A 168-Year-Old Question Still Worth Asking

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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.

The Atlantic’s second issue included a thunderous philippic of some 7,600 words on the relentless encroachments of slavery and the fate of the Republic. Written by Edmund Quincy, “Where Will It End?” voiced the urgency of what was called the “Slave Power conspiracy”—the idea, borne out by national politics in the 1850s, that southern oligarchs and their groveling northern enablers (“doughfaces,” in the lingo of the day) had seized control of every level of government to spread slavery to every corner of the country and beyond. Quincy’s essay shows a person reckoning with a moment like our own, when our institutions feel like they’re on the verge of collapse and a shared understanding of what holds the country together is fraying.

Where will it end? was a sensible question. The U.S.-Mexican War in the 1840s threatened to bring slavery to large new swaths of western territories. High-profile cases in which fugitive slaves were recaptured in the North left Bostonians on alert for “slave hunters” in their midst. Violence erupted in Kansas in 1854, not over fugitive slaves but over the prospect of slavery taking hold there. In 1856, violence came to Washington, too, when a South Carolina congressman brutally caned the Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate, two days after Sumner delivered a withering antislavery speech. The Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision in March 1857, both negating the citizenship of Black Americans and Congress’s power to limit the expansion of slavery.

The force of Quincy’s essay resided not in rehearsing this full litany of offenses for The Atlantic’s readers but in delineating its implications. Slavery had become ever more entrenched in America; this transformation had brought the fringe to the mainstream, made the unthinkable thinkable, the impermissible permissible. “What was once whispered in the secret chamber of council,” Quincy wrote, “is now proclaimed on the housetops.”

What was once done by indirection and guile is now carried with the high hand, in the face of day, at the mouth of the cannon and by the edge of the sabre of the nation. Doctrines and designs which a few years since could find no mouthpiece out of a bar-room, or the piratical den of a filibuster, are now clothed with power by the authentic response of the bench of our highest judicatory, and obsequiously iterated from the oracular recesses of the National Palace.

As the “Slave Power” was ascending, the Republic was declining. Sycophants had replaced statesmen to do the bidding of a “coarse and sordid oligarchy.” Violence and intimidation had overtaken discussion and persuasion. In addition to Brooks’s attack on Sumner, Quincy noted that a Tennessee minister had been forced to leave his church after denouncing the beating of an enslaved person, and a Virginia politician had been barred from returning home after attending a northern political convention. The corrosive effects extended well beyond politics. Northern publishers expurgated literary texts for fear of offending slaveholders; antislavery publications were barred from being mailed in the South. “In the blighting shadow of Slavery,” Quincy wrote, “letters die and art cannot live.”

His essay did not dwell in despair, however. Quincy closed by arguing that the “success of the conspiracy” was not “final and eternal,” but instead that its stridency was a response to the strength of a growing opposition. “We discern the confession” of the opposition’s might “in the very extravagancies and violences of the Slave Power,” Quincy wrote. “It rages, for its time is short.”

Quincy’s confidence was rooted not in a clique but in a party he didn’t name. The Republicans had formed a broad antislavery coalition that mounted a strong showing in the 1856 presidential election, despite suffering a defeat. “The thunder of its protest,” Quincy believed, “struck terror into the heart of tyrants.” He predicted that the “Slave Power” would end with the Republicans’ triumph, and the “ideal of a true republic” would be realized, thus cementing “the great experiment of this Western World” as “a Model, instead of a Warning.” Quincy scarcely could have imagined that its triumph would come through a destructive war, or that his question—Where will it end?—would remain open long after that.