She Came North Because The 'Land of Liberty' Made Her Work For Free: Why The Tubman $20.00 Is Great For Canada

She came north because the ‘land of liberty’ made her work for free: Why the Tubman $20 is great for Canada

Library of CongressHarriet Tubman in 1911, two years before her death.

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If Canada could have hoped for anyone on a United States Treasury Note, it would have to be Harriet Tubman.

Here was a woman who lived in Canada, who risked her life to turn people into Canadians and stands as a testament that when it came to basic human freedom, the so-called “land of liberty” couldn’t hold a candle to a cold, agrarian British colony.

“I wouldn’t trust Uncle Sam with my people no longer, I brought ’em all clear off to Canada,” said Tubman during her lifetime.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that the U.S. $20 bill will soon feature Tubman in place of seventh president Andrew Jackson, one of four men featured on U.S. money who owned slaves.

“We’re ecstatic that we can call her one of our own,” said Rochelle Bush, historian for Tubman’s former church in St. Catharines, Ont.

Between the 1851 passage of the Fugitive Slave and the opening shots of the Civil War 10 years later, Tubman was a well-known attendee at the Salem Chapel British Methodist Episcopal Church.

That is, when she wasn’t slipping back over the border to smuggle more people to Canada via the Underground Railroad.

In total, Tubman freed roughly 300 former slaves by bringing them to Canadian soil, and hundreds of their descendants remain in the country to this day.

Within Tubman’s own family tree, in fact, Bush estimates there are roughly 100 descendants living in Ontario and British Columbia.

As she noted, it’s a further testament to Canada that some of these Tubman descendants look black, while others look white.

“Thank god for Canada; interracial marriage was accepted,” she said. In several former slave states, meanwhile, interracial marriage would not be legalized until 50 years after Tubman’s death.

Tubman has been named by Parks Canada as a person of national historic significance. Saint Catharines just opened the Harriet Tubman Public School, complete with a life-sized bronze statue of Tubman.

In fact, as Canada tries to find its own woman to put on the money, Tubman has been in the running.

Kathleen Powell, manager of the St. Catharines Museum, similarly touted that “someone from St. Catharines” was now on a U.S. banknote.

That banknote, incidentally, is currently worth $25.33 Canadian.

The honour will soon make Tubman among the most recognizable visages in the world, up there with Albert Einstein and the ubiquitous portrait of Mao Zedong.

National Post filesSt. Catherine's British Methodist Episcopalian Church, which was founded by many who fled slavery via the Underground Railroad.

United States currency is used well beyond the country’s borders, and greenbacks remain the official or unofficial means of monetary exchange in several Central American countries and unstable corners of Africa. 

And among this vast array of international transactions, it’s the $20 that changes hands the most.

“There’s more $20 bills than human beings out there,” said Douglas Mudd, director of the Edward C. Rochette Money Museum in Colorado.

The choice of Tubman is of sort of a no-brainer. In her 90 years, Tubman ran the gamut of United States history; a former slave, an abolitionist, a Civil War hero and an early suffragist.

And, like any archetypal American hero, she always carried a gun.

“In one person, she covers a number of different bases,” said Mudd.

The right-leaning National Review, for one, praised the addition of a “gun-toting, Jesus-loving spy” in place of “overheated pompous populist” Andrew Jackson.

Appearing on a U.S. treasury note has a way of thrusting people into immortality.

Alexander Hamilton was an influential Secretary of the Treasury, to be sure, but it was likely his face on the $10 that kept his legend strong centuries after his death.

It was the prospect of taking Hamilton off the money, in fact, that inspired a revival in the Founding Father’s life story, including the hit Broadway musical Hamilton.

The National Post recently spoke to the Alexander Hamilton Birthplace, located in the Caribbean country of St. Kitts and Nevis. Despite its remote location, the house still gets 3,000 visitors a year, most of them Americans.

U.S. history has long been unusually coy about pointing out where the Underground Railroad actually ended. Often, textbooks will merely say that slaves were fleeing “north.”

Canadians, of course, have a bad habit of smugly talking up their country in the presence of Americans, be it the benefits of socialized healthcare or noting that the Canadian Armed Forces largely sat out the Iraq War.

And Bush said it’s entirely fine now to “proclaim it to everybody” that the woman on the $20 bill appreciated Canada’s policy of not forcing black people to work for free.

Of course, in addition to former slaves, Canada also took in the people who owned them.

After the Civil War, in which Tubman served as a valuable Union spy and armed scout, British North America accepted many exiled Southerners from the defeated Confederacy, including Confederate president Jefferson Davis.

“Canada was the gateway to freedom,” said Bush, “not only for freedom-seekers (the name for Underground Railroad refugees) but for Confederates as well.”

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