Keep Hamilton on the Ten. Put Tubman on the Twenty.

“Have you given any thought to the woman who should be on the ten-dollar bill?” Brianna Kellar asked Hillary Clinton recently. “You know, I am very torn about it,” Clinton replied. “I want a woman on a bill. I don’t know why they take the ten-dollar bill. Some people are now agitating for the twenty-dollar bill.” Indeed, ever since the Secretary of the Treasury, Jack Lew, announced, last month, that the next version of the ten would feature a woman, that has been the baffled response. Alexander Hamilton, as the musical opening for previews on Broadway this week reminds us, has much to recommend him: he was the immigrant son of a single mother who became a founding father and the architect of our financial system. Why take him off the ten, and leave Andrew Jackson, who brutalized Native American communities, defended slavery, and opposed a national paper currency, on the twenty? A group called Women on 20s had already been organizing a drive to get Jackson off and a woman on. Harriet Tubman won the group’s online poll of who that woman should be, and she seems to be the leading choice all-around. Even Miss Oklahoma named her, when asked in the interview section of the Miss U.S.A. pageant this weekend, after regretting that Oprah was not eligible (under the rules, you have to be dead)—an answer that helped her win the title. Worse, Lew said that Hamilton’s defenders shouldn’t worry: he’d still be on the ten, sharing it with the yet-to-be-determined woman. (Clinton: “That sounds pretty second-class to me.”) Half of a ten is just a five.