In the campaign to put a woman on American currency, the Sun favors Sojourner Truth. The name of the abolitionist is being advanced by Gloria Steinem in a wonderful “Room for Debate” column in today’s Times. It links the movement to put a woman on a Federal Reserve note to the centenary of women’s suffrage. It interviews notable women on their suggestions. Nominees include the pro-life activist and feminist Susan B. Anthony, the poet Emma Lazarus, the environmentalist Rachel Carson, the champion of labor Frances Perkins, and the Cherokee chief Wilma Mankiller. All would be worthy.

Sojourner Truth, though, towers over the others. She was born a slave in 1797 at Ulster County, New York. Her birth name was Isabella Baumfree. She was known as Belle. In her autobiography, she recounts how, from a window, she witnessed the first love of her life, a neighboring slave named Robert, get irrecoverably beaten by his owner for trying to visit her. Then he was bound and dragged away. She never saw him again. One bites one’s hand when reading her story. In 1843, as Belle was emerging as a giant in the struggle for abolition, she took the name Sojourner Truth.

This coincided with her conversion as a Methodist, and she became a symbol of, among other things, the alliance between Christianity and abolition. The column in the Times proposes the twenty-dollar note as the denomination on which to honor Sojourner Truth. She would replace Andrew Jackson, who, the Times notes, was against paper money on constitutional principles; the paper linked to the seventh president’s farewell address, when he sketched his principles. Though we acknowledge Jackson’s faults, we admire his long campaign for constitutional money. So we’d be inclined to leave him on the twenty-spot.

To honor Sojourner Truth, whose character was unalloyed, we will need something radical. We’ll need something that makes a moral point. Why not issue, in the Sojourner, the first modern gold note? Let it bear a declaration that it is redeemable in gold at any branch of the United States Treasury. Let the amont of gold a Sojourner dollar can be redeemed at be fixed in law at the time of its issue. Let the law feature a prohibition against any future federal or state taxation on any appreciation of a Sojourner in respect of other currency.

That would make the Sojourner dollar unique in being free of capital gains tax on its underlying gold. It would make the Sojourner dollar function more like money as conceived of by the Founders. That would also make the note honoring Sojourner Truth the most sought after marker in the land. It would send a message in the age of fiat money and defy the tax of inflation, whenever that tax descends on America. It would become a testament to the integrity of which Sojourner Truth stood as such a shining tribune.