Federal court sides with Trump about slave history panels at National Park site



A federal appeals court has sided with the Trump administration in the decision to remove display panels about slave history at the President's House site in Philadelphia.

Activists accused the administration of trying to white out the troubling slave history of the site where Presidents George Washington and John Adams once lived.

'The decision to do this appears to be made because the President's House Site memorialized the nine enslaved individuals that were held there against their will by President Washington.'

A lower court had ordered the National Park Service to restore the panels, but a 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals panel found unanimously on Thursday that the order should be overturned.

The appeals court said the lower court had misinterpreted the contract between the NPS and the city of Philadelphia and also found the replacement installation was "full of historical context."

The court added that the replacement installations "highlight the momentous events that took place in the President's House and the other sites at Independence National Historical Park."

Workers removed the slavery panels from the site on the corner of 6th and Market Streets in Old City in Jan. 2026.

Paul Steinke of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia called the removal a "terrible day" for American history.

"The decision to do this appears to be made because the President's House Site memorialized the nine enslaved individuals that were held there against their will by President Washington and his wife, Martha," he said to CBS News, "and this is the only federal historic site that commemorates the history of slavery in America."

The city of Philadelphia sued NPS and argued that it had violated their agreement to seek "communication and consultation" before implementing any changes to the site.

District Judge Cynthia Rufe, who was nominated by former President George W. Bush, opened her ruling against the administration back in February with a quote from George Orwell's "1984."

RELATED: Judge orders Trump administration to restore slavery exhibits to presidential home site

An NPS spokesperson mocked the city of Philadelphia after the original ruling.

"We encourage the City of Philadelphia to focus on getting their jobless rates down and ending their reckless cashless bail policy," the statement reads, "instead of filing frivolous lawsuits in the hopes of demeaning our brave Founding Fathers who set the brilliant road map for the greatest country in the world — the United States of America."

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While many Americans claim that the founding fathers were not deeply shaped by Christianity but rather secular, president and CEO of the Museum of the Bible Dr. Carlos Campo and BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey beg to differ.

“Is that true what we hear — that all of the founders were just deists, that they didn’t really have any faith imbued in our founding documents?” Stuckey asks Campo, whose museum is currently showing an exhibit on the founding of America and the role of the Bible.

“Can we say that every founder was an orthodox Christian? No. And we wouldn’t say that. See, we have a mandate, unlike other places, that we have to tell the story fully and faithfully,” Campo tells Stuckey.


“But if we could only exhume the bodies of these men and talk to them again, I don’t think we can even fully understand how the Bible was truly part of the air that they breathed,” he explains.

“Even as we look at the different versions of the Declaration … this was a text they worked on together, and that they added the word ‘Creator’ with a capital ‘C’ — that in and of itself tells us, perhaps in many ways, all we need to know,” he adds.

“That’s such a good point that it was so ubiquitous in their culture … that they just didn’t realize how special and unique it was,” Stuckey responds.

The principles of the gospel, she explains, “filled them with this really radical and revolutionary idea that your rights don’t come from a monarch.”

“They come from you being a human being. ... But of course, I think through the Holy Spirit they did put some of those principles into our founding, which is amazing,” she continues.

Stuckey even pulls out a quote from John Adams, who once said, “The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity, as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.”

“So I don’t think anyone who studies the founding of our country could say, ‘Well, yeah, they were just kind of agnostic. They had a relativistic moral worldview,’” she says. “That’s clearly not true.”

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Our forefathers prayed on Thanksgiving. We scroll.



There was a time when Thanksgiving pointed toward something higher than stampedes for electronics or a long weekend of football. At its root, Thanksgiving was a public reminder that faith, family, and country are inseparable — and that a free people must recognize the source of their blessings.

Long before Congress fixed the holiday to the end of November, colonies and early states observed floating days of thanksgiving, prayer, and fasting. These were civic acts as much as religious ones: moments when communities asked God to protect them from calamity and guide their families and their nation.

Grounded in gratitude

The Continental Congress issued the first national Thanksgiving proclamation in 1777, drafted by Samuel Adams. The delegates called on Americans to acknowledge God’s providence “with Gratitude” and to implore “such farther Blessings as they stand in Need of.”

Twelve years later, President George Washington proclaimed the first federal day of thanksgiving under the Constitution. He asked citizens to gather in public and private worship, to seek forgiveness for “national and other transgressions,” and to pray for the growth of “true religion and virtue.”

Our problems — social, fiscal, and moral — are immense. But they are not greater than the God our ancestors trusted.

Other presidents followed suit. During rising tensions with France in 1798, John Adams declared a national day of “solemn humiliation, fasting, and prayer,” arguing that only a virtuous people could sustain liberty. The next year he called for another day of thanksgiving, urging citizens to set aside work, confess national sins, and recommit themselves to God.

For generations, this was the American understanding: national strength flowed from moral character, and moral character flowed from religious conviction.

The evolution of a holiday

In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln — responding to years of lobbying by Sarah Josepha Hale — established the last Thursday in November as a permanent national Thanksgiving. Hale saw the holiday as a unifying civic ritual that strengthened families and reminded Americans of their shared heritage.

Calvin Coolidge echoed this tradition in 1924, observing that Thanksgiving revealed “the spiritual strength of the nation.” Even as technology transformed daily life, he insisted that the meaning of the day remain unchanged.

But as the country drifted from an agricultural rhythm and from public expressions of faith, the holiday’s original purpose faded. The deeper meaning — gratitude, repentance, unity — gave way to distraction.

When a nation forgets

Today, America marks Thanksgiving with a national character far removed from the one our forebears envisioned. The founders believed public acknowledgment of God’s authority anchored liberty. Modern institutions increasingly treat religious conviction as an obstacle.

Court rulings have redefined marriage, narrowed the space for religious conscience, and removed long-standing religious symbols from public grounds. Citizens have been fined, penalized, or jailed for refusing to violate their beliefs. The very freedoms early Americans prayed to preserve are now treated as negotiable.

At the same time, other pillars of national life — family stability, civic order, border security, self-government — erode under cultural and political pressure. As faith recedes, government fills the void. The founders warned that a people who lose their internal moral compass invite external control.

Former House Speaker Robert Winthrop (Whig-Mass.) put it plainly in 1849: A society will be governed “either by the Word of God or by the strong arm of man.”

A lesson from history

The collapse of religious conviction in much of Europe created a vacuum quickly filled by ideologies hostile to Western values. America resisted this trend longer, but the rising influence of secularism and identity ideology pushes our society toward the same drift: a nation less confident in its heritage, less united by a common purpose.

Ronald Reagan saw the warning signs decades ago. In his 1989 farewell, he lamented that younger generations were no longer taught to love their country or understand why the Pilgrims came here. Patriotism, once absorbed through family, school, and culture, had been replaced by fashionable cynicism.

Thanksgiving offers the antidote Reagan urged: a return to gratitude, history, and shared purpose.

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Photo by Barney Burstein/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

Thanksgiving was meant to be the clearest expression of a nation united by faith, family, and patriotism. It rooted liberty in gratitude and gratitude in God’s providence.

Reagan captured that spirit in 1986, writing that Thanksgiving “underscores our unshakable belief in God as the foundation of our Nation.” That conviction made possible the prosperity and freedom Americans inherited.

Today’s constitutional conservatives must lead in restoring that heritage — not by nostalgia, but by example. Families who teach gratitude, faith, and national purpose build the civic strength the founders believed essential.

A return to gratitude

Thanksgiving calls each of us to humility: to recognize that national renewal begins with personal renewal. Our problems — social, fiscal, and moral — are immense. But they are not greater than the God our ancestors trusted.

That confidence is the heart of Thanksgiving. It is why the Pilgrims prayed, why Congress proclaimed days of fasting and praise, why Lincoln unified the holiday, and why generations of Americans pause each November to give thanks.

Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared at Conservative Review in 2015.