As A Fight Over The Legacy Of Slavery Brews In Pa., A Historian Tells How It Shaped The Commonwealth

By Ian Karbal and John Cole, Capital-Star Guest Contributor, Pennsylvania Capital-Star

February 11, 2026

A federal judge is considering next steps in a lawsuit over the removal of a slavery exhibit on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall.

In January, National Park Service employees removed the signs from the President’s House, where George Washington lived for the bulk of his presidency.

The exhibitions documented the nation’s first president’s history with slavery, and were removed to comply with an executive order signed by President Donald Trump last March, entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

The order called for a review of material in federally-run museums and national parks that are found to cast “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”

The removal of the exhibits, which had been in place since 2010, comes months before Philadelphia will become the center of the country’s celebrations for the 250th signing of the Declaration of Independence.

The city of Philadelphia has filed a lawsuit over the exhibitions’ removal. Recently, a judge ordered the federal government not to further damage the panels as the lawsuit continues.

In a brief filed Monday, four collar counties wrote in support of Philadelphia.

“Removal of the Exhibit undermines the Counties’ efforts to present an accurate rendition of Pennsylvanian and American history,” the brief read. “By depriving residents of the Counties of access to the Exhibit, Defendants have abrogated their responsibility to impart the lessons of Philadelphia and the Counties’ shared past to current and future generations.”

Gov. Josh Shapiro also filed an amicus brief last month.

While Pennsylvania and Philadelphia have become focal points in the fight over America’s history, the Pennsylvania Capital-Star spoke to historian Kathleen Brown, a University of Pennsylvania professor, about how the legacy of slavery has shaped the commonwealth and its largest city.

Like America itself, Pennsylvania’s founding is tied to ideas of liberty and equality, which the commonwealth has not always lived up to. And its founding father, William Penn, owned roughly 12 slaves.

The conversation with Brown was edited for length and clarity.

Capital-Star: Pennsylvania is founded as a colony with some radical principles like freedom of religion, but slavery is legal. What did conversations around that look like?

Kathleen Brown: That depends exactly what and when you mean by ‘conversation.’ Enslaved people are really clear that they have an objection to slavery. So there’s always that sense of profound unease from the very beginning of the transatlantic traffic that people’s wills are being violated. When William Penn and his family arrived in Pennsylvania (Editor’s note: 1682), they enslaved people. So if they had moral objections, they overcame them.

An early, isolated figure among Quakers in Pennsylvania is Benjamin Lay. He’s a fairly eccentric figure, but clearly trying to jostle the consciences of his fellow Pennsylvania Quakers about the immorality and the violation of slavery. In the very late part of the 17th century, there’s also a group of German Mennonites who got together and actually wrote what we now have come to believe is the first organized, group petition objecting to slavery on moral grounds in North America. But the conversation in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, especially among Quakers, is really only coalescing by the 1750s. You can date it a little bit earlier, but there’s really a conversation going by then. So there weren’t a lot of people in William Penn’s world that we know of, other than this little group of German Mennonites in 1688, who were objecting to slavery on moral grounds.

CS: How did Pennsylvania compare to other colonies?

KB: Pennsylvania is not the only place where there’s a growing sentiment around the moral obscenity of slavery, to use that phrase. There are a lot of Quakers in New Jersey and Virginia who are also connected to what’s going on with the Quakers in Philadelphia — eventually you can find Quakers active in the 19th century all over the United States. There’s a growing number of voices who are writing letters to each other, printing pamphlets, and exchanging information.

They are really minority voices in the places that have developed economies that rely primarily on enslaved people’s labor. So, for example, even though there are Quakers in Maryland and Virginia and the Carolinas, you’re not getting a kind of full throated abolition movement or protest against slavery because all the white people who are making a living in those places are doing so with enslaved labor. Whereas it’s a lower lift for people to move from a kind of casual acceptance of slavery to a moral opposition if enslaved people are not the primary labor driving the economy.

That would be true in the New England colonies. On the eve of the revolution, New York actually has a whole lot of enslaved people. More than Pennsylvania. I think the figures are that there’s 6,000 in Pennsylvania and over 10,000 in New York. But New York’s got an economy much more heavily indebted to slavery. So part of what happens is in the colonies where it is less economically central, and where you have more religious dissidents, you get more public discussion about the moral wrongs of slavery and much quicker action when the revolution begins: Writing state constitutions that get rid of slavery, or making some provision for eventually getting rid of it. And that’s, of course, what happens in Pennsylvania.

CS: How is slavery considered by the framers of Pennsylvania’s constitution when it’s written in the revolutionary period?

KB: I can tell you what we know based on the notes taken at the [state] Constitutional Convention. It’s contested in Pennsylvania.

In 1765, there were 6,000 enslaved people in the colony of Pennsylvania, and 1,500 of those were in Philadelphia. So there are slavers who have a stake in this. Enslaving people is very much part of how they are engaged in farming, agriculture, business, and what have you.

The other thing is, Quakers have really faded as a political force. They opposed what’s known as the Seven Years War during the 1750s and ‘60s. Then again during the Revolution, they wanted to try to remain neutral. So they really lost a lot of political ground in Pennsylvania. They are not carrying the day in the way they might have in William Penn’s time.

The compromise ends up being this “gradual abolition” law in 1780. Pennsylvania is the first of the colonies to produce a gradual abolition law — or any abolition law.

It’s a very measured step toward unencumbering people of the burden of slavery. It’s not a radical act, even though it’s a first. It isn’t immediate abolition. It actually frees absolutely no one on the day it’s enacted. It comes out of a real argument, but once Pennsylvania has done this, nearly every northern new state in the United States also moves in this direction.

CS: What is the practical effect of gradual abolition for enslaved people over the next decades?

KB: Here’s the wacky and wild thing about gradual abolition — and if you think about it, your first reaction might be, ‘What were they thinking?’ — Nobody’s freed. The first people freed after the law is passed are babies who are born like the day after. So try to think about a world where you are born free, technically no longer encumbered by slavery, but all of your grown ups are enslaved. Is that not the craziest thing you’ve ever heard of?

So there’s another part of the provision. If a child is born, somebody’s got to take care of them, somebody’s got to nurture them, somebody’s got to be providing for them. But what does a free child do who’s born of enslaved parents?

What Pennsylvania does is it entitles the masters of the parents to 28 years of service from those children who are born free. Now, from 1780 through to the Civil War, people are not necessarily expecting to live into their 80s or 90s. They’re in a period of dependency probably until they’re 10, maybe 12. They become really prime laborers from age 12 into their 30s. So it is taking a really big chunk of their prime laboring years from them so that they can pay for their own upbringing.

CS: How did George Washington get around that law when he moved to Philadelphia and brought enslaved people with him? (Philadelphia was the U.S. Capital before Washington, D.C.)

KB: Washington uses a loophole. He’s a Virginia enslaver who lives in the President’s House and brings enslaved people into Philadelphia. So do his enslaved people become free the moment they set foot on soil in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, or do they retain their bound status? The law at the time of the passage of the Gradual Abolition Act is that an enslaver like Washington had six months. After six months, his enslaved people, by virtue of residence in a state that has gotten rid of slavery, will become free. So to avoid losing his enslaved people to freedom, Washington rotates them out of Philadelphia and back to Mount Vernon. That loophole got plugged in 1788.

CS: So at what point does slavery effectively end in Pennsylvania?

KB: Anybody born right before 1780 would technically be enslaved unless their enslaver decided to manumit them, or they were able to purchase their freedom. They could persist in slavery for their lifetimes. So we do know there’s a small number of enslaved people still in Pennsylvania — off the top of my head, almost single-digit numbers — in the 1820s. But this is a gradual abolition plan, and that means it gradually withers. It’s not a stroke of the pen that transforms everybody’s status all at once.

CS: At that point, what is Pennsylvania’s role in the Underground Railroad and the national abolition movement?

KB: There are a couple of things that are important to understand about this, by virtue of its place on the eastern seaboard. At the very beginning of the 19th Century, Philadelphia hasn’t yet been surpassed by New York as an important port. It’s still one of the most important cities in the new United States. It’s also the southernmost important city in the southernmost important state that has gotten rid of slavery. Thousands of people trying to escape slavery from more southern points come up north through Philadelphia. So Philadelphia soon has the largest population of free Black people in the new United States.

Pennsylvania is also a border state. What that means is that any tensions around slavery and freedom, there’s a physical line. On one side of the line, even though their freedom is really encumbered by gradual abolition, there is some legal recourse to people. On the other side of that line, people are legally enslaved. So it becomes a really contested space along that border. Philadelphia is an incredibly important place in the geopolitics of slavery, because it’s so close to that line.

What I will tell you about Philadelphia is a couple contradictory things. You have the legacy of the Quakers. You have free Black people who create the first Black churches in the United States. You have a really active and vital free Black community in Philadelphia. But you also have one of the most prestigious medical schools at the University of Pennsylvania. All the way up to the Civil War, that school attracts very large numbers of wealthy, white Southerners who send their kids there to become doctors. What you’ve got is a really kind of volatile and high energy mix and set of conflicts around whether the nation will go the way of a place like Pennsylvania, in terms of reforming its laws on slavery. You have people kind of fighting it out.

That becomes violence. There’s kidnapping in Philadelphia of Black children who can easily be spirited away and sent further south in slavery. There are claims by enslavers that their Black enslaved people have escaped, which, who knows if it’s true, but they use federal law to try to get them back. It’s a pretty fraught political environment.

CS: What is life like for Pennsylvania’s Black population in the 19th Century?

KB: There’s a pretty big free Black population, but free Black people are in a very vulnerable position in Philadelphia. There are kidnappings in the 1820s and 1830s. You get a series of what you might attach the label ethnic cleansing to, or the label of race riots perpetuated by white people. It’s a particular kind of violence with a particular kind of goal. At several moments in the early 1830s, white mobs attack Black neighborhoods, burning down schools, burning down orphanages, burning down churches, dismantling Black houses, and any vestige of civic presence in Black neighborhoods. Very few Black people are actually killed by these white mobs, but the goal seems to be to push Black people out of particular neighborhoods. And it works.

In 1838, two things happen. There was a big, lofty, ambitious building constructed by abolitionists and other progressive groups who wanted a public space that wasn’t a church to go talk about these issues. It’s called Pennsylvania Hall. They built this gorgeous building and they’re having a major convention on abolition when an angry mob with a kind of a ‘wink, wink, nudge, nudge’ permission from the mayor of Philadelphia, burns it to the ground within three days of its opening.

The other other part of this is that Black firefighting gangs have been kept out of firefighting. They’ve not been allowed to form and access water in Philadelphia and its neighborhoods this entire time. So these acts of arson have a particularly terrible impact on Black civic institutions, and homes, and neighborhoods because they don’t have the defensive equipment that all the other groups have. The Irish Catholics have their firefighting gangs. The native-born Protestants have theirs. But Black neighborhoods don’t because they’ve been excluded deliberately from that.

CS: Why do you think it’s important we remember the complexities of this history, even when it’s not pretty?

KB: I guess I would reframe that. You don’t have to get into the complexities and nuances to get to the not-so-pretty part. The basic storyline about slavery in the United States is really not a history that many people would stand up and puff out their chests and say, ‘Yes, I’m proud of that.’ It’s a pretty basic story, and it’s a persistent story, and there’s an abundance of evidence supporting it.

It’s not a story where there’s a lot of ways you could interpret the fact that, for example, the president of the United States enslaved people and then, to keep them from going free, moved them out of the President’s House in Philadelphia. You don’t need a lot of nuance to figure that one out.

It’s not the point of history to identify heroes. I question the premise that a nation absolutely needs to have these kinds of airbrushed heroes in order to anchor national purpose or identity. I guess I think there is a more mature way to approach the past — what I call sometimes with students, ‘History for grown-ups.’

A grown-up person knows that people are complicated, and that you rarely find pure villains, and even more rarely pure heroes. So I think we kind of have to just grow up a little, and get a little bit tougher. History is really not intended to provide us with a comforting fairy tale. It’s intended to help us understand how things happened the way they did, and how we ended up where we are.

The past is also a burden, in that it requires us to acknowledge and recognize, and maybe to repair. We can’t live in the present absolutely free of what people did before us. What they did before us has had consequences. And while we ourselves might not have done the things that George Washington did at the exact moment he did them, what he did, and what his generation did, and what the generations after him did, certainly left a mark. An imprint on American society that has a legacy.

So I sort of reject the idea that there is a simple story we’re making more complicated. Actually, the stories are always more complicated. It’s our own desire to tell ourselves a story to comfort ourselves that’s too simple.

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