The $20 bill just got more valuable, not, to be sure, as a measure of exchange, but in its intangible value for America – because yesterday Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced that a likeness of Harriet Tubman will replace that of Andrew Jackson on the bill’s face. An escaped slave who was cruelly beaten as a child, Tubman returned frequently to the South and guided so many slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad that William Lloyd Garrison dubbed her “Moses.” During the Civil War she became a Union spy and an armed scout, leading an expedition that freed over 700 slaves. Jackson, the nation’s seventh president, was considered one of its greatest in the history books of my youth. But his star has rightly dimmed, particularly because of the 1830 Indian Removal Act, which forced tens of thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands to Oklahoma along the deadly “Trail of Tears,” one of the saddest, most shameful events in our history.

There will, no doubt, be cries of political correctness, as we replace a white man, both president and general, with a black woman – laments that, in our efforts to conform to multi-cultural demands, we are rewriting our history.

Well, good for us. We are recognizing a part of our history we have too long ignored. We are honoring a woman of courage, faith and accomplishment who dedicated her life to equal rights and women’s suffrage. And maybe we are insisting, in a small way, that our money reflect our values.