The decision to replace former President Andrew Jackson’s image on the $20 bill with the abolition activist Harriet Tubman may seem like a turn inward, away from the foreign-policy-focused presidents and statesmen who have graced U.S. currency since the early 20th century. But Tubman’s role in a network that moved people to freedom in British colonial Canada was part of a broader struggle between competing visions of American foreign policy, among those who saw the hemisphere as a battleground for slavery, or for freedom.
Tubman was born in the early 1820s, in a period of forced migration known as the Second Middle Passage, when about a million Black people were trafficked from the older, coastal states to fertile, cotton-growing land taken from Native Americans in the new Louisiana Territory. There, they were sold down the river to the Deep South: Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama.
