This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
A vivid rumor began circulating in the United States in the middle of the 1850s. It was said that Robert Toombs, the ardently pro-slavery Georgia senator, was going to come to Boston and “call the roll of his slaves at the foot of Bunker Hill.” It’s not clear where the notion of a southern politician taking enslaved people to a sacred Revolutionary battlefield came from—whether Toombs spread it to troll the high-minded, antislavery Bostonians, or whether the Bostonians themselves conjured it from their own fever dreams. The nightmare never came to pass, but it was the kind of idea—conspiratorial, frightening, plausible—that flourishes in a highly charged political environment.
These were the conditions in which The Atlantic was established: information overload and profound uncertainty. By the end of 1857, no one knew the crack-up of the Union was coming in three years, or that the nation would be in a civil war in four, but the portents were bleak. What did this mean for the new monthly magazine “devoted to literature, art, and politics”? With respect to politics, the mission pledged fealty to “no party or clique,” alignment with no “sect of anties”—that is, single-minded reformers. But the crisis over slavery and its encroachments shaped what the magazine’s values looked like in practice…