Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Why It Was Always Going to Be Tubman on Our Money
Why It Was Always Going to Be Tubman on Our Money
Dec 20, 2025 10:06 AM

Last Summer I predicted that Harriet Tubman would be replacing Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill. I was almost right. She’ll be replacing Andrew Jackson.

The U.S. Treasury announced last year that the $10 bill is the next paper currency scheduled for a major redesign — a process that takes years because of the anti-counterfeiting technology involved — and will feature a “notable woman.”

The new ten will be unveiled in 2020, the 100th anniversary of the passage of the nineteenth amendment, which gave women the right to vote. As the Treasury explained, “The passage of the nineteenth amendment granted women their right to fully participate in the system our country was founded on—a government by the people, a democracy.”

In a post last June I wrote: “I’m almost certain they already know who Treasury is going to choose: It’s going to beHarriet Tubman.” Instead, it was Jackson who got demoted to the back of the currency while Tubman will take his placeon the front.

I think the Treasury made the right decision. As the first Treasury secretary, Hamilton deserved to stick around on the $10 (leaders of the women’s suffragemovement will be featured on the other side). But it was time for a woman to join the men on our money and, based on the criteria used for consideration, Tubman is a solid choice. She was not only an abolitionist, she served inthe Civil War as a Union spy and became the only woman during that conflict to lead men into a battle.

Unfortunately, fans of Tubman will have to wait awhile longer to see her new portrait: the $20 isn’t scheduled for a redesign until 2030.

In the meantime, here was my reasoning from last year on why Tubman was all but inevitable based on the Treasury’scriteria for a “noble woman”candidate:

She will be dead, and pro-democracy — A primary criteria for getting your face on America’s money is that you have to be dead. Plenty of famous women meet that criteria, of course, but that’s the first hurdle. The second one sets a higher bar. As the Treasury website notes:

Democracy is the theme for the next redesigned series and the Secretary will select a woman recognized by the public who was a champion for democracy in the United States. The person should be iconic and have made a significant contribution to — or impact on — protecting the freedoms on which our nation was founded.

That requirement narrows the field considerably.

She will have name recognition — If you didn’t hear her name mentioned in history class in junior high, you likely won’t see her name linked to the new ten.

She will not be Susan B. Anthony — Anthony seems like she would be the obvious choice, considering her connection to the 19thAmendment. And she has plenty of champions (such as Dominic Bouck, O.P. at First Things) who would love to see her share the bill with Alexander Hamilton. But there is also an obvious reason it won’t be Anthony: she was already on the dollar.

The Susan B. Anthony dollar was a dollar coin minted from 1979 to 1981 and again in 1999. The public hated it—not Anthony, just the coin (which was too similar in size to the quarter). But Anthony had her shot. The Treasury Department is not going to waste this historic opportunity to simply shift Anthony’s visage from a coin to a paper bill.

She will be African American — To date, only two women have appeared on U.S. paper currency. One was white (Martha Washington) and the other was Native American (Pocahontas). It’s time for an African-American woman.

In light of those tentative requirements, the field is narrowed to only three candidates: Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth.

Parks has been called the “mother of the civil rights movement” because of her role in the Montgomery bus boycott. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993, was presented the Medal of Freedom Award by President Bill Clinton in 1996 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999, and after her death on October 24, 2005, Congress approved a resolution allowing her body to lie in honor in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. She’s a solid contender, but she’s too current a figure.

At the time of the currency unveiling, Parks will have been gone from this life for 15 years. Assuming that America will continue to exist and that Bitcoin won’t replace paper money, there will be plenty of opportunities in the future to honor Parks by putting her on our money.

That leaves only Tubman and Truth.

Both Tubman and Truth were former slaves who became abolitionists and later fought for women’s suffrage alongside Susan B. Anthony. Both are the very models of “inclusive democracy”, which make both the primary contenders for placement on the new ten.

I could have titled this article “Why Sojourner Truth Will Be on the $10 Bill”—and I almost did. If Truth were chosen over Tubman it’d be only a mild surprise. But Tubman gains a slight advantage because of her name recognition.

Tubman is better known because her role in the abolition movement is slightly more impressive. Truth gained prominence mainly as a speaker while Tubman was active in helping slaves escape to freedom. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison even dubbed Tubman “Moses” because of the way she led her people out of bondage.

For these reasons, Harriet Tubman will be the one sharing space on the new ten with Alexander Hamilton, the only Founding Father on our currency who never owned slaves.

How sure am I this will be Treasurer Lew’s choice? Almost certain. If I were a betting man I’d bet you a $10 it’ll be Tubman.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Fear the Boom and Bust — rappin’ with Hayek and Keynes
From Econstories.tv: In Fear the Boom and Bust, John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek, two of the great economists of the 20th e back to life to attend an economics conference on the economic crisis. Before the conference begins, and at the insistence of Lord Keynes, they go out for a night on the town and sing about why there’s a “boom and bust” cycle in modern economies and good reason to fear it. Lyrics sample (written by John...
Recall Aristide to Haiti? No way.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the ex-president of Haiti who has lived lavishly in exile as a guest of the South African government for the past six years, recently announced he was ready to go back and help Haiti rebuild from its catastrophic earthquake. Allowing the former despot Aristide — a long time proponent of liberation theology — back into the country would be the worst thing we could do to Haiti right now. The American government must resist any move by Aristide...
Bernanke bad for limited government and the little guy
This week’s reappointment vote for Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has created some strange bedfellows in Washington. A muddled middle of Republicans and Democrats supports the Keynesian’s reappointment, but the real odd couples are among the opposition. For different if overlapping reasons, free market proponents and far-left figures such as democratic-socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont are both convinced that Bernanke has done much to hurt our economy, particularly those in the bottom half of our economy. Desmond Lachman of The Enterprise...
A Reminder
Children are not the property of the state: A Christian family from Germany have been granted political asylum in the US after facing the threat of prison for home schooling their children. Uwe and Hannelore Romeike, who are evangelical Christians, were forced to flee Germany as they wished to educate their five children at home. Home schooling is still illegal in Germany under laws introduced during the Nazi era. The German law means that parents who choose to home school...
New Book: Echeverria on Real Ecumenism
Occasional Acton Institute collaborator and theologian Eduardo Echeverria has a new book out: “Dialogue of Love”: Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic Ecumenist. I haven’t gotten my hands on a copy yet, but the buzz—from some pretty respectable folks—is good. To wit, Francis Beckwith of Baylor University: This is an amazing book. Professor Echeverria, artfully and persuasively, shows how the Catholic and Reformed traditions can better understand, as well as learn from, each other. This book is a model on how...
Ineffective Compassion?
Writers on this blog have pointed to a lot of examples of passion when es to charity and public policy. But what can passion, or maybe just a passion, look like? The Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina Andre Bauer made ment saying government assistance programs for the poor was akin to “feeding stray animals.” I’m not highlighting ment just to bash Bauer and you can watch the clip where he clarifies ments. He continues in a follow up interview by...
A ‘reckless’ Green Patriarch?
Over at the American Orthodox Institute’s Observer blog, Fr. Hans Jacobse takes Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew to task for jumping on the global warming bandwagon: We warned the Ecumenical Patriarch that endorsing the global warming agenda was reckless. Anyone with eyes to see saw clearly that global warming (since renamed “climate change” — a harbinger that the effort might freeze over) was a political, not scientific, enterprise calculated to centralize the control of the economies of nation-states under bureaucracies. New evidence...
Latin America: After the Left
This week’s mentary: The left is in trouble in Latin America. Sebastián Piñera’s recent election as Chile’s first elected center-right president in decades owes much to the inability of the center-left coalition that governed Chile after 1990 to rejuvenate itself. Yet across Latin America there is, as the Washington Post’s Jackson Diel perceptively observes, a sense that the left’s decade of dominance is unraveling. Future historians may trace the beginning of this decline to the refusal of Honduras’s Congress, Supreme...
The Audacity of the Savior State
The current issue of Touchstone magazine features an impressive cover essay by Douglas Farrow, Professor of Christian Thought at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. In “The Audacity of the State,” Farrow uses the biblical Ichabod motif to examine the crumbling pillars of the family and church, which when properly respected form critical foundations for a flourishing society. In their place, writes Farrow, is the “savior state,” which “presents itself as the people’s guardian, as the guarantor of the citizen’s well-being....
Forgive us our deficits
This week’s mentary: As 2010 unfolds, many countries are confronting a public deficit crisis of disturbing proportions. Since 2008, countless politicians have underscored that a cavalier attitude to debt on the part of Main St. and Wall St. contributed significantly to the recent financial crisis. It’s therefore ironic to observe these contemporary preachers of thrift plunging developed economies into an abyss of public liabilities. In 2009, for example, the Obama Administration spent more money on new programs in nine months...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved