Faneuil Hall

Built in 1742 in Boston, Massachusetts, Faneuil Hall was a meeting house well-known as a platform of oration across various causes. It was here that American colonists first opposed the Sugar Act in 1764, declaring "no taxation without representation," and where Samuel Adams rallied support for independence from Britain. In the 1800s, it became a key meeting place for various local abolitionist groups, including the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, which hosted the annual National Anti-Slavery Bazaar at Faneuil Hall for nearly a decade. The bazaar is best known for sponsoring The Liberty Bell, an anti-slavery publication that ran from 1839 to 1858, featuring the work of popular contemporary writers, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Parent Map

Key Locations: EBB and the Landmarks of Slavery

Coordinates

Latitude: 42.360058600000
Longitude: -71.056230500000

Timeline of Events Associated with Faneuil Hall

Date Event Manage
circa. 1847

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Publishes "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point"

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.
circa. 1855

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Publishes "A Curse for a Nation"

Elizabeth Barrett Browning first published "A Curse for a Nation," the fifth and final of EBB's poems about slavery, in December 1855, as an invited contribution to the 1856 issue of the 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.

 Title page of the 1856 edition of The Liberty Bell.