On March 27, 2025, in an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” President Donald Trump complained of a “widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” He directed the interior secretary to “determine” if “public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties” of the government had been “changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.” He demanded our national parks remove “descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”

Last week, Trump quietly followed through on this threat, ordering the secretary of the Department of the Interior to remove from national parks references to slavery, artifacts connected with slavery, and other aspects of American history that the president apparently does not like or understand. The Washington Post reported that Trump’s order would change signage and information at the Harpers Ferry National Historic Park, various Civil War battlefields, and other historic sites. As the Post reported, the offensive information at Harpers Ferry includes “signs referring to racial discrimination and the hostility of White people to people who were formerly enslaved.”

At the national park at the site of the battlefield at Bull Run, in Manassas, Virginia, the administration wants to remove signs indicating that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War. Similarly, the president wants to remove a famous picture of an enslaved man named Peter (also sometimes called Gordon) that was taken in 1863 by a U.S. Army photographer.

Trump’s March executive order launching this campaign complains that the National Park Service has attempted to “rewrite” our history by ignoring “objective facts.” In reality, the administration seems to be grossly bothered by “objective facts.”

The picture of Peter is obviously an “objective fact.” It is not made up. It was taken in 1863 and reproduced across the North during the Civil War as an example of the barbarism of slavery.

Similarly, virtually every historian of the Civil War knows that slavery was the moving force for secession which led to the Civil War. We don’t have to listen to 21^st-century scholars to know that. Let’s look at what the South itself said as it left the Union.

The South Carolina secession convention declared the state was leaving the Union because northerners “have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery.” South Carolina also complained that in the 1860 election, northerners elected “a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery” and who has publicly declared that “ ’Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,’ and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.” This president was the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln. Not liking the outcome of the election, South Carolina left the Union.

Georgia proclaimed that “the subordination and the political and social inequality of the African race was fully conceded by all” at the American founding. But because all the northern states had ended slavery, and some allowed Black people to vote and hold public office, Georgia was leaving the Union. We can only wonder which historical account of the Civil War our current president wants to get rid of—the statement that the founding was based on “the subordination” of Black people or that Georgia was seceding because a majority of the states no longer supported slavery.

Texas was blunt. The secessionists there declared that Texas entered the Union “holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery—the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits—a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.”

In a speech just before the Civil War began, the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, declared: “Our new government[’s] … foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” In their own words, the moral basis of the Confederacy was slavery and racial subordination.

Thus, we know, and everyone at the time knew, that slavery was the cause of secession. That is why a Confederate army began the war on April 12, 1861, attacking Fort Sumter, a U.S. Army installation built with money from taxpayers across the nation. Leading the soldiers inside that fort was Maj. Robert Anderson, son of a Revolutionary War officer, a cousin of Chief Justice John Marshall, and a West Point graduate from the loyal slave state of Kentucky.

What about Harpers Ferry? The landmark, in what is now West Virginia, was the site of an attempt by the abolitionist John Brown to seize weapons at the national armory there, move into the mountains, and help enslaved people escape to freedom. He failed miserably and was hanged for his efforts. But his willingness to die to end slavery led to the first marching song of the United States Army in the Civil War: “John Brown’s Body.” Hanged for attacking slavery, he became a martyr to freedom. We can only speculate as to which of these truths the current administration finds inconvenient.

These are the facts of American history. They are not distortions, nor is displaying this information at national parks ideologically motivated. These and similar facts explain much about our nation. If President Trump wants to highlight the greatness of America, he should be doing more to teach us about men like John Brown and Maj. Anderson. He should be praising the more than 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors—many of whom were enslaved when the war began—who fought to preserve the nation and end slavery.

Slavery was terrible. It was horrible. From 1775 until 1865, more than 10 million people were held as slaves in the United States. There were 4 million slaves when the Civil War began. Many, like Peter, were brutalized. Removing mentions of slavery is dishonest. Slavery ended at the cost of the lives of more than 650,000 Americans. Southerners seceded to protect slavery and fought to preserve it. Northerners initially fought to preserve the nation, but under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln—our first Republican president—the North successfully fought to destroy slavery.

A Republican president who praises freedom and a free market economy should enthusiastically condemn slavery, praise abolitionists like John Brown and Frederick Douglass, and honor the soldiers, sailors, and political leaders who ended slavery.

There is no better place to do this than at our national parks and national museums, which can tell the story of ending human bondage and striving to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence, that we are all “created equal.”

President Trump is right: We need “objective facts” to understand our history. The park service has demonstrated this in the past and should continue to do so.