A NEW FACE ON THE US $20 BILL
One of the most interesting and inspiring people in all of history I have ever studied is known to most as Harriet Tubman. I can’t get enough of watching shows about her and the Underground Railroad.
As a retired engineer on a railroad who hated that job so much that I still have nightmares about being back at work there, Harriet Tubman’s “Railroad” is the only one that holds any fascination for me.
We know her as Harriet Tubman, but she was born Araminta Ross sometime between 1820 and 1822 as a slave in Dorchester County, Maryland. Harriet was her mother’s name and when “Minty” (short for Araminta) gained her freedom and was separated from her family, who were still slaves, she took her mother’s first name to feel closer to her. Slaves often took a new name once free and called it their freedom name. Tubman was her married name, though most slaves were not allowed to marry legally. Minty lived with and loved John Tubman as her husband from 1844 until she escaped to Pennsylvania in 1849.
Harriet Tubman was known as “Moses” to both slaves and slave owners alike in the South because she led slaves to freedom via the “Underground Railroad” like the Biblical Moses rescued the Israelites from bondage in Egypt.
She was the most wanted criminal in the South and a $40,000.00 reward was offered for her capture by slave owners. $40, 000.00 in the 1850’s would be almost 1.5 million dollars in today’s money!
Tubman did not invent the “Underground Railroad” as some have thought, but made use of it to help her in leading slaves to freedom. She was known as a “conductor” and was never caught and she never lost a single “passenger.”
It amazes me that once she gained her freedom she could have lived free and happy in Pennsylvania and later in Canada and never looked back, but that was not who she was. She made several trips back to Maryland and was responsible for freeing dozens of slaves by leading them north to Canada after the US passed the draconian “Fugitive Slave Law.”
John Tubman gave up waiting on Harriet after she escaped and remarried another woman, which broke her heart. Her first trip back to Maryland was to lead John to freedom, she thought, but she said God showed her that though her husband refused to be go north with her that there were many others who needed her help to be free.
Once the Civil War broke out Harriet Tubman was the first African American woman to serve in the United States military.
“Through the Underground Railroad, Tubman learned the towns and transportation routes characterizing the South—information that made her important to Union military commanders during the Civil War. As a Union spy and scout, Tubman often transformed herself into an aging woman. She would wander the streets under Confederate control and learn from the enslaved population about Confederate troop placements and supply lines. Tubman helped many of these individuals find food, shelter, and even jobs in the North. She also became a respected guerrilla operative. As a nurse, Tubman dispensed herbal remedies to black and white soldiers dying from infection and disease.”
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/harriet-tubman
Harriet Tubman was friends and contemporary with Frederick Douglas, John Brown, and Susan B. Anthony. She ended up remarrying a Union Soldier (Nelson Davis) who had also been born in slavery and was twenty years her junior. They never had children but adopted a daughter. Harriet Tubman died a natural death of old age in 1913, which seems like a long time ago, but to give it some perspective, my grandmother was 10 years old when Tubman died!
There has been a movement to put Harriet Tubman’s picture on the US twenty dollar bill, and it appears that it will happen eventually, and I say I can’t wait to honor such an incredible inspiring figure from our past.
The BBC says that President Biden has revived the project, with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki telling reporters the Treasury was “exploring ways to speed up” the process.
When it becomes reality that would make Harriet Tubman the first African American to appear on a US banknote, and the first woman in more than 100 years.
I hope it happens. This one thing I agree with Joe Biden on! Harriet Tubman is a person I’d like to meet in Heaven.
