MORRIS: It’s awkward! It’s also fascinating. The conceptual coups of the show reside in its placing the stress on Hamilton’s being an outsider and having that status align with the modern conversation about who “belongs” in this country. In the show, that line, “Immigrants, we get the job done” simultaneously brings down the house and electrifies it. It’s exhilaratingly punctual. This is to say that an amazing thing has happened to Hamilton thanks to the success of the show. He’s the subject of Ron Chernow’s book, but now he’s also Lin-Manuel Miranda. So to Mr. Miranda’s fans (and to Hamilton’s late-arriving partisans), removing him from the $10 bill might feel like apostasy, confirming not only how cool this guy suddenly is, but how he has been recast as nonwhite — and, consequently, how protected he is by our current identity politics.

SCHUESSLER: Exactly. Am I crazy to think that the show has effectively turned Hamilton — a white man born in the British West Indies — into our nonwhite founder, or our least-white founder, in a Bill Clinton “first black president” kind of way? It has certainly made Hamilton, an unabashed elitist, into a populist hero, embraced by people who (like me) probably didn’t quite notice until the last year that he was even on our currency. But is it important that the people on our money, and in our history books, are likable and relatable (to use two good 18th-century words)?

APPELBAUM: I’d like to admire the people on our currency, but it’s unlikely that “we,” in the sense of all Americans, are going to agree about any given historical figure. The eurozone has skirted this problem by putting bridges on its bank notes. And they’re not even actual bridges: just archetypes of different styles: Classical on the five euro note, Romanesque on the 10 euro note, and so forth. Putting presidents on currency is also a kind of safe harbor. Those are the 43 people who have actually won a national popularity contest.

Tubman now joins the shorter list of nonpresidents who have been selected as “representative Americans,” alongside Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin.

MORRIS: Jenny, I can tell you a story that’s worse than never looking at my money. On Saturdays, I go to the same ATM to withdraw cash for the week. I prefer that particular set of machines because it gives out $10s and $50s, and getting them feels, I don’t know, special. Well, last weekend it gave me a $100 bill that, in the shallow pockets of my sweats, might have as well have been a one, since the money was quickly gone. That’s a little story about why I hate “athleisure.” It’s also a story about why I hate cash.

But this Harriet Tubman news will make me reconsider. For one thing, she’s super-“representative.” For another, $20 bills are the favorite denomination of most ATMs, and I predict I’ll feel scrupulous in spending it. How do I pay for a family-pack of toilet paper with a Tubman? Who knows, my savings game might go through the roof.