Monuments Harriet Tubman on Currency

We are discussing paper money, so how is the governments monetary policy beyond the scope of this forum?
Thanks for your response.
No, we are not discussing "paper money". The topic is the proposal to honor Harriet Tubman on our currency. It is not whether our currency is sound or our government's fiscal policies.
 
Do you think currency changes are done at no cost to the taxpayers? Pretty obvious it costs more to change which nets no empirical improvements to government operations.
Thanks for your response.
Certainly, there is a cost. No one is denying that. If you want to make that part of an argument to keep our currency 'as is', please do so.
However, the topic is not whether to change: it is a specific proposal to put an image of Harriet Tubman on our currency. Among the questions that have come up are: Is she an appropriate choice? Should her image replace another person's image? Should a new denomination with her image be issued? Etc.
 
Thanks for your response.
Certainly, there is a cost. No one is denying that. If you want to make that part of an argument to keep our currency 'as is', please do so.
However, the topic is not whether to change: it is a specific proposal to put an image of Harriet Tubman on our currency. Among the questions that have come up are: Is she an appropriate choice? Should her image replace another person's image? Should a new denomination with her image be issued? Etc.
My posts have made it very clear that I oppose change on grounds of government outlays exceeding income. The topic is most certainly about change unless her image being used on currency is some sort of special definition of the word “change”
 
The key problem with the Harpers Ferry Raid is that people were murdered and no one was freed.

I don't care that they put Tubman on some currency, but the $20 bill is a bit over the top.
Where does Tubman rank among historical figures in the country? Would she even be in the top 100?
Yeah, too bad they weren’t successful in their goal to free people but it did serve as a catalyst for the coming jubilee and the destruction of the old antebellum south, which needed destroyed. Too bad they weren’t able to kill more of their enslavers and tormentors. I can’t speak for you, but if someone was enslaving me or my family because of the color of my skin I would certainly feel justified in murdering them to gain my & my family’s freedom.

A slave rising up to claim their own freedom and the people helping them to do so should be honored. The people fighting to keep them in chains are not the heroes- they are the bad guys every time, whether we’re talking 1860 morals or modern morals. I know it is very hard for the traditional mind to do so, but try to see things from someone else’s shoes- through someone else’s eyes. See it from the perspective of the slave and not the master. How would you feel and act in that situation?
 
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Thanks for your response.
No, we are not discussing "paper money". The topic is the proposal to honor Harriet Tubman on our currency. It is not whether our currency is sound or our government's fiscal policies.

I would like to know where you got I stated we are discussing whether the US dollar is strong or weak? IMO, no she doesn't belong on currency permanently, but it would not bother me if she was on some bill temporarily.
 
A slave rising up to claim their own freedom and the people helping them to do so should be honored. The people fighting to keep them in chains are not the heroes- they are the bad guys every time, whether we’re talking 1860 morals or modern morals.
I've said it before and I'll say it again- any people have a right to defend themselves against invasion and I definitely do not fault the South for doing so.

Good guy or bad guy?:
"[T]he adoption of the measures I advocated at the outset of the war, the arming of the negroes, the slaves of the rebels, is the only way left on earth in which these rebels can be exterminated. They will find that they must treat those States now outside of the Union as conquered provinces and settle them with new men, and drive the present rebels as exiles from this country....They have such determination, energy, and endurance, that nothing but actual extermination or exile or starvation will ever induce them to surrender to this Government." -Thaddeus Stevens, US House of Representatives, January 8, 1863
 
I would like to know where you got I stated we are discussing whether the US dollar is strong or weak?
Thanks for your response. I did not say that you did. You asked, "We are discussing paper money, so how is the governments monetary policy beyond the scope of this forum?", I responded. Again, the discussion does not concern monetary policy.
 
General Tubman and John Brown

By Norman Dasinger, Jr


US House Bill 1842- To Require the Secretary of the Treasury to mint commemorative coins in recognition of the Bicentennial of Harriett Tubman

Section 9 of HR 1842 dated March 11, 2021 states “During 1859 Tubman aided abolitionist John Brown by recruiting supporters for his raid on Harpers Ferry; a planned insurrection against slaveholders in Virginia and Maryland.”


On October 16, 1859, John Brown began his effort to initiate a slave revolt by taking over the United States arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). Doubt has been raised as to whether Brown believed his implausible, undermanned attack could succeed or whether he knew it was doomed yet wanted the publicity it would generate. William Lloyd Garrison said, “His raid into Virginia looks utterly lacking in common sense.” On October 20, 1859, The Richmond Dispatch echoed Garrison’s opinion with its review of Brown’s deadly foray, “Is it possible that the animosity of the North against us has reached such a degree of all consuming hate as to drive any of her citizens upon such efforts and make them blind not only to his vile wickedness but to his utter folly.”

Brown had originally asked Harriett Tubman to join him at Harper’s Ferry and part of his violent group. She met Brown in Canada in 1858. Prior, Tubman had claimed to have seen Brown in one of her prescient dreams. During the previous winter, Tubman told her friend Franklin Sanborn, editor of the Boston Commonwealth, of a reoccurring dream she was having of. . . “the head of an old man with a long white beard, gazing at her.” According to Rebecca Brooks in a September 13, 2011 story, “When she [Tubman] first laid eyes on Brown’s face, she realized she had seen it before. “

Brown considered her as one of his more important recruits and referred to her as ‘General’ Tubman. Following their meeting, both of them began speaking to wealthy individuals and sympathetic organizations. On May 8, 1859, Brown appeared at the Concord, Massachusetts Town Hall and spoke of his preceding aggressive action in Kansas but alluded to a wider war. Bronson Alcott, an observer that day, wrote, “Our best people listen to his words. Emerson, Thoreau and [State Supreme Court] Judge Hoar” many residents opened up their wallets “without asking particulars . . . He was the manliest man I ever saw.”

Brown’s ‘wider war’ plans included the implantation of an alternative to the US Constitution. He had many copies of the document printed and kept at a hideout a few miles from Harper’s Ferry. It contained forty-eight articles and included a preamble: “We, citizens of the United States, and the Oppressed People, who, by a recent decision of the Supreme Court are declared to have no rights. . . Do, for the time being, ordain and establish ourselves, the following Provisional Constitution and Ordinances, the better to protect our Persons, Property, Lives, and Liberty”. Tony Horwitz in his 2011 book Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War wrote, “Brown’s Provisional Constitution . . . was not just a governing document. It was a scare tactic.” As proof, article 43 included this provision: “Carry arms openly. All persons known to be of good character, and of sound mind and suitable age, who are connected with this organization, whether male or female, shall be encouraged to carry arms openly.” Horwitz also added, “According to Brown’s son Salmon, fifty years later: ‘He wanted to bring on the war. I have heard him talk of it many times’.” In what appears to have been a keen retrospective description The Richmond Enquirer on October 25, 1859 wrote, “The Harpers Ferry invasion has advanced the cause of Disunion more than any other event that has happened since the formation of this Government.”

Apparently, Harriett Tubman was fully briefed on Brown’s 1859 intentions. The Eastern Shore Journal on December 12, 2020 reported, “She even suggested he should raid Harper’s Ferry on July 4. Though it’s generally thought Tubman was fully committed to participating in Brown’s Raid, she disappeared at the crucial moment. Why she failed to join Brown remains a puzzle.”
 
Actually Harriet Tubman was best known for doing slave rescue--outwitting southern men (and she, a mere woman--and not well born at that) and she actually led an armed assault at the Combahee River Raid. Besides her achievements as an abolitionist, Harriet Tubman was also a major voice in the women's suffrage movement, working along with Susan B. Anthony.

She has been a credit and a benefactor to us all.

BTW If you are going to criticize her for her support of John Brown, you should also forget about Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson...making some lives intellectually poorer.
 
I'm not criticising but I feel she is overrated.I'm sure she did some fine things but I don't see where she rates this "hero worship" that has been bestowed upon her lately. I would think almost any President of the U.S.(Though I can think of a few "bottom of the barrel" presidents) would be more worthy of being on currency than an insurrectionist who guided 300 escaped slaves northward.
 
I'm not criticising but I feel she is overrated.I'm sure she did some fine things but I don't see where she rates this "hero worship" that has been bestowed upon her lately. I would think almost any President of the U.S.(Though I can think of a few "bottom of the barrel" presidents) would be more worthy of being on currency than an insurrectionist who guided 300 escaped slaves northward.
I suspect that you haven't read very much about her if you've reached that conclusion. Certainly if you limit so her accomplishments. She was a remarkable woman in several fields. 🥺
 
Put her on a coin, just please don't take Andrew Jackson off the $20 bill!
Jackson was a dichotomy: a poor president but a good man. If goodness of character is the criteria, I'd nominate my great uncle Henry. Uncle Henry was a very good man and (on a technicality) a better president than Jackson--the technicality being that Uncle Henry never was president. 😂
 
She was - in addition to her other accomplishments - the first woman to ever lead a US Military expedition. That raid alone freed over 700 slaves. This is the Combahee Ferry Raid.

440px-Harriet_Tubman_Civil_War_Woodcut.jpg


Frederick Douglass wrote in a letter to her in 1868 - "The difference between us is very marked. Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day – you in the night. ... The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown – of sacred memory – I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have."
http://www.harriet-tubman.org/letter-from-frederick-douglass/

Leading even a small handful of people out of slavery is impressive especially with all the forces arrayed to keep slaves in bondage. She had escaped slavery and willingly and repeatedly put herself back at risk to go south and free more people.

After the war she received little thanks for her work, being granted neither a salary nor a pension. She lived in poverty for most of her life. She was finally granted a pension in 1895 as the widow of a war veteran and, after much campaigning, a compromise pension in 1899 of $8 as a widow and $12 for work as a nurse. Her work as a spy and scout was never acknowledged.

She was involved in woman's suffrage movements later in life, working alongside Susan B. Anthony and others.
 
Jackson was a dichotomy: a poor president but a good man. If goodness of character is the criteria, I'd nominate my great uncle Henry. Uncle Henry was a very good man and (on a technicality) a better president than Jackson--the technicality being that Uncle Henry never was president. 😂
More than just a president, Andrew Jackson had an illustrious military career. I just read the book An American Lion and I think Jackson should stay in a place of prominence like on the $20 bill
I'm not reading through seven pages of this, except to say, I am a stalwart supporter of Harriet Tubman's likeness being used on our U.S. $50 bill, henceforth.

The time is now.
Oh no. And take Grant off??? No way. Give her a dollar coin. That should be Teri Ute enough
 
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