It is shameful that, a few days ago, the National Park Service, under Donald Trump’s orders, removed the exhibits about the nine enslaved people who were held and who lived at the President’s House when George Washington was President.
https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/presidents-house-independence-mall-slavery-trump/
You cannot change history just by removing exhibits that speak the truth.
George Washington enslaved people at the President’s House and at his personal property, Mount Vernon. Mount Vernon recognizes that fact with exhibits on its grounds, recreation of an enslaved person’s housing, reenactors representing enslaved persons, and recognition of the enslaved persons’ burial grounds.
https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/slavery-at-mount-vernon
The truth is the truth. And, the truth is the light.
The City of Philadelphia sued the National Park Service about the removal based on a 2006 agreement that the City had with the federal government. I will be watching that lawsuit with interest, and cheering on my fellow Philadelphia lawyers who work for the City’s legal department.
As a descendant of enslaved people—the last being my great great grandmother and great grandfather—I could not write about the American Revolution and the Revolutionary War with out addressing its great hypocrisy: that it was a revolution and a war fought for the freedom of some, but not of all.
My book, Threshold to Valley Forge: The Six Days of the Gulph Mills Encampment, is a laser-focus on the Gulph Mills Encampment of December 12 – 19. 1777. So, in it, I write about the enslaved people who lived in Gulph Mills, held by Continental Army officers who were not fighting for the freedom of those enslaved people; Continental Army officers, including George Washington, who brought their enslaved people with them as they fought this war of freedom for themselves, but not their enslaved people; and the history and reality of slavery in Pennsylvania and the new United States.
The history and brutal reality of slavery and the stories of the enslaved have been buried and distorted for too long. We are all Americans who deserve to have our stories told—the good, the bad, and the ugly. I will keep telling them. You should, too.
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