Redefining the "Cradle of Liberty": The President's House Controversy in Independence National Historical Park

Abstract

This article examines the public controversy surrounding the National Park Service's decision about how best to recognize the site of the nation's first executive mansion—the President's House—in Philadelphia's Independence National Historical Park. The first of the house's two presidential occupants, George Washington, kept nine slaves in the mansion while circumventing a Pennsylvania law that could have given the slaves their freedom. The National Park staff's resistance to acknowledging Washington's actions led to an ongoing and lengthy public debate that eventually resulted in the decision to build an installation that recognized all of the occupants of the house. Advocates for building such a site invoked two types of vernacular discourse—a counternarrative ("Liberty has been incompletely enacted") and a representative anecdote ("Excavating buried history")—that embraced the traditions of storytelling at Independence National Historical Park.