rights, and, in particular, the abolition of slavery: only by abolition, he

argued, could “the ‘self-evident truth’ maintained in the American Declaration of

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