News that Old Hickory is going to be removed from the $20 Federal Reserve Note in favor of a woman has a certain logic. We favor including women among the faces featured on our currency. Secretary Lew of the Treasury Department is reportedly set to announce that it will be Jackson who will step aside for the first woman (the Sun has long since declared for Sojourner Truth). The logic of removing Jackson — though it’s not Mr. Lew’s logic — is that it has been a kind of vainglory for the Federal Reserve to put our seventh president on its notes in the first place.

The historical fact is that Jackson was too principled for paper money. The greatest cause of his presidency was in the campaign to defeat the Second Bank of the United States, as our central bank was then called. The campaign, known to historians as the Bank War, ended in a victory for Jackson, who vetoed a renewal of the bank’s charter. At the end of his presidency, Jackson devoted much of his farewell address, one of the most famous in American history, to his thinking in respect of money. It bears reading amid the wreck of our own currency.

It was delivered in March 1837. The speech began with a paean to the Constitution and the “sages and patriots of the Revolution.” At 50, the Constitution was, he said, “no longer a doubtful experiment.” It had preserved “unimpaired” the “liberties of the people,” he said, and had “secured the rights of property.” It is impossible to put the gloss on the way he spoke of Native Americans, whom he’d helped drive from the states, but he also expressed a hope that the survivors of the Indian wars would, when settled on reservations, be “beyond the reach of injury or oppression.”

Jackson warned of the tendency of the government to “overstep the boundaries marked out for it by the Constitution.” He talked of taxes, maintaining that Congress “has no right under the Constitution to take money from the people unless it is required to execute some one of the specific powers intrusted to the Government.” But nothing, he averred, has “produced such deep-seated evil as the course of legislation in relation to the currency.” He asserted that the Constitution “unquestionably intended to secure to the people a circulating medium of gold and silver.”

The outgoing president reckoned that the establishment by Congress of a national bank “with the privilege of issuing paper money receivable in the payment of the public dues, and the unfortunate course of legislation in the several States upon the same subject, drove from general circulation the constitutional currency and substituted one of paper in its place.” He asserted that experience had “proved the mischiefs and dangers of a paper currency,” which he warned, because of its lack “intrinsic value,” was prone to “great and sudden fluctuations.”

Jackson dilated on this head for another 3,000 words. He spoke of how the fluctuations of fiat money rendered “property insecure and the wages of labor unsteady and uncertain.” He laid particular emphasis on the tendency of paper legal tender to inflict a “peculiar hardship upon the class of society least able to bear it.” He kvelled about the American laboring class — he was famous for this — and its industry and patriotism. He warned that “their interests can not be effectually protected unless silver and gold are restored to circulation.”

It is a remarkable read, a memorable l’envoi. Today’s Democratic Party claims to be turning its back on its founder because of his racism and his cruelty in war. We have our doubts about those claims to high-mindedness. The element of Jacksonianism that is being rejected today particularly by the party operating in his name is his comprehension of the link between money, property, and liberty. It’s no coincidence that Jackson’s is the face being removed from the federal scrip. He’s become an embarrassment to a party that has run its programs on unrestricted government debt and fiat money.