Just opening the daily newspaper in a southern city such as Richmond would remind even the least vigilant reader that the peculiar institution loomed large in U.S. life. And yet, despite its omnipresence in all those advertisements and notices, slavery’s role in the nation’s visual culture was subdued. By the third decade of the nineteenth century, abolitionists had assembled and disseminated an archive of antislavery broadsides and illustrated books, but slavery rarely made an appearance in the hundreds of paintings—and inexpensive reproductions—that comprised the nation’s burgeoning market of visual art. This is not to say it wasn’t there—but slavery was likely to be glimpsed lurking on the margins and in the background of paintings and prints, troublesome and ominous like an elusive thought.

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Reproduced in various engraved and lithographed editions (such as this 1851 print), the wildly popular 1848 painting War News from Mexico decorated many an American home. The expatriate Baltimore artist Richard Caton Woodville’s depiction of a clutch of men (and one meek older woman) eagerly listening to the latest news about the Mexican War was viewed at the time as a patriotic celebration of the American victory as well as a paean to the unifying role of the press in U.S. society.

But there was no room on the stagelike portico of the “American Hotel” for the two black figures posed in the right corner of the painting. Most viewers, not to mention critics, missed Woodville’s subtle suggestion that the nation’s acquisition of new territory would spur the expansion of slavery and worsen the lives of enslaved African Americans. One contemporary reviewer, however, did note the “painful . . . truth with which the squalor and rags of the poor negro girl are rendered.”