The U.S. Treasury made the right decision

Harriet Tubman deserves to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill. Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew recently announced that Tubman would replace Jackson. This was a good move.

Harriet Tubman was a slave, a nurse in the Civil War, an abolitionist and an Underground Railroad conductor. Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, believed the Earth was flat, owned slaves and was responsible for the Trail of Tears, which caused the deaths of Native Americans. With this, I believe Harriet Tubman was obviously a better choice.

Andrew Jackson is the man responsible for some of the Native American people’s oppression and discrimination because he signed into law the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which removed the Native Americans from their land, with or without their consent, and put them on reservations. The devastating effects included the deaths of 15,000 Native Americans.

About 10 years later, a slave named Harriet Tubman escaped captivity. She escaped by traversing the Underground Railroad. After that she went to Pennsylvania and worked in a hotel to provide for herself. Then, she heard her family was going to be sold, which meant they would be separated. She went to Maryland and helped them escape. Once again she was traversing the Underground Railroad, but now with the company of her family. She had gotten them safely to the city of Philadelphia, making her a conductor on the Underground Railroad. She then went on to free at least 70 slave families!

But that wasn’t the only time she saved lives. During the Civil War, she became a skillful nurse. She introduced an herbal cure for dysentery, and she helped sickly smallpox victims but never caught the disease herself. She was not only one to help save lives, she also aided in attacking the Confederates. Harriet Tubman was a spy. She was so good at being a spy she was named Commander of Intelligence Operations for the Union Army’s Department of the South, according to the book, “Who Was Harriet Tubman?” She cut off supplies from Confederate troops with the help of 300 African American soldiers. I believe we all should’ve thanked and honored Harriet Tubman by putting her on the $20 bill a long time ago. This would have shown not only how important Harriet Tubman was to the survival of our country, freeing of slaves from terrible conditions, but also building bridges between our country’s racial groups that are angry and being discriminated against. In a time when there is much turbulence in our country, we should try to right the wrongs of the past.

Jacob A. Finch lives in Kent with his parents and is a sixth-grade student at Kent Center School. These are his musings on current events, culture and technology.