This month the U.S. Treasury will begin circulating brand new twenty dollar bills. The currency will be more colorful and harder to counterfeit, but will still carry the image of America’s premier war criminal, President Andrew Jackson.

Most modern courts would put him in the same category as Pol Pot or Slobodan Melosivic–guilty of crimes against humanity. Jackson first gained his national reputation as an Indian fighter during the Creek War of 1814, where his ruthlessness earned him the sobriquet "Sharp Knife." Four years later, he embarked on an illegal war against the Seminole in Florida, which was still in Spanish hands. Driving the Creek off their native lands, and leaving Spain little choice except to sell her territories or see her forts seized and villages burned, Jackson and his cronies were able to claim legal title to the now "vacant" properties, which they sold an immense profits to slave owners eager to spread plantation culture across the South.

But the casual pillage and plunder that had characterized white European’s dealings with the red man since the days of Columbus became national policy during the Presidential administration of Andrew Jackson and his successor Martin Van Buren. The Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole tribes were all slated for removal from their ancestral homes in the Southeastern United States. Together, these were known as the "Five Civilized Tribes" because they had developed a level of material civilization fully compatible with that of their white neighbors. The Cherokee, for example, lived in towns with roads, schools and churches. They had a written alphabet and a representational government, with their own newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. A census of 1826 showed 17,000 Cherokee living in Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee, surrounded by almost a million whites. Realizing they were outnumbered, they had done their best to adapt to the white man’s world. They had become farmers, businessmen and property owners. The census count indicated that the Cherokee owned 726 looms, 2,488 spinning wheels, 172 wagons, 2,943 plows, 10 saw mills, 31 grist mills, 62 blacksmith shops, and operated 18 schools. But unfortunately, the land they owned was ideally suited for growing cotton. They had to leave the homes they had built and everything they owned to embark on a Trail of Tears.

The Supreme Court of the United States said the government was bound to uphold its treaties with the Cherokee, but Andrew Jackson defied the Supreme Court and the U.S. Constitution. The Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson penned a letter of protest to President Van Buren, who finished what his predecessor started, calling the removal of the Cherokee "a crime that confounds our understanding by its magnitude." But on October 1, 1838, five regiments of U.S. Army regulars began driving the Indians westward on a march where four thousand children, women and men would perish en route.

Andrew Jackson’s picture should be in a National Hall of Shame, not on the twenty-dollar bill. And I like to imagine acts of grassroots resistance to his presence on our currency. What if people wrote the word "genocide" across his face on every bill that passed through their hands? Or what if they simply refused to accept twenties, and demanded one dollar coins--Sacajaweas or Susan B. Anthonys--or asked for five dollar notes, featuring good old Abraham Lincoln, instead? None of these things are likely to happen soon. We’re likely to be looking at that bouffant of white hair, that prim little smirk, that "Southern Gentleman" countenance, for quite some time. His mug will remain a sorry reminder of how often our nation has worshiped at the shrine of making money, whatever the cost in justice or blood.