05:42 Aug 20 2018
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Harriet Tubman, Enemy of the State
Chris Campbell
By Chris Campbell
Apr 22, 2016
--Araminta Harriet Ross was born into state-sanctioned slavery in Maryland in the 1820s.
As a child, she was beaten regularly at the hands of her “masters.” Yet, she grew up to be, despite constant attempts to break her spirit, consistently and relentlessly defiant.
As a teenager, for example, she once blocked a doorway so that a fellow slave could escape a severe beating. This sent her overseer into a fury. In a blind rage, he threw a two-pound weight at her head, fracturing her skull and condemning her to a lifetime of sporadic seizures and narcolepsy.
In 1844, undeterred, Harriet married a freeman named John Tubman. A few years later, in 1849, to secure her own freedom, she fled to Philadelphia. In Philly, she was able to find work and save enough money to go back and free her family and, eventually, as many slaves as she could convince to escape.
In all, Tubman went on 19 missions through the Underground Railroad. And she was so determined that, during each escape, she threatened to shoot any liberated slave who tried to turn back.
“You’ll be free,” she told them, “or die.”
“I was a conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years,” Tubman said later, reflecting on the Underground years. “I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”
We admit, given all of this, Tubman is a strange choice to put on government-issued money. In her lifetime she was, in the State’s eyes, a criminal. The government, in fact, wanted to see her killed. She was considered a nuisance and dangerous to “law and order.”
At one point, government officials endorsed a $40,000 bounty (over a million bucks in today’s cash) for her capture — dead or alive.
Harriet Tubman Wanted Poster
Because the government had made the immorality of slavery legal, Tubman was forced to become one of its greatest enemies of her time. And it’s a good thing she stood up.
Morality calls for the brave to break unjust laws until those laws are broken beyond repair. And Tubman not only heard the call, but acted upon it, despite others constantly trying to “remind her of her place.”
“As the abolitionists saw it,” Damon Root writes, “they weren’t stealing anybody’s property because nobody had a right to own human property in the first place. Tubman was thus fully justified in liberating herself and others from the tyrannical regime that violated their natural right to self-ownership, a right which John Locke famously called man’s ‘property in his own person.’”
“So,” Nick Gillespie writes in Reason, “Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) is going to be the new face of the $20 bill. Great choice, yes.”
A far better choice than the likes of Andrew Jackson, who stood for nearly all things abhorrent about early America. Jackson, you might recall, passed the Indian Removal Act which displaced tens of thousands of Native Americans. A slave-owner himself, Jackson hoped he’d be able to open more plantations on the stolen land.
That said, here are four reasons, according to Gillespie, Tubman is an excellent choice as the new face of America’s $20 bill:
She chose to live free or die and articulated that message for all to understand. “I had reasoned this out in my mind,” she said, recalling the death of her master and the necessity of escape. “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 exemplified higher-law theory, which holds that laws violating basic human rights are null and void regardless of the repressive superstructures created to legitimate and maintain them, and risked her life freeing about 70 other slaves as the “Moses” of the Underground Railroad. Her actions thus stemmed from a reading of rights that synchs with libertarian legal scholar Randy Barnett’s discussion of limits on government power in his latest book. At the same time, she didn’t advocate violence in the mode of John Brown, whose goal of ending slavery she shared.
She believed in armed self-defense, a radical-enough concept for poor whites, let alone renegade blacks. During her Underground Railroad missions, she carried a pistol both for protection against slave-catchers and, reportedly, to keep ambivalent “passengers” in line. To this day, blacks have a strong and yet routinely overlooked belief in the Second Amendment, leading one historian to argue that “guns made the Civil Rights movement possible.” The desire of relatively powerless minorities to arm themselves can still be heard in pro-Second Amendment remarks made by rappers such as Ice-T.
She was a suffragette who, after helping slaves escape and working as a spy and scout for the Union in the Civil War, committed herself to women being allowed to vote and have equality under the law. According to Wikipedia, when Tubman was asked whether she believed women deserved the vote, she replied, “I suffered enough to believe it.”
At a time when women in general were supposed to be quiet and submissive, Tubman defied both the law and social norms, grabbed a pistol and helped to free any African American slave who dared follow her into the unknown.
“Tubman,” Doug Bandow wrote in the American Spectator blog, “fought enormous injustice and promoted human liberty. She advocated genuine equality of opportunity, allowing women to vote, rather than the sort of PC notions of equality popular today. She exhibited courage in fighting and breaking unjust laws. She was no ivory tower theorist, but took the lead in putting her views into action. She never saw her work as done, but constantly joined anew the battle for freedom. Never did she wait for bureaucrats, politicians, judges, lawyers, and others to act. Instead, she acted to rescue the oppressed.”
It’s no question, then, that Harriet Tubman, a true American hero, is an excellent choice for the American $20. The real question, though, is this: Is the $20 Federal Reserve Note worthy of Harriet Tubman?
Thomas L. Knapp of the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism thinks not.
Read on for Knapp’s take on the up-and-coming $20, and why Tubman’s face would look better on a Bitcoin…
Dishonoring Harriet Tubman
By Thomas Knapp
When Harriet Tubman died in in March of 1913, the US $20 bill bore George Washington’s portrait and the inscription “THIS CERTIFIES THAT THERE HAVE BEEN DEPOSITED IN THE TREASURY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TWENTY DOLLARS IN GOLD COIN PAYABLE TO THE BEARER ON DEMAND.”
Later that year, Congress passed, and US president Woodrow Wilson signed into law, the Federal Reserve Act. The following year the Federal Reserve issued a new $20 bill, adorned with the portrait of Grover Cleveland. In 1928, the first $20 bill bearing the visage of Andrew Jackson appeared. Even though the Federal Reserve had taken over the creation of “money” (loosely defined) from the US Treasury, the note still promised that it could be redeemed for gold at the US Treasury, or gold or “lawful money” at any Federal Reserve Bank.
Nearly 90 years later, as the Treasury announces that Tubman’s likeness will grace the next $20 bill, Federal Reserve Notes are just paper, no longer redeemable in gold but sustained only by the faith of buyers and sellers in a government nearly $20 trillion of its own debased dollars in actual debt and even deeper in the hole when unfunded promises of future spending are taken into account.
Due to a cumulative inflation rate of more than 2,300% since 1913, a $20 bill today will buy goods valued at 83 cents in 1913 currency.
That differential represents something that Tubman spent her whole life fighting. I wonder how one of slavery’s greatest opponents would feel about having her image appropriated for use on the symbol of its resurgence — an instrument of debt representing the promises of politicians to hold their subjects in perpetual bondage while taking the payments out of our hides?
Tubman was no stranger to financial swindles like the Fed’s disappearing gold scheme. In 1873, she fell victim to a private sector cash for gold con that ended with her knocked out, robbed, tied up and left penniless in the woods. I doubt she’d have fallen for the Federal Reserve scam.
In recent years a few scattered politicians (most notably former US Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), his son US Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT)) have sponsored or supported legislation demanding an audit of the Federal Reserve System.
Laudable, I guess — especially in the case of Sanders, who broke with the Democratic Party to support the latest version of the bill even as he ramped up his Democratic presidential campaign — but a little short of what Harriet Tubman might have expected.
Auditing the Fed isn’t enough. Like Tubman said, “never wound a snake; kill it.”
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are the 21st century’s version of the underground railroad. If the US government won’t kill the Federal Reserve, free markets will.
[Ed. note: Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida. This article originally appeared on the Garrison Center’s website here.]
Regards,
Thomas Knapp
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