Early Years
Horace King's Signature. Horace King Interrogatories, February 28, 1878
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Horace King was born in 1807 as a tri-racial slave. He was a mix of African American, Native American and Caucasian.
"This man believed in education and his life proved the benefits of learning. Coming, as he did, from slavery, I found his belief in education and his determination to raise himself up to a better life to be praiseworthy and laudable. The best quote I found from Horace King was, 'Ignorance breeds poverty.'" (Gibbons, Faye. Personal Interview. 13 January 2014). "We know very little about his life before he moved to Columbus, Ga [in 1832]" (Gibbons, Faye. Personal Interview. 13 January 2014), but in 1830 he was purchased by a contractor named John Godwin. This started an important relationship between two men that was stronger master and slave, and they became friends and business partners. |
Horace King's World: Slavery
Horace King lived as a slave during the period of the "migration generation." "Between 1810 and 1861,...thousands of men and women whose forebears had reconstituted African life along North America's Atlantic Coast were propelled across the continent in a Second Middle Passage. Driven by the cotton and sugar revolutions in the southern interior, the massive deportation displaced more than a million men and women, dwarfing the transatlantic slave trade that had carried Africans to the mainland" (Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity, 2003).
"Black skin was the sign that a given people had been providentially designed to serve as menial laborers" (Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage, 2006). "Planters instituted a familiar regime: they employed force freely and often; created invidious divisions among the slaves; and exacted exemplary punishments for the smallest infraction...Slave masters made it clear that slaves, by definition, had no rights they need respect" (Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity, 2003). This is the world that Horace King lived in, which makes his story of triumph and accomplishment seem almost impossible. |
"American slavery thus became the ultimate form of inhuman bondage"
(David, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage, 2006). |
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