Elizabeth Barrett Browning first published "A Curse for a Nation," the fifth and final of EBB's poems about slavery, in 1855, and it officially appeared in the 1856 edition of Boston-based abolitionist publication The Liberty Bell. Like "The Runaway Slave of Pilgrim's Point" before it, "A Curse for a Nation" reflected ongoing abolitionist debates in the United States, particularly as the country spiraled closer to the start of the Civil War. EBB would republish "A Curse for a Nation" a few years later in her collection Poems before Congress (1860), a recontextualization that led much of her British readership to interpret the piece as criticism of the British government for failing to support the Risorgimento, the Italian struggle for unification that lasted from 1848 to 1870.