From slave owner to slave liberator

Harriet Tubman replaces Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill

News that Harriet Tubman will replace Andrew Jackson as the face on the $20 bill has been justifiably met with widespread jubilation. Not only is it a welcome change to have a woman and a non-European American on U.S. currency, it’s moving that we are honoring Tubman.

She became famous as an escaped-slave smuggler and abolitionist, but was an even more phenomenal human than most people know. Towering at all of five-feet-zero-inches, Tubman worked as a spy during the Civil War, during which she helped plan and lead a raid in South Carolina that freed hundreds of slaves (and, she complained later, nearly destroyed the dress she wore through the entire operation). She is said to have once declined an offer of anesthesia during brain surgery and bit an actual bullet instead. And, though she was poor her entire life, Tubman’s generosity was legendary—she donated a section of her small property to establish a home for poor, elderly African Americans, into which she herself, being poor, old and black, eventually moved.

Tubman’s visage on the $20 will be a welcome sight, but there’s another element of the story, of course. Tubman, a famous former slave, is replacing a famous slave owner, “Old Hickory,” America’s seventh president, and the architect of one of this country’s most successful exercises in ethnic cleansing: Andrew Jackson, whose mug will be moved to the back of the bill. 

As many an Oklahoman will already be aware, Jackson was the chief proponent and implementer of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which set in motion the removal of Native American tribes and their slaves from lands in the southeastern United States, in exchange—for awhile—for sovereignty over land west of the Mississippi, in what is Oklahoma today. Many of the state’s residents are the ancestors of the survivors of that pre-industrial crime against humanity. It was a moral outrage, a national tragedy, and there were politicians—including Jackson’s fellow Tennessean, David Crockett—who said so at the time. 

So what on earth is Jackson doing on our money in the first place?

I posed the question to Dr. Mark Cheathem, author of Andrew Jackson: Southerner. 

“Jackson was chosen to be put on the $20 bill in 1928,” he told me. “He was likely chosen because of his commitment to the Union during the nullification crisis,” a dress rehearsal, basically, for the Civil War. “He also was a popular military hero because of his victory at the Battle of New Orleans. He also promoted democracy, or, as it was considered during his era, and he fought governmental corruption.”

Fair enough. 

It must also be said that Jackson’s Indian Removal policy was not intended to be an exercise in genocide, as some suggest, but something more like the opposite. The forced migration of Native Americans to Oklahoma was the culmination of decades of strife between sovereign tribes and Americans illegally encroaching on their lands, many of whom really would have liked to see the tribes simply eradicated. Andrew Jackson was a racist, but he wasn’t looking to exterminate Native Americans. You’ll note that there was no Trail of Tears from the northeastern United States, and it’s not because nobody was living there when Europeans arrived. 

For now, Tubman and Jackson will share the $20 bill in an immaculately weird illustration of the tragic and immensely complicated history of this country of ours. One hopes Tubman remains a face on our money
for a very long time. As for Jackson, even if the current balance of power, with Tubman on the front and Jackson on the back, is satisfying in a certain way, I wouldn’t be sad to see him go. Neither, apparently, would his biographer, who has a cool idea to get more people like Tubman in circulation. 

“I am delighted with the Treasury Department’s decision to replace Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the front of the $20 bill,” Cheathem said. “It’s a symbolic gesture, but a good one. Secretary Lew should go even further and implement a process of regularly rotating historic figures, thereby giving many less-recognized—but no less American—individuals, groups and perspectives a more prominent place in our marketplace of ideas.”

For more from Denver, read his article on Oklahoma's attraction to Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.