Elizabeth Barrett Browning Publishes "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point"
circa. 1847
Elizabeth Barrett Browning first published "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" in December 1847, as an invited contribution to the 1848 issue of the Boston-based abolitionist annual 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). EBB would go on to publish the poem (with some variations) in her editions of Poems (1850, 1853, 1856).
Title page of the 1848 volume of The Liberty Bell.