Coxhoe Hall, Durham - Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1860)

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1860) was born in Coxhoe Hall, Durham, and the eldest child of 12 siblings (8 boys and 4 girls). For over two hundred years the Barrett family had resided in Jamaica as the owners of sugar plantations which profited from the labour of slaves. Elizabeth was the first Barrett born in England since the early seventeenth-century. Elizabeth's father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett (1785-1857), decided to raise his family in England with a secure income from his estates in the Caribbean.

As many critics have suggested, Browning’s stanchly abolitionist poem ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ (1848) many well have been an act of rebellion against her families’ fortune. Moreover, the poem stands in direct contrast to Felicia Hemans’ more celebratory, even eulogistic ‘Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England’ (1825). Browning feared the work was ‘too ferocious, perhaps, for the Americans to publish’. Despite this, it was carried in the 1848 edition of The Liberty Bell, an antislavery annual based in Boston, and became one of Browning’s best known poems on both sides of the Atlantic.

The manuscript indicates the poem was originally titled ‘The Black and Mad at Pilgrim’s Point’ demonstrating how foregrounded issues of race are to the poem, but also the centrality of Plymouth Rock to the narrative. The speaker of the poem, a fugitive slave woman, stands at Pilgrim’s Point in an ironic inversion of the history of liberty that had become an integral part of the Mayflower narrative and American national identity. The poem opens with the speaker addressing the Pilgrims directly:

I STAND on the mark beside the shore

Of the first white pilgrim's bended knee,

Where exile turned to ancestor,

And God was thanked for liberty.

I have run through the night, my skin is as dark,

I bend my knee down on this mark . . .

I look on the sky and the sea.

II.

O pilgrim−souls, I speak to you!

I see you come out proud and slow

From the land of the spirits pale as dew . . .

And round me and round me ye go!

O pilgrims, I have gasped and run

All night long from the whips of one

Who in your names works sin and woe.

III.

And thus I thought that I would come

And kneel here where I knelt before,

And feel your souls around me hum

In undertone to the ocean's roar;

And lift my black face, my black hand,

Here, in your names, to curse this land

Ye blessed in freedom's evermore.

Through her speaker, Browning is directly challenging the historical association of the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ as the origin myth for a nation founded on liberty. Browning presents another association, that of the intimate connection between race-based slavery and the settlement of North America. The runaway slave sees only the connection between the pilgrims and an inhuman system of bondage: ‘O pilgrims, I have gasped and run/All night long from the whips of one/Who in your names works sin and woe’. She has come to the edge of the American continent, faced with the sea – again, inverting the narrative of settlement and freedom in a boundless new land, to denounce the separatists: ‘And thus I thought that I would come/ […] /Here, in your names, to curse this land/ Ye blessed in freedom's evermore’. The word ‘blessed’ mocks the supposed religious virtue of the Pilgrim Fathers.

From these opening stanzas alone we can read how the poem makes powerful and pointed use of the Mayflower narrative in order to demonstrate the hypocrisy of a national myth based on freedom and liberty that still supported slavery. You can read more about Browning’s abolitionist Mayflower poem here.

Source

Elizabeth Barret Browning, The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barret Browning, 3, (New York, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1900), p.385.

Friends of Freedom, The Liberty Bell. (Boston: National Anti-Slavery Bazaar, 1848).

MS D0800, Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University (Waco, Texas).