Why Remove Hamilton Instead of Jackson?
Apparently, it is Hamilton that will get the ax on the $10 bill rather than Jackson on the $20 in order to make way for some fresh historical faces. I am not the biggest Hamilton supporter in the world, and he was never a President, but he had as much to do with the form our Constitution takes today as any man in history. On the other hand, for whatever points Jackson might make with me by opposing the Bank of the United States, he was really a horrible person. His attitude about blacks and his treatment of slaves represented the worst of the slave-holding South, his his ruthless role in wiping out of the Cherokee nation is beyond criminal.
To this day, I don't know how the conflict between nomadic Native Americans and European settlers looking to build towns and farms could ever have had a happy ending. But the one exception to this was the Cherokee, who settled down in communities in Georgia that in most ways mirrored European communities in the rest of the early United States. If there are any native americans we should have been able to integrate into American society, it was the Cherokee. And we wiped them out. Awful. I would rather the $20 bill be blank than have that genocidal maniac on it.
PS- would love to see someone like Harriet Tubman on the money, or really anyone else whose contribution did not consist merely of exercising power over me. Hell, put Steve Jobs on there -- the iPad, and the Apple II before it, have improved my happiness more than any politician.
