Elizabeth Barrett Browning published "The Runaway Slave of Pilgrim's Point" for the first time in the 1848 edition of the Boston-based abolitionist publication The Liberty Bell. The third of five anti-slavery poems EBB wrote throughout her life, "The Runaway Slave" is the first of these works to directly address the issue of slavery beyond the scope of the British Empire, which had outlawed slavery in 1833.