AKIPRESS.COM - Abolitionist Harriet Tubman's image will appear on a new series of $20 bills, becoming the first African-American to appear on U.S. paper currency and the first woman in more than a century, the Treasury Department announced Wednesday, USA Today reported.

In replacing replace President Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill, the Treasury Department abandoned a previous plan to have a woman replace founding father Alexander Hamilton on the $10.

Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said the about-face came in response to an unexpected show of support for Hamilton in the weeks after he announced that plan last June — a response fueled, in part, by the popularity of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway musical based on Hamilton's life by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

"The show has certainly caught people's imagination, and I think it’s a great thing," Lew told USA TODAY. "What we’ve been doing on the currency and what they’ve been doing on the show were really quite complementary."

But just as important was a book Lew read early on in his quest to find the woman most worthy of being honored on U.S. currency: Catherine Clinton's Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, published just last year. What he found, he said, was a different Tubman than he learned about in school.

Clinton said Tubman is a much more multi-dimensional figure than she was portrayed as in the children's books that defined her image for decades. "I think most people are unaware of the full dimensions of her Civil War career. I'm a Civil War historian, and I was unaware," said Clinton, a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. "It took her 30 years to get her pension from the government, because she was a spy and a scout and she worked behind enemy lines."

The $5, $10 and $20 bills will all be redesigned over the next four years, but will be put into production at various times over the next decade.