America is Turning 250 While Hiding the People George Washington Enslaved
Beside the Liberty Bell, a wall of names is testing how much truth America wants at its birthday party.
America is Turning 250 While Hiding the People George Washington Enslaved
Beside the Liberty Bell, a wall of names is testing how much truth America wants at its birthday party.
Photo by Jacob Postuma on Unsplash
By July 4, America will be deep into its 250th birthday. Official calendars are full of block parties and patriotic events. The US Mint has also announced Declaration of Independence quarters for 2026. The celebration carries extra weight in Philadelphia because Independence Hall is where the Declaration of Independence was adopted.
One block away, the President’s House site tells visitors who kept Washington’s Philadelphia household running. He lived there in the 1790s, when the city was the national capital. People enslaved at Mount Vernon worked inside that home. In January, federal workers removed the panels that told visitors more about their lives. Their names remained carved into the memorial. The fuller story had to go to court.
The Birthday Starts Where Washington Held People in Bondage
The President’s House site can be easy to miss for a strange reason. It sits in a tourist path so famous that people often move through it too quickly. The Liberty Bell and Independence Hall are close. Families pass through with phones out and tired children asking where the next line begins.
The site is free and outdoors at Sixth and Market Streets. It marks the first executive mansion, where George Washington and John Adams lived during their presidencies. Philadelphia was the temporary capital from 1790 to 1800. Washington rented the home of Robert Morris, a wealthy financier of the Revolution. The house gave the new presidency a public address. The labor behind that address came from Mount Vernon.
The memorial opened in 2010 with the official title The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation. Visitors walk through a partial outline of the former house. They can see archaeological remains through glass, read panels, watch short videos, and stand near the wall of names. The design puts the enslaved household on the same visitor route as the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall.
Photo by Miguel Ángel Sanz on Unsplash
The original house was demolished in 1832, and later buildings covered the ground. For generations, a visitor could come to Independence Mall and hear about the nation’s birth without being sent toward the enslaved household a short walk away.
On January 22, 2026, National Park Service workers removed interpretive panels from the memorial under the administration’s order on “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Philadelphia sued, saying the federal government changed the exhibit without the notice and consultation required by agreements tied to the site. A federal judge ordered the panels restored in February. In June, the 3rd Circuit allowed the administration to replace them while the case continued.
A separate national parks case in Massachusetts complicated the picture by ordering restoration of exhibits removed under the broader directive.
Washington Knew the Clock Was Running
The wall at the President’s House names Austin, Christopher Sheels, Giles, Hercules and Joe. It also names Moll, Ona Judge, Paris and Richmond. The names sit together on the wall. The lives behind them were different. Their work touched family rooms and stables. It also ran through food, clothing, and visitors. All of them lived under a president who knew how law could threaten his control over their labor.
Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 made Philadelphia different from Virginia. The law moved slowly, leaving many people in bondage and freeing children born to enslaved mothers only after years of service. The detail that mattered to Washington was the six-month residency rule. Enslaved people kept in Pennsylvania long enough could try to claim freedom.
Washington understood the risk and acted on it. The National Park Service says he repeatedly moved enslaved people between Philadelphia and Mount Vernon to keep them from staying long enough to use Pennsylvania law. He saw the loophole clearly and planned around it.
Ona Judge read the household in her own way. She served Martha Washington and learned she was expected to be given to Martha’s granddaughter. On May 21, 1796, while the Washingtons ate dinner, Judge left the President’s House. She reached New Hampshire and refused to return. Washington still tried to have her brought back.
Hercules, Washington’s cook, escaped from bondage in 1797. His skill made him valuable inside the president’s household. It gave him no claim to his own life.
The sharpest part of this history is the attention on both sides. Washington tracked the calendar while the people he enslaved studied rooms and meals, then streets, ships and openings. The word “liberty” was being printed, toasted, argued, and celebrated around them. For them, liberty depended on getting out.
The Memorial Was Already a Repair
The President’s House memorial came from research, local pressure, public argument, and years of forcing a famous block to carry more than the easy story.
By the early 2000s, historians had identified the location and the people Washington enslaved there. Michael Coard and the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition pushed the National Park Service and the city to make the enslaved people visible where tourists came to honor the founding. The demand was simple enough for anyone on the sidewalk to understand. A site tied to the first president should tell visitors who lived and labored in the house with him.
Archaeology gave the argument physical proof. In 2007, excavation began at Sixth and Market. A public viewing platform drew crowds. People looked at brickwork, foundations, and traces of rooms hidden under later construction. The evidence was no longer a footnote in a book because it was under the sidewalk.
The finished memorial carried that pressure into public space. The wall of names asked visitors to see who had been missing from the walk between the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall.
That fight is unfolding in the 100th year of Black History Month’s earliest form. A century ago, Carter G. Woodson launched Negro History Week, the commemoration that later grew into Black History Month. Woodson’s project began because Black history had been pushed out of classrooms, books, monuments, and national rituals. A hundred years later, one of the clearest Black history sites near the Liberty Bell is back in court over what its own signs can say.
A Softer Sign Still Teaches
The President’s House fight belongs to a larger federal push. The executive order told the Interior Department to review exhibits that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” A fact about slavery can become a problem when the test is whether it makes a national hero look worse.
A court-ordered inventory showed that the National Park Service removed at least 51 exhibits from 37 sites. Reuters reported that the removed material included displays about slavery, civil rights, climate change, and communities left out of older federal storytelling. Judge Angel Kelley called the removals an effort to rewrite history with a “white-out pen.” Everyone knows what white-out does. It hides the original words while leaving the page in place.
The fight also reaches into a larger American habit right now. School boards argue over slavery lessons. Libraries argue over which books stay on shelves. Teachers measure every sentence because one parent complaint can become a board meeting. A park panel works in the same small, practical way. Remove the hard sentence, and many visitors never know it was there.
By the Fourth of July, someone may find a special quarter in a cash register and notice the 1776–2026 stamp. A few blocks away from the Liberty Bell, another family may stop at Sixth and Market for five minutes before moving on. They may miss the court history. They may never learn who paid for the memorial or who fought for it. The visit will depend on what the signs are allowed to say.
The carved names can survive on a wall while the story around them is thinned out. That’s the danger at a place built to tell visitors who was inside the first president’s house.
References
https://www.nps.gov/inde/planyourvisit/presidentshousesite.htm
https://www.nps.gov/inde/learn/historyculture/enslaved-people.htm
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/inde-pa-gradual-abolition-act-1780.htm
https://www.nps.gov/articles/excavating-presidents-house.htm
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/the-enslaved-household-of-president-george-washington
https://eji.org/news/national-park-service-removes-exhibit-on-people-enslaved-by-george-washington/
https://eji.org/news/court-orders-exhibits-on-enslavement-restored-in-philadelphia/
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