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Late in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, one character wonders to another “whether the world is anchored anywhere.” It was a fair question in November 1851, when Moby-Dick was published; it was still an open one in November 1857, when the first issue of The Atlantic Monthly came out. American life felt unmoored. Political conflict over slavery continued unabated, having brought violence to the plains of Kansas and the floor of the Senate in the previous year. A global financial panic gripped markets and crippled businesses. The precise causes of the panic were fuzzy, though there were plenty of newspapers and magazines ready to venture explanations.
“In this kingdom of illusions,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in that first issue of The Atlantic, “we grope eagerly for stays and foundations.” The magazine he helped start was dedicated to finding these stays and foundations. It was the intellectual equivalent of publications such as Day’s New-York Bank Note List and Counterfeit Detecter, which helped readers navigate the bewildering array of paper currency circulating in 19th-cen
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