Albert Gallatin

American anthropologist and government administrator

• Born: January 29, 1761
• Birthplace: Geneva, Switzerland
• Died: August 12, 1849
• Place of death: Astoria, New York

While serving as secretary of the treasury in the presidential administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Gallatin drew upon the social philosophy of the French Enlightenment to improve the fiscal stability of the new nation. As the first president of the American Ethnological Society, he made significant contributions to the development of American anthropology.

Early Life

The parents of Abraham Alfonse Albert Gallatin (gahl-ah-tihn), Jean Gallatin and Sophie Albertine (née Rolaz) Gallatin, both died when he was an infant, and his care was entrusted to a distant relative of his mother, Mlle Catherine Pictet. Part of the Geneva aristocracy and supplier of lords and councillors to the city-state, the Gallatin family saw to it that young Gallatin was provided an excellent education. Despite access to the rich cultural heritage of his family, who counted Voltaire as a close friend, and a fine education at the academy, from which he was graduated in 1779, Gallatin resisted the aristocratic trappings of his family and identified with a growing number of students who supported Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Romantic call of “back to nature.”

Gallatin’s grandmother secured him an appointment as lieutenant colonel in the army of her friend Frederich, the Langrave of Hesse, who was then preparing to fight as a mercenary for England against the American colonies. In response, Gallatin rebelled and with a friend fled Geneva at the age of eighteen for America. He arrived in Massachusetts in 1780 and, without much money, set off for the frontier of Maine. After spending a year there, he returned to Boston, where he eked out a living as a tutor teaching French to students at Harvard College.

Finding the atmosphere in Boston too cold for his tastes, Gallatin moved to the backcountry of Pennsylvania in 1782. Through business dealings, he acquired land in the region and, as a good Romantic, settled down to devote his life to farming. At one point, Gallatin hoped to establish a Swiss colony on the American frontier, but these plans came to nothing. Gallatin was successful as neither farmer nor land speculator. Personal tragedy also touched him when his wife of a few months, Sophia Allegre, whom he had met in Richmond, Virginia, died at his farm, Friendship Hill. Despondent, Gallatin contemplated returning to Geneva, but an inability to sell his farm and the fighting in Geneva triggered by the French Revolution caused him to remain in America.

Gallatin’s intelligence and gregariousness led him to politics, first in Pennsylvania as a member of the Harrisburg conference of 1788, which met to consider ways in which the U.S. Constitution could be strengthened, and then as a member of the convention that met in 1789-1790 to revise the Pennsylvania constitution. In 1790, he was elected representative of Fayette County to the Pennsylvania state legislature.

Life’s Work

Gallatin had three careers: politics, business, and science. Although he believed that his investigations in science, rather than his work in government, would cause his name to be remembered in history, the reverse, ironically, proved to be the case. Western Pennsylvania elected Gallatin twice to the state legislature, and then he was elected by the legislature to the Senate of the United States. There, his eligibility was challenged because he had not been a citizen for nine years. Removed from the Senate, Gallatin returned to Pennsylvania, taking his new bride Hannah, daughter of Commodore James Nicholson of New York. His stay in Pennsylvania proved short, for in 1794 the voters of western Pennsylvania sent him to the House of Representatives, in which he served three terms. A Republican, Gallatin defended the farming interests of western Pennsylvania; at the same time, his grasp of international law and public finance and his reasoning ability and cogent arguments made him a valuable legislator at a critical time in early American history.

In May of 1801, Thomas Jefferson appointed Gallatin secretary of the treasury. Gallatin held this post through Jefferson’s two administrations and through part of James Madison’s first administration. Accusations that his financial policies hindered American efforts to fight the British in the War of 1812 prompted Gallatin to leave the treasury in 1813 and accept an appointment as a special envoy to Russia, which had offered to mediate the conflict between Great Britain and the United States. Great Britain, however, refused to accept mediation and, thus, frustrated Gallatin’s mission. Rather than returning to the treasury, as Madison expected, Gallatin chose to remain in Europe in diplomatic service. So began Gallatin’s career as diplomat.

Along with John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, Gallatin drew up the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812. With the work on the treaty concluded, Gallatin, Adams, and Clay traveled to England and negotiated a commercial treaty with the British. On his return to the United States, Gallatin accepted the post of minister to France, which he held from 1816 to 1832. Upon his return from France, he intended to retire from government service and to devote the rest of life to being a gentleman farmer at Friendship Hill, but, although Gallatin was increasingly upset with the emphasis on gain in American politics, he allowed his name to be put forward for vice president. Henry Clay’s ultimate acceptance of the nomination allowed Gallatin happily to withdraw his name. Life at Friendship Hill proved boring for the Gallatins after seven years in Paris, and so Gallatin once again accepted diplomatic assignment, his last, in 1826, as minister to England.

The United States to which Gallatin returned in 1827 seemed foreign to him. The robust activity of Jacksonian America seemed to make a shambles of the Jeffersonian idealism to which Gallatin subscribed. So disorienting did the new United States seem to him that he seriously considered leaving the country and returning with his family to Geneva. Although he did not return to Europe, he did retire from government service, beginning a new career in business.

Gallatin moved to New York City, where John Jacob Astor urged him to accept the presidency of Astor’s new National Bank. In this position, which Gallatin held from 1831 to 1839, he not only wrote on fiscal reform in articles such as Considerations on the Currency and Banking System of the United States (1831) but also protested slavery, the annexation of Texas by the United States, and the war with Mexico. In addition, he found time to indulge his interests in ethnology and, especially, linguistics.

While Gallatin had been living in Paris, he had made the acquaintance of the famous German scientist Alexander von Humboldt . Gallatin’s knowledge of several European languages and his interest in linguistics complemented Humboldt’s study of linguistics and American Indian languages. Humboldt prevailed upon Gallatin to write on Indian languages, and thus, even before Gallatin left public service, he had begun his scientific career. His first major publication in this field was A Synopsis of the Indian Tribes Within the United States East of the Rocky Mountains and in the British and Russian Possessions in North America (1836), followed by Notes on the Semi-Civilized Nations of Mexico, Yucatan, and Central America (1845) and Indians of North-west America (1848). Besides writing in the field of ethnology, Gallatin served as president of the American Ethnological Society, an organization he helped to found in 1842.

Significance

Although sometimes indulging in Romantic notions, Gallatin was first and foremost a gentleman of the Enlightenment. With his superb forensic skills and his ability to remain calm under personal attack, Gallatin proved a consummate politician, negotiator, and diplomat. His brilliance of mind led Jefferson to rely on Gallatin not only to oversee national finance but also to proofread his speeches and act as personal confidant. As secretary of the treasury and disbursing agent, Gallatin assumed a major role in promoting the exploration of the West and settlement of the Western frontier.

Governed by an Enlightenment philosophy that emphasized idealism and humanism in politics, learning, and society, Gallatin became uncomfortable with the raw commercialism of Jacksonian America, which seemed to him to promote only the base side of human potential. By the time of his death, Gallatin was out of step with his time: an Enlightenment figure in Jacksonian America. Nevertheless, for many he remained the Enlightenment conscience of America’s idealistic beginnings.

Bibliography

Adams, Henry. The Life of Albert Gallatin. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1880. Still a classic account of Gallatin’s life. Henry Adams, the grandson of John Adams, provides an intimate glimpse into Gallatin’s life and values and places both in the context of Gallatin’s European experience and a rapidly developing American society.

Allen, John Logan. Passage Through the Garden: Lewis and Clark and the Image of the American Northwest. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975. Allen’s work discusses Gallatin’s economic contribution as secretary of the treasury and his intellectual contribution to the exploration of the West.

Balinky, Alexander. Albert Gallatin: Fiscal Theories and Policies. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1958. An extensive study of Gallatin’s theories and policies on public finance.

Bieder, Robert E. Science Encounters the Indian, 1820-1880: The Early Years of American Ethnology. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. Contains a chapter on Gallatin, his study of American Indians, and his place in the early development of American ethnology.

Elazar, Daniel Judah, and Ellis Katz, eds. American Models of Revolutionary Leadership: George Washington and Other Founders. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1992. Collection of essays assessing how America’s earliest leaders enabled the country to make the transition from revolutionary upheaval to stable democratic government. Includes an essay by Rozann Rothman entitled “Albert Gallatin: Political Method in Leadership.”

Gallatin, James. The Diary of James Gallatin, Secretary to Albert Gallatin, a Great Peace Maker, 1813-1827. Edited by Count Gallatin. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931. A highly intimate and entertaining account of Gallatin’s years in Paris and London, written by his son, who served as Gallatin’s secretary.

Kuppenheimer, L. B. Albert Gallatin’s Vision of Democratic Stability: An Interpretive Profile. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996. The author builds a profile of Gallatin based on analysis of the intellectual climate in Europe that influenced his philosophical and political perspectives.

Smelser, Marshall. The Democratic Republic: 1801-1815. Edited by Henry S. Commager and Richard B. Morris. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. Mentions Gallatin in the larger context of the growth of the American republic.

Walters, Raymond, Jr. Albert Gallatin: Jeffersonian Financier and Diplomat. New York: Macmillan, 1957. Walters differs from Balinky in emphasizing Gallatin’s Jeffersonian ties and diplomatic career.

White, Leonard D. The Jeffersonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1801-1829. New York: Macmillan, 1951. Now dated but still useful in its consideration of Gallatin’s administration of the treasury.