Andrew Jackson Hasn’t Always Been On the $20 Bill

We may be waiting until 2030 for Harriet Tubman to replace Andrew Jackson on the U.S. $20 bill, as U.S. Treasury officials have been promising. But the years-long push to display the Maryland-born abolitionist and icon on currency has also highlighted Jackson’s controversial deeds as America’s seventh president.

Andrew Jackson, remembered both as a man of the people and an enslaver who instigated the Trail of Tears, has long held the coveted spot on the $20, one of the most commonly circulated bills—but he hasn’t always held that place of honor. In fact, Jackson’s face has graced twenties only since the 1920s. Prior to that, Old Hickory had his humble beginnings on the $10 bill.

The first-ever run of Federal Reserve notes didn’t come out until 1914, when Jackson’s portrait featured prominently on the $10, with Grover Cleveland holding pride of place on the $20. In 1928, federal money went through a design do-over; Cleveland ascended to the space vacated by Alexander Hamilton on the $1000 bill—which astute readers will realize is no longer in circulation—while Jackson settled into his now-familiar place on the $20, with Hamilton demoted to the $10. Why the dramatic reshuffling of presidents? Not even the Treasury Department itself seems to remember, claiming that its absence of documentation on the subject means “It’s a mystery to us as well.”

The current effort to diversify the $20 also brings up the fact that U.S. paper currency has only ever featured portraits of white men who happened to be politicians. The trend makes our banknotes an outlier among those of other industrialized nations. The UK, for example, has issued banknotes featuring authors, scientists, and social reformers, including Florence Nightingale, Jane Austen, Michael Faraday, and Charles Darwin. In 2020, the government approved a banknote design featuring the Jamaican-British Crimean War nurse Mary Seacole and the French Resistance fighter Noor Inayat Khan. France, Italy, Australia, Denmark, Canada, Japan, Mexico, Sweden, and many other countries have featured non-male, non-politician portraits.

The great irony of Jackson’s visage prominently featuring on a banknote is, of course, that he disdained paper money, preferring the tangible value of gold and silver. It’s debatable whether Jackson would consider his commemoration on the $20 bill any sort of honor at all.

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A version of this story was published in 2015; it has been updated for 2024.