Whitewashing the history of US slavery
First published: August 18, 2025
This week, rangers at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park (INHP) await the outcome of a review by the Trump administration of signage at the park. The signs have been flagged as potentially showing America’s history in less than a favorable light.
It’s the outcome of an executive order from the president back in March that required employees of America’s national parks to review depictions and descriptions in the parks that may “inappropriately disparage” Americans past or living.
The order’s explicit intention was to reverse what the president described as a decade-long “effort to rewrite history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth”. Its most visceral language rails against “a divisive, race-centered ideology” and the promotion of narratives that “portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive”.
Though the order applies to all of America’s federal parks, the president highlighted both the INHP in Philadelphia and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC as prime examples of where the previous Biden administration had sought, in the president’s words, to advance “this corrosive ideology”.
In Philadelphia, attention has focused on The President’s House exhibit, right in the middle of the Historical Park. No one who’s visited the exhibit would doubt that its key theme is slavery. It’s an impressionistic recreation of the former mansion’s outer walls, bearing several interpretive panels and videos. More specifically, it details the life of George and Martha’s household slaves, who they took back and forth from their Mount Vernon farmstead throughout his eight-year-long presidency.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped."
In fact, it’s unlikely the memorial would ever have been built, if it wasn’t for the lobbying of African-American activists. They argued successfully at the turn of this century for the long-forgotten site to be excavated and memorialized; not just as the location of the first presidential mansion — the first forerunner of the White House — but also for the lives and experiences of the dozen or so individuals enslaved there.
George and Martha Washington were slave owners from Mount Vernon in Virginia, both before and after his presidency (1789-97) when Philadelphia was the nation’s capital. Slaves worked their farm and served them at home; and they brought their household slaves with them to the executive mansion (The President’s House) whenever they were in Philadelphia. To avoid being caught by Pennsylvania’s 1780 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, they also rotated their slaves back to Virginia every six months, to avoid the Act’s requirement that visiting slave owners emancipate their slaves after that period had elapsed.
Washington’s single significant action as president, relating to slavery throughout the new nation, was to sign off the original Fugitive Slaves Act in 1793. Notably, the Act required officials in non-slave states to capture and return escaped slaves from slave states to their owners in the South. It was a law the president himself tried to enforce, though unsuccessfully, when Martha Washington’s personal slave made her escape from Philadelphia to New Hampshire in 1796. Correspondence between Washington and a New Hampshire official, who made no effort to return the escapee after he had found and interviewed her, made clear the president’s extreme displeasure at the impasse.
Reinforcement of the Fugitive Slaves Act in 1850, with tougher penalties for non-compliance in the non-slave states, helped fan the flames of division between the North and South in the run-up to the Civil War. More than a century later, devotees of the southern Confederacy would still claim that the War was not fought over slavery, which they argued would have eventually ended naturally, but solely over states’ rights. (Fact: in its Articles of Secession, South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union, mentions slaves and slavery 18 times. The document mentions states’ rights six times.)
As I wrote recently in my chapter in Brits Who Shaped America on the English abolitionist Fanny Kemble, who lived at close quarters with slaves in South Carolina around 1840 and published a vivid journal of her experience: the same apologists invariably defended the institution in the ante-bellum era as a benign and caring one. Privileged whites like Kemble, who lived amongst slaves and argued otherwise, were condemned well into the 20th century as ignorant, treasonous or simply sentimental fools.
It is stories and interpretive context such as these that President Trump’s executive order seeks to remove from federal parks and replace with a whitewashed, anodyne version of American history; just in time for celebrations next year of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. If so, it will become a national storybook in which “the foul stain” of slavery is not spoken of, the sun always shines, and the hypocrisy of the Founding Fathers’ belief in that Declaration — in an inalienable right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all — is never examined.
Then it will be left only to tour guides, and the bravest federal park rangers, to tell or not to tell visitors the whole truth of the historic places they visit.
You can read more about US slavery seen at close quarters and the impact of an English woman’s journal on Britain’s role in the Civil War in my chapter on Fanny Kemble — in Brits Who Shaped America.