Perspective: Harriet Tubman, America’s foremost female patriot, belongs on the $20 bill now
A mural of abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the side of a building in Richmond. By Elizabeth Cobbs Elizabeth Cobbs is the Melbern Glasscock chair in American history at Texas A&M, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and author of"The Tubman Command, A Novel," released this week. May 26 at 6:00 AM Harriet Tubman won an Internet vote in 2015 to decide which American woman should appear on the nation’s currency by 2020.
Historically, a patriot is someone who symbolizes, advances or fights to defend the ideal that all people are created equal. By this standard, many Americans would qualify, but each man on America’s bank notes did something extraordinary to advance the nation’s founding ideal that “all men are created equal.”
How does Tubman rank among these men? The scholarly record is clear. Tubman helped redeem America from its original sin to bring our nation in line with its founding ideal. She embodies the resistance to slavery. The potential consequences were horrifying. Massachusetts abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who later commanded the first official regiment of African American troops, called her “the greatest heroine of the age.”
Frederick Douglass knew no one, except the abolitionist John Brown, who “willingly encountered more perils.”But her patriotic contributions did not end when war broke out. Tubman served the American cause on the occupied Sea Islands of South Carolina. According to the brigadier general who later recommended her for a military pension, Tubman operated as a “spy” who “made many a raid inside the enemy’s lines, displaying remarkable courage, zeal, and fidelity.
In other words, Tubman was both an antebellum hero and a war hero. She helped change the fight to preserve the union into a fight to honor the nation’s highest ideal.
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