The Trump administration installed new information panels on slavery at President George Washington’s Philadelphia residence on July 15, introducing a revised exhibit at one of the country’s most historically significant sites as part of a broader federal effort to reshape how American history is presented at national parks and museums.
The changes at the President’s House site, where Washington and First Lady Martha Washington lived with enslaved people while Philadelphia served as the temporary US capital, are part of a nationwide review ordered in March 2025. That executive order directed federal agencies to examine and in many cases remove or replace museum and park displays the administration characterized as presenting a distorted view of American history through an ideologically driven lens.
What the new exhibit contains
The new exhibit examines the founding of the nation alongside the realities of slavery, presenting both dimensions of the historical moment together rather than in separate framing. It highlights the nine members of Washington’s enslaved household by name and examines the lives and roles of the people who lived and worked in the presidential residence, connecting their experiences to the broader national struggle over liberty, freedom, and equality that defined the era.
The exhibit also references a range of additional historical figures connected to the period, including a representative of a Haitian revolutionary leader who was present in Philadelphia during Washington’s presidency, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and Native American dignitaries who had dealings with the early American government.
What was removed and why
The exhibit that was removed in January had been in place for 15 years. It was titled in ways that emphasized the intersection of freedom and slavery in the founding period. Its removal was announced alongside a broader set of changes at federal sites carried out under the administration’s history executive order, which identified certain existing displays as products of what it called a widespread effort to rewrite American history in ideologically unfavorable ways.
Critics of the removals have argued that the previous exhibits represented honest and necessary engagement with the full complexity of American history at sites connected to the founding era, while supporters of the administration’s approach have said the existing exhibits placed undue emphasis on the country’s failings at the expense of its founding ideals and achievements.
The historical significance of the site
The President’s House in Philadelphia occupies a particularly charged location in the geography of American history. Philadelphia was the center of the early American republic during the years when Washington served as president, and Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4, 1776, stands nearby. The presence of enslaved people in Washington’s household at this location, during the same years the new nation was articulating its founding principles of liberty, has made the site a focal point for discussions about the contradictions embedded in the founding period.
The nine enslaved members of Washington’s household are central to any honest accounting of what life at the President’s House actually looked like, and both the old and new exhibits include them. The differences between the two exhibits reflect different editorial choices about framing, emphasis, and the relationship between the site’s founding significance and its slavery history, choices that have become subjects of national political debate as the administration has used its executive authority to reshape how federal historic sites interpret the past.
