Upon the Ruins of Liberty: Slavery, the President’s House at Independence National Historical Park, and Public Memory by Roger C. Aden (review)

Beginning in the spring of 2002 and extending over nearly a decade, the corner of Sixth and Market streets in the city of Philadelphia was the focal point of a sometimes rancorous debate about one of the nation’s iconic founders, the elaborate mythology surrounding his service, and the purpose of public representations of “history.” As a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, I wrote tens of thousands of words about this skein of events, debates, controversies, and supposedly new narratives, all swirling around the rediscovery of the “President’s House,” the house where George Washington and John Adams conducted their presidencies during the first decade of the United States, and where Washington, as it happened, housed nine enslaved Africans at various times during his administration.

The arc of events moved in a fashion not atypical for public controversies. In this case, independent historian Edward Lawler Jr. published a detailed architectural and social history of the house in the pages of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography at the beginning of 2002. The house had been largely demolished in 1832, although knowledge of its presence was never entirely obliterated, contrary to general belief. In the 1950s, as the area became part of a park celebrating the founding of the nation, a ladies’ room was built on the spot, a plaque denoting the significance of the site was affixed to bathroom bricks, and that, apparently, was that. Lawler’s ninety-page article, however, pointed out, in a paragraph deep within, that Washington kept enslaved Africans in Philadelphia throughout his time in the city—as did many other federal officials—rotating them out of state after six months to avoid problems with Pennsylvania’s law of gradual abolition.

Lawler’s article sat for two months without any public controversy, despite references to it by UCLA historian Gary Nash on a popular local radio show and despite looming park construction at the site. When members of the city’s African American community were finally engaged, however, they reacted with anger. Why was Independence Park suppressing the story of Washington’s brutality? Why wasn’t the truth being acknowledged and told on the ground? The city, then led by African American mayor John Street, started asking questions as well. Community activists and historians, rallied by Nash and Randall Miller, a St. Joseph’s University professor of American history, argued that the President’s House site provided the park with an opportunity to tell a “complete” story of the nation’s birth— with all of its nuance and unhappy contradiction. Independence Park, which was building a new home for the Liberty Bell almost on top of Washington’s long-gone slave quarters, was forced to address harsh commentary and criticism coming in from all sides. Eventually, the site of the house was excavated, and a memorial emphasizing the African enslaved was designed and built.

Roger C. Aden’s account of this complex story focuses on its meanings and ambiguities within the context of public history. He ably describes the symbolic purposes of the park, which constructs a patriotic, even edenic vision of the nation’s founding. In the view of park officials, Aden argues, acknowledgment of the President’s House would sully a pristine picture. Slavery poisons the apple and the presence of the first president’s chattel on the landscape of the nation’s birth would be bitter fruit indeed.

In telling this story, however, Aden neglects to address one critical question effectively: Why did this controversy happen at all and why did it happen when it did?

The question is important for several reasons, not the least being that the location and presence of the President’s House was not a secret, as Aden himself notes. The question of what to do with the site, if anything, and how to...