As you may know, in 2020 we are putting a woman’s face on our currency. The candidates include former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and the suffragette Susan B. Anthony, but the current favorite is Harriet Tubman, the former slave and abolitionist who helped found the Underground Railroad that carried so many slaves to freedom. I think Harriet Tubman is a fine choice.
The man she is supposed to replace, however, is not a fine choice. Obviously it won’t be dollar-bill George Washington or five-dollar-bill Abe Lincoln, and Ben Franklin’s place on our C-note is secure, as is Ulysses S. Grant’s on our fifty. Leaving us with Alexander Hamilton on the ten-spot and Andrew Jackson on our twenty, and according to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, the current favorite to be replaced is Hamilton.
Which is an outrage. Hamilton was Lew’s predecessor. He was our first Treasury secretary, and in that position he almost single-handedly created the economic and financial system under which we operate today. Say what you will about the banking system, without it we don’t have a modern economy, and Hamilton created it, overcoming formidable opposition because most of his fellow Founding Fathers preferred that America remain an agricultural nation of gentlemen planters (themselves) and yeoman farmers.
It was Hamilton who established our First National Bank, which became the central conduit for the commercial, industrial, mercantile, and international trading nation that we soon became and are today. “We honor Jefferson,” the columnist George F. Will once wrote, “but we live in Hamilton’s country.” That country has the world’s leading economy, thanks to the seeds Hamilton planted.
Andrew Jackson, by contrast, vetoed the re-chartering of the Second National Bank, preferring that the nation’s money be held in highly volatile state banks. A five-year recession, the “Panic of 1837,” subsequently ensued, and the blatantly unconstitutional manner in which he transferred funds from the national bank to those state banks resulted in the U.S. Senate censuring him, the only time in history it has censured a president.
Jackson was also a slave owner and racist who signed The Indian Removal Act, a law that forced Indians from their homelands in the Southeast, to be resettled in the Midwest (Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma), where the brutal winters killed thousands of Indians, as did the infamous “Trail of Tears” journey they were forced to take to get there. Hamilton, by contrast, co-founded the New York Manumission Society, which was dedicated to abolishing slavery.
So ask yourself this. If a former slave and abolitionist, Harriet Tubman, is to replace a man on our financial system’s exchange mechanism, our currency, shouldn’t she replace a slave-owning racist (and financial ignoramus) rather than a fellow abolitionist, and our financial system’s creator?
