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