CNN
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A US Senator wants to speed up a decade-long plan to replace Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill with abolitionist Harriet Tubman.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, renewed her call on Tubman’s birthday earlier this month. She’s urging Treasury officials to redesign the bill with Tubman’s likeness, which would make her the first woman and Black American to be printed on US paper currency.
“Images on US paper currency are a reflection of our values and history,” Shaheen said in reintroducing the legislation. “Some of the most significant chapters of our collective history were shaped by women, which is why it’s egregious that a woman has never been featured on US paper currency.”
The proposed legislation calls on the Treasury to feature the abolitionist’s image on $20 bills printed after Dec. 31, 2030. CNN has reached out to the Treasury Department for comment on the bill.
Part of the push is to honor Tubman, a former slave who used the Underground Railroad to lead enslaved people north to freedom. Part of it is to demote Jackson, the President who kept scores of slaves at his Tennessee plantation and signed legislation that forcibly evicted thousands of Native Americans from their land.
But Jackson isn’t the only one of the seven White men on US paper currency who had a troubling history with slavery. At least five of the seven owned enslaved people at one time, although some gave them up later in life and became abolitionists.
The civil rights movement led historians to reassess the role of White supremacy in the US and forced Americans to take a harder look at their leaders, says Donald Nieman, a history professor at Binghamton University in upstate New York.
“We always reassess historical figures — especially those we put on the pedestal — as contemporary values change. And we should,” Nieman said. “Confederate leaders looked a lot different before the civil rights movement awakened us to the legacy of racism and White supremacy and helped us understand that they were fighting to preserve human bondage.”
The faces on US currency are mostly associated with core American values such as independence, liberty and democracy, and Harriet Tubman embodies all those, Nieman says.
The US Mint last year released a series of commemorative coins honoring Tubman, although efforts to put her likeness on the $20 bill have stalled in recent years.
Here’s a look at the seven men on current US currency bills and their complex histories with slavery.
As the leader of a fledgling nation at a tumultuous time, the nation’s first President had no shortage of challenges. After leading the Continental Army to victory over the British, Washington adopted and ratified the Constitution and helped unite former colonies into the United States.
But like many of his successors, he owned slaves. He inherited them at age 11 after his father died and left him the Virginia family farm, and bought more enslaved people as an adult.
As president, Washington avoided speaking about slavery, fearing it was a divisive issue that could tear apart the young country.
In his later years, he became more sympathetic to the abolitionist movement and in a 1799 will ordered his Mount Vernon slaves freed after the death of his wife, Martha. (She freed them about a year later, while she was still alive). He also ordered his estate to support his former slaves who were elderly or too sick to work.
The third President of the United States drafted the Declaration of Independence at age 33 with the words, “all men are created equal.”
Today historians at Jefferson’s estate in Monticello, Virginia, host tours that paint a delicate portrait of the man’s complex legacy.
Jefferson also called slavery a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot,” but like many of his contemporaries he held human beings as property his entire adult life. He had more than 600 enslaved people at several properties — the most of any US President. Some of them even accompanied him to the White House.
As a younger man, Jefferson argued for the abolition of slavery and in 1778 drafted a Virginia law that prohibited importing enslaved Africans. But, perhaps bowing to public opinion, he grew quieter on the issue by the time he ran for president.
Jefferson later maintained that any decision to emancipate slaves must be part of a democratic process and not handed down by, say, executive order.
America’s 16th president led a weary nation through the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation that led to the freeing of enslaved people. By all accounts, he never owned slaves himself.
“Lincoln grew in his understanding of race and equality, and … made invaluable contributions to the nation and to making the words of the Declaration a bit closer to being true,” Nieman said.
At the same time, Nieman said, Lincoln “held views and attitudes and sometimes expressed himself in ways that we consider racist today. Do we take down the Lincoln Memorial? I think we need a more nuanced view, one that recognizes that values evolve.”
While Lincoln spoke out frequently against slavery, his position on what should happen to freed slaves wasn’t so clear. It took him a while to figure out what steps to take next, according to historian Eric Foner, author of “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.”
“Even after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, he continued to declare his preference for gradual abolition (of slavery),” Foner wrote. “While his racial views changed during the Civil War, he never became a principled egalitarian in the manner of abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass.”
In Lincoln’s last public address in 1865, four days before he was assassinated, he recommended extending the right to vote to African Americans who had fought for the Union.
Alexander Hamilton | $10 bill
Hamilton is one of two non-Presidents featured on US paper money. Before his name became synonymous with a popular Broadway musical, he was one of the nation’s founding fathers.
Tubman was originally set to replace Hamilton on the $10 bill, but an outcry ensued. As America’s first treasury secretary, Hamilton founded the nation’s first major bank and played a crucial role in creating monetary policy and financial institutions.
He was part of a trio that wrote the Federalist Papers — a series of 85 essays published in New York newspapers urging residents to ratify the proposed Constitution drafted in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787.
Hamilton despised slavery and fought to end it — at least, that’s what most history books say.
But new research by the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site, the former upstate New York home of Hamilton’s in-laws, offers another, damning conclusion.
In a paper called “Alexander Hamilton’s Hidden History as an Enslaver,” Jessie Serfilippi, a historical interpreter at the mansion, said she reviewed his personal letters and other documents that show Hamilton purchased slaves for his household.
“Not only did Alexander Hamilton enslave people, but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally,” she wrote. “The denial and obscuration of these facts in nearly every major biography written about him over the past two centuries has erased the people he enslaved from history.”
Andrew Jackson | $20 bill
The legacy of the nation’s seventh President, who served from 1829 to 1837, is also complex.
Before his presidency, Jackson served in the House and the Senate. He was also a general in the War of 1812, and was hailed a national hero after he defeated the British in New Orleans.
His supporters praise him as a President who challenged the political establishment and secured more land for the nation, ushering in an important era of American exploration.
But critics have slammed his record on slaves and Native Americans.
Jackson’s Indian Removal Act forced Cherokees and other Native American tribes off their lands to make room for White settlers, leading to thousands of deaths in a grueling journey known as the “Trail of Tears.”
Jackson also owned a 1,000-acre plantation near Nashville that relied on labor from enslaved African American men, women and children. At the time of his death in 1845, he had 150 slaves on the property.
Jackson’s legacy has grown more controversial in recent years. In 2018, vandals targeted his grave in Nashville and painted it with profanities and the word “killer.”
Under the planned currency redesign, Jackson would not be completely wiped off the $20 bill. The front would feature Tubman, while the back of the new version would include images of Jackson and the White House.
Before Grant became the nation’s 18th President, he was a general who led the Union Armies to victory over the Confederacy in the Civil War. When he was elected President several years later — he was in office between 1869 to 1877 — he worked to abolish slavery and implement Reconstruction.
But before the war Grant also owned a slave named William Jones, whom he’d purchased from his father-in-law.
Jones worked in his St. Louis plantation for years before Grant legally freed him in March 1859. Around that time, Grant faced financial struggles and gave up farming to work in real estate. He could have sold Jones to a slaveholder but opted to free him.
Grant is believed to be the last US president who owned slaves.
Like Hamilton, Franklin did not serve as President.
But he was one of the founding fathers who helped draft the Declaration of Independence, was one of its signers and served as a US diplomat to France. He also was the creative force behind several key inventions, including bifocals, swim fins and a musical instrument called an “armonica.”
Throughout his life, he held many titles: inventor, scientist, printer, politician and author.
He also owned two slaves, and his newspaper ran notices on the sale or purchase of slaves.
In his later years, he became an abolitionist and considered slavery against the principles of the American Revolution. As president of a Pennsylvania abolitionist society, he petitioned Congress in 1790 to grant liberty “to those unhappy men who alone in this land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage.”
