Did you hear that archaeologists discovered the location of a house where Harriet Tubman spent part of her youth? Town & Country magazine reported on April 23rd that, “Buried artifacts, including broken pottery, glass, and a button, helped pinpoint the site of the former dwelling on land once owned by Ben Ross, the father of the renowned abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor.
“Tubman, whose maiden name was Aramint Ross (she later took her mother’s first name) was born into slavery in March of 1822. She was forced to work as a nursemaid, fieldhand, and woodcutter. Although she remained enslaved, she married a freed slave named John Tubman. In 1949, when she learned she might be sold, she escaped alone to Philadelphia and freedom.”
Also, in case you missed it, the Treasury Department is again moving forward in putting Tubman on the face of a new $20 bill after the effort was delayed indefinitely by the Trump administration in 2019. It will probably happen by 2030.
It’s doubtful that Jackson would lament being removed from the front of the $20. He’d probably prefer to removed altogether rather than just be sent to the back. Jackson opposed central banks and fiat currency and considered his re-election as a mandate on shutting down the Second Bank of the United States, which he did when the bank’s charter expired in 1836.
He once said, “If congress has the right under the Constitution to issue paper money, it was given them to use themselves, not to be delegated to individuals or corporations.”
Jackson recognized that paper money was theft. Paper money, personal freedom and privacy are incompatible. Paper money centralizes power to the state and diminishes the individual.
So is Tubman a fitting replacement for Jackson, the politically incorrect slave-owning Democrat and former Indian fighter who signed a bill that forced Indians from their ancestral homes in the Southeast into “Indian Territory” in what is now Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears?
The left laud Tubman for her efforts to free the slaves, but they ignore an inconvenient truth. The right laud her for because she was a “Republican” and because she carried a gun, but they, too, ignore an inconvenient truth.
Tubman supported nullification of laws she believed unjust, as evidenced by her activities with the Underground Railroad in violation of the Fugitive Slave Act that required all escaped slaves be returned to their masters if captured and that all officials and citizens of free states comply with the law.
What were Cliven Bundy and the occupiers of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge if they were not nullifiers of oppressive, unjust and unconstitutional laws? Leftists, of course, called them terrorists.
Tubman believed in gun rights. She carried a pistol on her rescue missions, both as protection from slave catchers and to “encourage” weak-hearted runaways from turning back, which would endanger the group. That encouragement would doubtless have included shooting in the back any former slaves who declined to stay with her if she thought they would “endanger the group.” That sounds very much how the military once treated deserters.
“I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me,” she once said.
The views in that quote sound conservative or libertarian, not leftist, because leftists are always eager to surrender their liberty to the state.
But truth be told, Tubman was little more than a terrorist because she conspired with and supported John Brown, the leader of the raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. She recruited for him and raised funds — soliciting from abolition-minded northern industrialists — for him and had even planned to accompany Brown on the raid but was prevented from it by illness.
Three and half years after Brown and six followers killed five men in pro-slavery Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas by hacking them with broadswords, cutting their throats and shooting them because they were suspected of being behind the sacking and burning of Lawrence, Kansas, Tubman was prepared to accompany Brown in his raid on Harper’s Ferry. The raid was designed to secure arms that would be used to free slaves — by force if necessary — and arm slaves for a race war in a violent rebellion against southern slave owners.
During the raid, Brown’s men killed a railroad guard, Harper’s Ferry’s mayor and a black railroad porter, injured eight other residents, kidnapped 40 townspeople and barricaded themselves in the armory.
In the ensuing battle to root them out of the armory, one Marine was mortally wounded and two hostages and 12 members of Brown’s party were killed.
Had Tubman not been too ill to participate, she most likely would have been killed in the shootout or hanged along with Brown, and doubtless would be seen today in a far different light.
But, given that the bones of the liberty-killing USA Patriot Act were assembled by then-Senator Joe Biden in the 1990s, and he himself uses fiat money to foment racial unrest, Tubman is a perfect choice to grace the $20 in today’s America… and don’t you dare argue.
Ben Carson did. If you recall, when the news first broke, he mentioned that the $20 wasn’t the only option. He was called an Uncle Tom. But the Leftist furor papered over another salient point Carson made: “We have lots of possibilities, all kinds of things we can do. But, you know, as you can imagine, there will come a time when we won’t have currency at all. I don’t think it’s all that far into the future.”
Written by Bob Livingston
