(April 23, 2016 at 4:18 am)Wyrd of Gawd Wrote: Tubman is the first black person on USA currency. The Confederacy had black people on its $10, $50, and $100 bills in 1861. Of course they were slaves picking cotton and the money was worthless, more like a bond than actual currency. The paper couldn't be redeemed until six or twelve months after a peace treaty had been signed between the USA & the CSA. Confederate currency was printed on just one side.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/1862-100-BILL-CO...Sw~oFXDutG
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5Puv_E94FUI/VF...%2BT-4.JPG
http://allensinc.com/coins/currency/conf...ges/29.jpg
Everyone and his brother from the CSA government to the States to the cities printed currency. A lot of it had women on the front.
Lucy Pickens, known as the "Queen of the Confederacy", was on the CSA $100 bill of 1864.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GY2LOV0tsS4/VE...2B1864.JPG
Maryland had a $3 bill with drawings of several fictional women on it. http://www.deerrunmercantile.com/images/...l2451F.jpg
So in the end the racist slavers were more progressive on putting blacks and women on their money than the Unionists were, although they did it for purely propaganda reasons.
They didn't put blacks on their currency in the South because they thought they were equal humans, they did it because owning another human being was a social norm to them. The North were the progressives. Slavery had ended in the North in the majority of the North long before the Civil War.