Harriet Tubman's Underground Railroad Missions and the Stalled $20 Bill

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery around 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, and escaped to Philadelphia around 1849, crossing into free territory alone after a first attempt with two of her brothers ended when they turned back. Rather than stay safely in the North, she returned to Maryland repeatedly over the following decade, making roughly thirteen documented rescue missions that guided about seventy enslaved people, including much of her own family, north to freedom along the network of safe houses, routes, and sympathizers known as the Underground Railroad. She became known as “Moses” for this work, and later claimed, a boast no contemporary account has ever disproven, that she never lost a single passenger.

Her methods were disciplined rather than improvised. She began journeys on Saturday nights, since newspapers could not publish runaway notices until Monday, giving her party an extra day’s head start; she used disguises, coded spirituals, and an intimate knowledge of the Maryland countryside, its rivers, and the position of the North Star to navigate; and after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act made the northern United States unsafe for escapees, she extended her routes into Canada. She carried a pistol on these missions, reportedly prepared to use it against slave catchers and, if necessary, to press forward any escapee who lost their nerve partway through the journey, since a single person turning back could expose the entire network.

Tubman’s Civil War service extended that record. She worked for the Union Army in South Carolina as a nurse, scout, and spy, and on June 2, 1863, she planned and guided the Combahee River Raid alongside Colonel James Montgomery, leading Union gunboats past Confederate mines and up the Combahee River to raid plantations and free more than 700 enslaved people in a single night, one of the largest single emancipation events of the entire war, and the action that made Tubman, by most accounts, the only woman to plan and lead a US military operation during the Civil War. She spent her later decades as an active suffragist and running a home for elderly and indigent African Americans in Auburn, New York, where she died in 1913.

The campaign to put Tubman on the $20 bill began in 2016, when Obama administration Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced she would replace Andrew Jackson, a pointed choice, since Jackson was himself a slaveholder and a driver of Native American displacement, with the redesign targeted for 2020, the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment. The first Trump administration’s Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, delayed the project, citing anti-counterfeiting redesign priorities for other denominations and pushing any release to 2028 at the earliest; a subsequent Treasury Department inspector general audit found the $20 note redesign had not even entered production design work and was unlikely to be ready before 2030. As of July 2026, the plan remains stalled rather than advancing: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Spectrum News the department is “not at present” pursuing the redesign, offering no further explanation and no revised timeline. A decade after it was announced, Tubman’s bill has not been produced, and the current administration has given no indication it intends to revive the project.