Elizabeth Barrett Browning published "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" in 1847, with the poem making its first appearance in the 1848 edition of the Boston-based abolitionist publication The Liberty Bell. The third of five poems about slavery that 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, focusing specifically on slavery in the United States through the perspective and voice of a woman who has escaped from a plantation after killing her child—a product of rape by her enslaver. EBB addressed the intensity of the poem's content in an 1846 letter: "I am just sending off an anti-slavery poem for America .. too ferocious, perhaps, for the Americans to publish: but they asked for a poem & shall have it" (BC, 21 Dec. 1846, EBB, no. 2643).

Title page of the 1848 edition of The Liberty Bell.