The announcement that Harriet Tubman was chosen to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill came as a shocker to almost everyone who heard it.
“Who’d have thought that she would actually be chosen?” asked James Willis when he heard the news.
The Treasury said last year it would put a woman on the $10 bill, and Tubman, a noted Civil War abolitionist, was said to be a top contender.
Andrew Jackson, the seventh U.S. president and a former slave owner, will share the $20 bill with Tubman– the former slave on the front and the former slaveowner on the back.
© Provided by MarketWatch Hamilton to stay on $10 bill, Harriet Tubman to replace Andrew Jackson on $20 bill
Why the $20 bill? The Atlantic’s Yoni Appelbaum recalls a story of that makes the choice more than appropriate. According to the narrative Tubman once went to the home of an abolitionist, Oliver Johnson, and asked for $20 to help secure the freedom of her parents. Johnson turned her down. But later, she is said to have awakened after a hunger strike to find that someone had given her $60 — which she used to help free her father.
