In the days before the Civil War, the South worked hard to censor any literature that cast slavery in a negative light. Officials in Charleston, S.C. went through mailbags for abolitionist newspapers. Legislatures passed laws banning any publication that may show “a tendency to make our slaves discontented.” In Maryland, the Rev. Jacob Gruber was prosecuted for daring to preach a sermon that hinted that slavery might be sinful. Anyone found with a copy of the explosive novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was subject to arrest.
I wrote about this censorious mania to preserve the fiction of “happy and contented slaves” in a recent book about the important role played by enslaved people in achieving their own freedom. It was published in September under the title The Road Was Full of Thorns. I could not have dreamed that my book itself would be censored—by the U.S. Government, the side that supposedly won the Civil War.
Censorship often works like this—indirectly, requiring no specified demands but rather a vague climate of intimidation that encourages “an abundance of caution” when making decisions about what voices should be heard.
A little background. In May of 2025, a few months into Donald Trump’s second term, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued Order 3431 entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It directed the superintendents of national parks and monuments to “review property for inappropriate content” and scrub their facilities of “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans.”
The order to whitewash America’s historic sites of anything less than rosy about the nation’s past has led to some predictable embarrassments. Visitors to Independence Hall in Philadelphia won’t learn much about the enslaved people owned by the founding fathers. The internment camp at Manzanar won’t have anything “negative” about the detention of 120,000 Japanese Americans in World War II. Fort Moultrie National Monument no longer has information related to rising sea levels that threaten Charleston Harbor. The order extends to books and materials on sale at the gift stores. Books related to Malcolm X and other Black leaders have been reportedly removed.
My own book details the consequential events at a place called Fort Monroe in Virginia that led directly to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the end of American slavery. Yet it is not for sale in the bookstore of the Fort Monroe National Monument. Because the book tells a hopeful story about how enslaved people ran toward the American flag during the Civil War, sought their own freedom and helped tip the military balance against the Confederacy, I would have thought it would have been in alignment with even the narrowest conservative definition of patriotic content. But the cover depicts seven members of the U.S. Colored Troops standing at attention. The jacket copy makes it clear that it is about slavery. It is not hard to imagine it setting off minor alarms on the part of the National Park Service or Eastern National, the concessionaire with the exclusive contract to supply the bookstore.
I asked the National Park Service whether this book had been censored. “Neither the Department of the Interior nor the National Park Service leadership gave direction to remove or prohibit your book, and no such directive has been issued under Secretary’s Order 3431,” they told me in a written statement. Eastern National did not return multiple calls seeking comment.
A strong clue to what happened might be found in a letter that went out to regional Park Service directors on November 25, 2025 asking for a review of “all retail items available for purchase in outlets operated by park cooperating associations and concessioners” to make sure they were in accord with the administration’s ideological goals. “Items identified as non-compliant with this order must be removed from sale immediately,” said the memo, signed by comptroller Jessica Bowron.
A leaked database of inspections shows that officials at Yosemite National Park, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, among other places, had singled out books in the bookstore for review. At the latter place, an anonymous official wrote that “out of an abundance of caution,” books such as The 1619 Project, which details the origins of American slavery, would be targeted for removal. This was their decision, not that of the Interior Department.
Censorship often works like this—indirectly, requiring no specified demands but rather a vague climate of intimidation that encourages “an abundance of caution” when making decisions about what voices should be heard.
Just don’t look for it in a national park or monument, and certainly not at Fort Monroe, the place where the greatest cover-up in American history all started to come apart.
It is a well-known feature of civil society that nervous middle managers often act far more radically than top executives out of a sense of self-preservation. In his short story “The Death of a Government Clerk,” Anton Chekhov writes of a clerk so mortified about a misplaced sneeze on a general’s sleeve that he literally dies from anxiety, even as the general didn’t give the sneeze a second thought.
With the example of widespread firings and layoffs throughout the federal government, it simply wouldn’t make any sense for a National Parks superintendent to risk a career on a bookstore choice. So the range of voices heard at America’s most important sites becomes narrower, leaving out important parts of our collective story.
We tried this before. An infamous “gag rule” prohibited any Congressional debates on the existence of slavery from 1835 to 1844 before it was overturned on Constitutional grounds. Nine crucial years of expansion and solidification of the pernicious institution went by, speeding the nation’s road toward a grinding war.
The irony was that the South’s preferred message about “happy and contented slaves” was all a lie. Instead of being proved on the ground of open debate and inquiry, it had to be proved in the Civil War when the enslaved people bolted toward the Union Army at the first possible opportunity, to the astonishment of the slaveholding class which had believed its own cheerful propaganda
You’d be able to read about this psychological shock in The Road Was Full of Thorns. Just don’t look for it in a national park or monument, and certainly not at Fort Monroe, the place where the greatest cover-up in American history all started to come apart.
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The Road Was Full of Thorns: Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War by Tom Zoellner is available from The New Press.
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