The Battle for Independence Park

A s of this January, George Washington was the most heavily criticized individual at Independence Park in Philadelphia. Because he had brought several slaves north to live in the President’s House, National Park Service signs had characterized his actions as “deplorable,” “profoundly disturbing,” and having “mocked the nation’s pretense to be a beacon of liberty.” Those signs, produced during the Obama presidency, accused Washington and other founders of “injustice” and “immorality.” Sign headings read “Washington’s Deceit” and “Washington’s Death and a New Hope for Freedom.” The hero of the American Revolution was portrayed as the villain of Independence Park.

Located just one block north of the hallowed ground of Independence Hall, the President’s House Site contains the ruins of the house where Washington and John Adams lived during most of their presidencies. When visiting the site in August 2025 for a Claremont Review of Books essay, I found that 25 of its 30 signs were about slavery or race relations. The site essentially ignored the watershed events that took place there during America’s first two presidencies, and it discussed slavery without any nuance or even-handedness. In the left’s simplistic oppressor-versus-oppressed narrative, the “Father of His Country” was an oppressor — meriting condemnation, not celebration.

Shortly after the CRB essay ran, the Trump administration’s National Park Service took down the offending signs. Philadelphia sued in federal court and won at the district court level. The NPS put some of the signs back up before the Third Circuit Court issued a stay in response to the Trump administration’s appeal, ordering that no further signs be hung until that court hears oral arguments on June 2. That court’s verdict will determine whether the excellent and attractive replacement signs that the Park Service has produced — but hasn’t yet been allowed to hang — will greet visitors on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this July 4, or whether they’ll see signs condemning the man most responsible for winning that independence.

Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senate Caucus and a leftist activist group called ATAC (pronounced “attack” and short for Avenging the Ancestors Coalition) have both filed amicus curiae briefs in the case in opposition to the Trump administration. The historical ignorance demonstrated in these two briefs highlights the need to present American history in an educational and informative way at such sites, rather than in a manner conducive to activists’ agendas.

ATAC, per its amicus brief, “was founded in 2002 by attorney and activist Michael Coard” and “embedded” itself in the “development” of the President’s House Site, helping to “shape” its “core themes and designs.” When not involved in such efforts, ATAC has sponsored “Anti–July Fourth Day” events. Coard says that “July Fourth is a celebration of . . . rapes, castrations, lynchings, and enslavement,” and those who celebrate it are “traitors” who “embrace whiteness” and “the 1776 birth of the racist American nation.” This is who helped spearhead the woke exhibit that the Trump administration is seeking to replace.

ATAC asserts in its brief that the “leaders of the American Revolution” were “imposing” a “system of chattel slavery.” In truth, the American founders didn’t impose slavery; they inherited it (from the British). Furthermore, they recognized the rampant injustice of it and sought to eradicate it. Indeed, the founding generation did more to eliminate slavery in America than any other generation aside from the one that spilled blood during the Civil War.

But eliminating slavery wasn’t as simple as waving a wand, as the NPS’s replacement signs make clear. Those signs note that it “took Lincoln and a bloody Civil War to finish the work that the Founders had begun and end slavery in the United States once and for all.” The prior signs’ “Slavery Timeline” amazingly didn’t even mention the Civil War — but did find the space to highlight Juneteenth.

The Pennsylvania Democratic Senate Caucus asserts that the Trump administration’s efforts are obscuring “historical truths,” including that “the 1787 U.S. Constitution denied the rights and humanity of enslaved people” by “failing to end the institution of slavery.” One might as well criticize the Declaration of Independence for failing to end slavery. Nothing that the Constitutional Convention delegates could have done would have changed the fact that slavery was entrenched in the South and would remain in place there. The question was whether the nascent country would write and adopt a new constitution. If Northern delegates had insisted upon the abolition of slavery, the young nation would have ceased to exist, splintering into two or more competing entities — with slavery surviving but hopes of forming “a more perfect Union” dashed.

Nor did the Constitution deny the rights of slaves; it just couldn’t secure them immediately. In fact, the Convention delegates went to some lengths to avoid any suggestion that slavery was consistent with natural rights. Echoing Lincoln’s observations in his 1860 Cooper Union address, the new NPS signs note, “The words ‘slave’ and ‘slavery’ are not in the U.S. Constitution as ratified, nor the word ‘property’ in connection with language alluding to slavery.” These signs add, “At the Constitutional Convention, James Madison, a Virginian, said it would be ‘wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man.’”

The Pennsylvania Democrats also claim that the Convention delegates denied the slaves’ “humanity” by “adopting the Three-Fifths Compromise, thereby codifying that enslaved people were worth less than free people in determining political power and embedding racial inequality into the nation’s highest legal document.” In other words, these Democrats are criticizing the founders for not granting more power to slave-holding states — a curious position.

The Pennsylvania Democrats could profit from reading the new NPS signs, which explain that “slave-holding delegates wanted enslaved people counted as whole persons to increase their political power.” Indeed, as Madison’s notes from the Convention convey, on July 11, 1787, “Mr. Butler and Genl. Pinkney” — two South Carolina delegates — “insisted that blacks be included in the rule of Representation, equally,” and “for that purpose moved that the words ‘three fifths’ be struck out” (italics in original). In response, Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania said that he “could never agree to give such encouragement to the slave trade as would be given” by the South Carolinians’ proposal. In short, the injustice of the three-fifths clause was not that enslaved people weren’t counted fully, but rather that they were counted at all — thereby padding Southern representation in the House.

Both amicus briefs insist that they want the “whole truth” to be told, yet Coard and others have criticized a new sign that provides a more nuanced account of slavery than they would like. That sign observes, “Slaves living in the President’s House” were at times “able to explore the city and sometimes even attend the theater, with Washington buying the tickets.” In 2010’s Washington: A Life, biographer Ron Chernow notes this fact as well, citing Washington’s financial records: “Household accounts for June 1792 disclose expense money doled out for ‘Austin, Hercules & Oney to go to the play.’” This sign adds welcome detail and complexity. It makes clear that while slavery was egregiously at odds with the right to liberty, the lives and living conditions of slaves varied greatly.

The Pennsylvania Democrats also note the importance of this year’s Semiquincentennial celebrations and hearken back to past milestone celebrations. They should be pleased, then, that while the old signs said nothing of such occasions, the new ones do. The new signs note that France sent the hand and torch of the then-in-progress Statue of Liberty to Philadelphia in 1876; that a four-story Liberty Bell replica, “lined with 26,000 lightbulbs, . . . lit up the night sky” in 1926; and that Queen Elizabeth II and 14 million to 20 million other people visited Philadelphia in 1976.

In 2026, the “whole truth” deserves to be told at America’s historic sites, but the previous signs at the President’s House Site told only a partial story through a distorted lens. They ignored almost everything of historical importance that took place there and presented the site “almost as if it were the Slave Market of Charleston” — to quote the 2010 words of then–New York Times critic at large Edward Rothstein. The new National Park Service signs seek to rescue this important site from the activists and provide the “whole truth” that the left praises in speech but eschews in practice. Let’s hope that the Trump administration’s salutary efforts succeed.