Albert Gallatin

IT is probably impossible to discover in the history of this country any statesman who has left behind him a reputation so poorly proportioned to his ability and influence as has Albert Gallatin. Why this is so; why he appears as little more than a name, an almost impersonal exponent of certain political measures; why he alone, among all the men of his time, can be mentioned without awakening any warm sentiment of liking or aversion; why we can agree with him without sympathy, and disagree with him without enmity. becomes apparent from the picture of the man now furnished by this biography. Not especially attractive in life, he remains singularly uninteresting since his death. A chapter, much too long, in Mr. Adams’s book concerning his youth fails to introduce him in an agreeable light. Enjoying every advantage which the best social position, an excellent education, and a family only too kind could give, he yet chose at an early age to run away. This venture, if not altogether without an object, was at least devoid of any sufficient cause or excuse. He was evidently soon ashamed of it; but, as is the freakish habit of poor human nature in such circumstances, he visited the punishment for his folly upon the relatives whom he had injured rather than upon himself, neglecting to send the simplest information concerning his fortunes to those who never ceased to manifest a solicitude as tender as it was undeserved concerning these matters.

This coldness of nature never wore off throughout his long life. The only evidence of warmth of feeling which we ever find in him was shown towards his second wife, who seems to have made his home thoroughly happy and attractive. In this respect, as in so many others, he offers a striking contrast to Hamilton, with whom it is impossible not to compare him. Both landed as strangers upon our shores. In less than a year after he arrived in New York, Hamilton had made more and warmer friends than Gallatin ever secured throughout his life, long, useful, and honorable as it was. And as years went on, Hamilton constantly and largely increased the number of those who, apart from their political faith in him, dearly loved the man. Gallatin never had so much as the nucleus of a personal following. What he gave and what he got in the world constituted an equation quite remarkable. People met him as he met them, with much temperateness both in affection and in hatred. In an age of vituperation he seldom used those potent epithets of abuse fur which his contemporaries must have ransacked the dictionaries and synonym books; in return he enjoyed an exceptional freedom from the more scurrilous personalities then in vogue. His bitter enemies were never his opponents in the opposite party, but a pitiful faction of spoils-seekers, who struggled to crawl up from the bottom of his own party by planting their teeth in those above them; men like Giles and Duane, whose hostility followed all upright and able men without distinction of political creed.

If a public man would escape obscurity, enemies are perhaps no less essential to him than friends. Gallatin’s deficiency in both is also partly attributable to the fact that he never became thoroughly an American. He was cosmopolitan to tlie end. He never served the United States as one of her own sons, nor embarked in party conflicts as in a family quarrel. His regard for the new country was rather of the head than of the heart. He saw in it a field wherein political and social theories which he believed in were likely to have a chance of trial. Had this chance diminished here and reappeared with better promise elsewhere, he would have migrated with little homesickness in pursuit of his willo’-the-wisp. His feeling towards the federalists was by no means that hearty fraternal vindictiveness which would have induced Mr. Jefferson to play Cain to Mr. Adams’s Abel; he simply disliked Hamilton as a man who had embraced erroneous doctrines, disagreeably antagonistic to his own sounder theories for the political development and happiness of mankind. Even Mr. Adams’s praise is measured, deliberate, instinct with meagre vital warmth; surely there must be some defect in a hero, concerning whom so exhaustive a study, developed into so long and minute a biography, fails to nourish some small flame of partisanship.

In July, 1780, being then nineteen years of age, Gallatin landed at Gloucester. It provokes a smile to see the fortune-seeking lad turn his face to the eastward even from the extremity of Cape Ann, and actually make his way to Machias. But becoming convinced, erelong, that he had not been happy in this choice of a neighborhood, he finally made his home in Western Pennsylvania. Here he began his public career, at first hardly under auspicious stars. In 1790 he entered the state legislature, and rendered such good service there for three years that a federalist majority was content to elect him United States senator. Party divisions were then embryotic, almost non-existent. But unfortunately for him, at this juncture the whisky rebellion broke out in the western counties of his State. Mr. Adams seeks to palliate the conduct of his hero in this disgraceful and ill-starred opposition to lawful authority, and to show that his chief function was that of the moderate counselor and wise restorer of order. Such, however, was far from being the opinion of his contemporaries, and probably the best that can be said for him is that in an affair in which he had little or no personal interest, having cast himself into the company of extremely violent men, he could not quite keep pace with his comrades. Certainly for the time being be was in ill repute with the party representing law and order, and his seat in Congress was disputed on the ground of his not having been a citizen long enough to render him eligible. The federalists controlled the vote, and threw him out; not, however, before he had had time to indicate his hostility to them and their leader by a motion calling for certain financial statements from the treasury. The next year, sufficient time having elapsed to remove all question on the score of eligibility, he was chosen a member of the national house of representatives. Again, however, he found himself in difficulty: the state legislature annulled the election on the ground that the whisky insurrectionists had overawed the voters. But a second polling showed substantially the same result, and at length the thrice-elected candidate was permitted to retain his place. It was not long before his political opponents learned that he was not the man they had thought him; that, however he might compel them to respect his intellect and to fear his power in debate, he was no agitator, demagogue, or disaffected revolutionist. He proved so formidable that they actually contemplated a very absurd constitutional amendment concerning citizenship, expressly designed to render him ineligible. But as they saw him always maintain a cool and even temper in the hottest conflicts, they soon came to treat him with a personal courtesy quite noteworthy in comparison with the flagellations dealt out to some of his more offensive coadjutors.

Gallatin’s career in Congress extended from 1795 to 1801. His own reminiscences of this period are expressed with self-satisfaction oddly commingled with a more judicial temper: “ It is certainly a subject of self-gratulation that I should have been allowed to take the lead with such coadjutors as Madison, Giles, Livingston, and Nicholas, and that when deprived of the powerful assistance of the two first, who had both withdrawn in 1798, I was able to contend on equal terms with the host of talents collected in the federal party, — Griswold, Bayard, Harper, Goodrich, Otis, Smith, Sitgreaves, Dana, and even J. Marshall. Yet I was destitute of eloquence, and had to surmount the obstacle of speaking in a foreign language with a very bad pronunciation. My advantages consisted in laborious investigation, habits of analysis, thorough knowledge of the subjects under discussion, and more extensive general information, due to an excellent early education, to which I think I may add quickness of apprehension and a sound judgment.” This was not an unfair estimate of himself; Gallatin’s cool head was equal even to the delicate task of weighing his own powers, and comparing his abilities with those of his rivals and opponents. It should, however, be said that his own parly was very poor in parliamentary talent, and he would have held by no means so exalted a position amid the unusually able array of debaters on the federal side.

Upon the road to more interesting portions of Gallatin’s life we can give but a brief paragraph to his congressional career. It began just after Jay’s treaty had been ratified, which he found his party seeking practically to annul by refusing to enact the legislation necessary for its fulfillment, thus raising a nice and dangerous constitutional question concerning the power of the lower house, — a question only lately, if indeed yet, finally settled by the debates concerning the Alaska treaty. Mr. Gallatin of course sustained the authority of the representatives in arguments of much ingenuity, if not so utterly unanswerable as Mr. Adams declares them. But with his wonted lack of regard for purely partisan tactics, after vigorously maintaining the right of the house to annul the treaty, he closed by deprecating any such action, thus fastening a federalist snapper upon a democratic lash.

During the famous voting which resulted. in the election of Jefferson as against Burr for the presidency, it would appear from this biography that Mr. Gallatin marshaled the forces of the successful candidate, devised the strategy, and secured an ultimate success which from the outset he had certainly anticipated with tranquil confidence. Other narratives have assigned positions of different relative importance to Mr. Gallatin and other prominent friends of Jefferson. The character of king-maker is so attractive that it is not surprising that no one person should have been allowed to retain it uncontested. It is only natural that when General Samuel Smith represented himself as having been the efficient agent at the critical moments, Gallatin should repudiate the idea and prefer his own claims. But when he further intimates, apparently with Mr. Adams’s full approval, that Jefferson himself was utterly passive, intrusting his whole fortunes to Gallatin, and going calmly to sleep so soon as he had established this Palinurus at the helm, we must be permitted to rescue our credulity from so severe a strain. No man in the country was better fitted than Jefferson, in point of nature, taste, and training, to conduct such a struggle, and that he so religiously refrained from touching any of the wires that moved the puppets never has been and never will be believed.

In the distribution of offices which took place upon Jefferson’s accession, Gallatin of course deserved and received a distinguished position. He was made secretary of the treasury; and the narrative of the twelve years of his incumbency is an interesting and instructive tale, pointed with a sad, almost a depressing, moral. At this time he cherished many exalted theories, of a mingled political and social character, which strangely enough do more credit to the heart than to the head of this so cold, sagacious, and thoughtful statesman. His chief aim was the material welfare of the people of the United States. He reversed what had been the general doctrine of those who, up to that day, had been concerned with the actual government of their fellow-men. He did not seek to make the country great, regarding greatness as the pedestal of prosperity; but he wished to make it prosperous, expecting power to result from mercantile success. What he desired was to see the people building ships, trading, conducting an extensive commerce, heaping up dollars, paying off the national debt, thriving generally in their financial affairs. Not till they had grown rich and could afford the expensive luxury of lighting did he wish to see them keeping up an army ever so trifling, a navy however small. Meantime, during the process of accumulation, the nation was not to be disturbed, but should submit to almost any humiliation rather than engage in war. He fully agreed with Mr. Jefferson during the period when that gentleman improved so much upon the scriptural injunction that while England smote one cheek he turned the other to France, then at once reversed with astonishing rapidity, and, indeed, thus succeeded in keeping the national countenance in so continuously receptive a condition that the game of striking almost ceased to interest the strikers. It cannot be denied that this ideal of a growing, prosperous, commercial nation, making money, gathering comforts, at peace with all the world, sure of ultimately attaining that respect and influence which national riches ever bring, is far higher and more agreeable than the Napoleonic ideal, which the world was then watching, as it reduced Europe to the condition of a prizering wherein nations were the contestants. Yet there must be the modus in rebus; the Jew of the Middle Ages, seeking much the same ends which Gallatin proposed for the United States, bore insults with a meekness which few would wish to emulate. Nor can one read the tale of democratic politics, as shaped by Jefferson and Gallatin, without the too frequent flush of anger and mortification.

Yet in the main Gallatin’s ends were noble, useful, and wise; and his highest claims to the affection of mankind lie in his firm purpose to promote their welfare, and his resolute belief that a wellbeing better than that of victorious war could be furnished to the great mass of the people. The treasury department was a position endowing him with extensive power in exactly those directions in which he wished to exercise influence, and he came into it, in his self-reliant way, thoroughly sanguine of success in carrying out his aspirations. In all history there is hardly to be found a more extraordinary instance of complete defeat. It is a stale remark that the radical out of office becomes the conservative in office. This was not precisely Gallatin’s case, in so far as this saying points to a change of the inward man, because he did not so much alter any of his abstract convictions as he did bitterly take home to himself the lesson of the omnipotent force of circumstances and the feeble power of man. No other statesman ever had more reason to be charitable in judging his political opponents than had Gallatin by the time that he retired from public life. Within that period he had seen himself, while consciously retaining perfect honesty of mind and heart throughout, occupying positions in the latter half of his career precisely antagonistic to nearly every position which he had assumed in the earlier half. There was hardly anything for which this assailant of the federalists vehemently upbraided them which in time he did not himself come to do. He began by being willing to endure any insult rather than to he forced into a war; in due season he found himself the chief member of a war cabinet. He fiercely assailed the alien and sedition laws; but he lived to demand and to receive powers which have never been denied to be vastly more arbitrary and dangerous than any contained in those bad acts. In 1795-96 he vigorously opposed a modest appropriation for building three frigates ; a few years later he was giving his best endeavors in aid of the construction of an efficient navy. He assailed the federalist secretaries of the treasury because their system did not involve specific appropriations, to be kept distinct and applied separately; as secretary he discovered the utter futility of seeking to carry out his own plans in this regard. He had an antipathy to all diplomatic connections abroad, and resolutely opposed the appropriations for their support; in good time it fell to his lot to pass many years in Europe in the diplomatic service of the United States, —years far from being poisoned by any sense of the wasteful folly of such employment. He vehemently ridiculed the commercial treaties advocated by the federalists, but himself afterward expended much time and toil in negotiating precisely similar treaties. He allied himself with the party which strenuously resisted the creation of the national bank, and became himself the strongest advocate of the renewal of its charter. The same party had bitterly attacked the principle of internal improvements as unconstitutional, but Gallatin within a few years formed the most elaborate scheme of internal improvements ever conceived by an American statesman. Yet Gallatin was neither fickle nor inconsistent, was devoid neither of fixed principles nor of honest perseverance. It only so happened that a long series of years passed in unbroken opposition were succeeded by a long series of years passed in equally continuous power; and malicious fate amused herself during the second series in testing and destroying pretty much all the theories developed during the earlier series. It was, on the whole, creditable to Gallatin that he could learn and practice the lessons which circumstances taught him, even at an age when most men have grown too rigid to accept instruction.

Neither Jefferson nor Gallatin doubted their power to achieve their favorite purposes. Gallatin at the head of the treasury department was where he wished to be. With that frankness with which he was wont to state his own good points, he once said of himself, speaking of his early days in Congress, that he had made himself complete master of the subject of finance, and had occupied that held almost exclusively. .Mr. Adams, echoing his hero, tells us that “to Mr. Gallatin finance was an instinct.” Historians have compared Gallatin with Hamilton, as the greatest democratic with the greatest federalist secretary, and have sometimes ventured to declare the two men to be well matched in financial ability. In fact, the comparison cannot be made. The circumstances in which the two were placed were so utterly different that no parallel can be run. It is impossible to say that Gallatin was or was not the equal of Hamilton, for the simple reason that he never encountered an occasion which enabled him to show such equality, if he possessed it. Hamilton created and organized the whole treasury department; reduced to a system, upon an entirely new basis, the entire public indebtedness, both state and national, of the country; established a revenue; and devised the whole plan of customs-duties and internal taxation. When Gallatin succeeded Hamilton’s successor, all the herculean labors had been performed. The power of origination was no longer needed. The national debt was in simple shape, relieved from all political embarrassments as well as from all financial complications; the machinery of the treasury was incapable of improvement, as has been shown in the long series of years which have since elapsed without bringing substantial change; the tax system was complete, and if not altogether unobjectionable was at least no worse than it has been ever since. Really, all that Mr. Gallatin had to do was what all sensible men have to do, namely, see to it that the outgo did not exceed the income, and try to lay aside something every year towards paying outstanding notes and borrowed capital. With the country prosperous and the yield from the taxes steadily and rapidly increasing, this was no very difficult task. Indeed, Mr. Gallatin even thought that he could afford to remit altogether all those excise taxes which he had so long reviled the federalists for establishing. But he soon found it necessary to increase other duties to supply the place of those thus abolished; and in this instance, also, if in time became part of his untoward fate to lose much popularity by insisting upon the reintroduction of precisely those abolished taxes.

Yet the duty which he had to do he did excellently, and the end which he placed before his eyes was admirable. He longed to see the United States owing nothing to anybody, and with an annual income abundantly sufficient to meet her annual expenses. He was anxious to simplify the system of accounts and of the various funds, so that the amount of yearly expenditure should plainly appear as a gross sum, and the amount of yearly income should be plainly set against it as another gross sum, with no obscurity in any details wherein a cheerful self-deception might snugly harbor. No chicanery of figures was ever permitted to delude himself or the public. In all this there was nothing of genius; nor indeed was there room for genius in the processes employed. But it was certainly the best possible doctrine, the noblest possible end, and was pursued by Mr. Gallatin, in his clear-headed, resolute way, to the uttermost moment and to the verge of success. Yet, quite in accord with his singular destiny, the very excellence of his administration of the treasury furnished the most conclusive refutation of his previous attacks upon the administrations of Hamilton and Wolcott. Improvements he could not suggest, and heartily as he was bent upon economy, and sincerely as he expected to achieve it, he yet totally failed to accomplish any reduction in the actual cost of running the government. In his budgets he always overestimated expenses and underestimated receipts, the better to insure his darling annual surplus for the bond-holders. But it was because he received more, not because he spent less, than Hamilton and Wolcott that he was able to reduce a debt which they could not prevent from increasing. In a word, as secretary of the treasury, he found that the treasury could not be better managed than it had been by his predecessors, and learned that the assaults, doubtless honestly made by him, had been wholly unjust,—that he had required impossibilities, and had quarreled with the inevitable.

Patient persistence will have its reward, and in the seventh year of his secretaryship Gallatin had the pleasure of seeing all the national debt which had become payable actually paid, and a handsome surplus accumulating in his coffers, promising more than to discharge the balance as it should mature. Under these circumstances, with a cheerful indifference for the long-cherished hostility of the democratic party towards internal improvements, he began to map out a system of such enterprises, comprehensive and costly enough to startle even this generation, apparently resolved that, whether Jefferson and the rest were pleased or not, his canals and great national roads should be built. But these fascinating dreams of practical improvement, so dear to a mind like Gallatin’s, were destined to be speedily dissipated. The nation suddenly found itself spinning rapidly down the grooves which ended by precipitating it into the miserable conflict of 1812. From the time that this progress definitely and -visibly began Gallatin appears ill at ease and wavering, like one treading among unfamiliar surroundings and uncertain as to his path. At first, with an honorable spirit of indignation, he anticipated war, seemingly without grave regret, sinking for the moment any sense of disappointment at the failure of his plans in his natural wrath at the outrageous wrongs heaped with such insult and contumely upon the country. It appealed directly to his feelings to see England pursuing a deliberate, relentless, and well-devised scheme for utterly banishing from the face of the seas the prosperous commerce of the United States. He regarded his surplus with supreme pleasure as he thought what a start it would give the country in a costly conflict. But when an embargo became the party measure in place of war, ho was less gratified. This was playing too much into the adversary’s hand. It impoverished the people; worse still, it cut down the income of the treasury in a doleful manner. He advocated that at least it should be made a temporary measure, to be followed, if not effectual in a short time, by war. But his advice was not permitted to prevail. The embargo soon appeared to be destined to indefinite duration, and threatened to become the normal condition of the country. In the mean time his dearly-cherished surplus rapidly disappeared, frittered away in a hundred petty and foolish directions by measures which the democrats described as preparatory and military, but of which the futility was only too apparent. Non-intercourse followed embargo, as a stop from one blunder to another, and Mr. Gallatin fell into helpless despair. He had changed from his warlike temper to a more pacific disposition, through dread that the treasury could not stand the drain of military expenditure. But now, influenced by the greater dread of national ruin, he reverted to his earlier frame of mind, and seeming to regard war as ultimately inevitable he became eager to see it precipitated at the earliest day possible, giving to the present wretched condition of things as short a time as might be for growing still worse before the crisis should come.

Thus bent upon aiding the war party, and for once losing his head, Gallatin committed the great error of his life, He sent in a disingenuous report to Congress, based upon the assumed accuracy of the military and naval estimates in the event of hostilities, and designed to show that the probable cost of war could be met by the regular income from present taxes, aided by loans, and without an increase of taxation. He did not say, what he well knew, that the military and naval estimates were grossly below the truth, and that the interest on the loans would inevitably necessitate a larger income. Mr. Adams glosses this over as an unfortunate inadvertence. But his hero, as elsewhere depicted in his book, was altogether incapable of so extraordinary an inadvertence. In fact, he was carried away by his excessive anxiety to aid the friends of strong measures. He achieved his object, but bitterly did he suffer for it erelong, when the enormous cost of the war utterly belied the halcyon promises of his report, and gave to his detractors weapons which they used, and unfortunately could not be blamed for using, with terrible effect.

Office could hardly have been grateful to Mr. Gallatin at this period; and certainly, when his views were so constantly, almost uniformly, counteracted, it was at least his privilege,even if it was not his duty, to resign. Yet he did not do so, but rather clung to his position with a very singular tenacity, — so much so, indeed, that the manner of his quitting it is very indefinite, and is left by his biographer wholly in the clouds. In the midst of his multitudinous troubles there reached the cabinet from Russia a kindly proposition for intervention. This was snatched at, and commissioners to go abroad and treat were appointed, with a haste not altogether discreet. Gallatin was one of them. Any doubt as to the propriety of appointing a cabinet officer might be supposed to be set at rest by the federalist precedent of dispatching the chief-justice of the United States upon a like errand; and not improbably, had the federal party alone been concerned to annoy Mr. Gallatin, this so obvious answer might have forestalled their complaints. But when Congress came together, it was found that his enemies within his own party were resolved to defeat the nomination; nor was it difficult for them, with the aid of more regular opponents of the administration, to do so. Their evident design was to oust him from the treasury, and they saw that the chances were that these tactics would accomplish this purpose.

By the time, however, that information of the failure to confirm could reach Europe, the negotiations were already well advanced, and the country had had the benefit of Mr. Gallatin’s services in spite of the hostility of the Smiths and Duane. Very valuable indeed those services were; and in truth one cannot but think that, having seen Gallatin serve as debater, financier, and diplomate, with distinction in each department, the meed of highest praise must be awarded to him in his latest character. The extraordinary and unexplainable episode connected with this mission concerns Mr. Gallatin’s behavior when he learned the news of the non-confirmation of his appointment on the ground of his holding a cabinet office. This contingency, not unanticipated by others, he had refused to consider, and had neglected, before his departure, to indicate to his friends what would be his wishes in such an event. They were authorized to do nothing on his behalf, and strangely enough he himself did nothing when the news reached him, — neither resigning his secretaryship in order to be renominated as commissioner, nor returning home to attend to the treasury. Indeed, how he ever technically got out of the treasury is a conundrum which Mr. Adams neither solves nor admits to be insoluble, but passes over in a silence only less surprising than the transaction itself. All that is known is that Gallatin never resigned and was never formally dismissed, but that, in the language of his friend and successor in the office, Mr. Dallas, it soon “ became necessary to treat the treasury department as vacant. ” A successor was appointed; Mr. Gallatin, in a queer way, as it were slid out, and, being out, was again nominated and at once confirmed as commissioner. Then, rejoining his colleagues, he concluded negotiations wherein unequaled difficulty was crowned with astonishing success, and achieved, in our opinion, the greatest feat of his life.

From this time forth there is little of especial interest to note in his career. His chief remaining function was, in spite of his old antipathy to diplomatic missions and of his quondam contempt for commercial treaties, to reside in Europe as the diplomatic representative of the United States at various courts, where, as it happened, he found himself chiefly engaged in arranging treaties of commerce. It was probably neither the least successful nor the least happy part of his life. He was admirably fitted for tasks of this nature; he mingled in society which he could hardly fail to find more congenial than that which he encountered on this side of the water. He actually had the grace to visit Geneva and the few survivors among his old friends. In 1829 he finally retired from public life, occupying himself thereafterward with business and ethnological studies, but never failing to take an active interest in public affairs. The reward of his even temperament was found in a long and agreeable age, closing no longer ago than 1849, when he died at the ripe age of eighty-eight.

A word should be added to our foregoing comments, ere parting with Mr. Adams’s book, upon its general scope and character. It is unquestionably a very valuable work for all students of American history. It is thorough and accurate; with the exception of occasional slurs upon Mr. Hamilton, and a dark background of profound antipathy to Mr. Jefferson, it would be admitted by federalist and democratic partisans alike to be almost judicial in tone. It is the gift of a student to students. It was probably intended to bear this character, and not to be addressed to the general reader; for not even the partiality of a biographer could induce Mr. Adams to expect any save persons exceptionally interested in American history to read faithfully nearly seven hundred large pages about Mr. Gallatin. There is no just proportion between such a biography and the time which most persons, even of literary and historical tastes, can devote to the career of a single individual, questionably of the first importance. The opening portion of the book is tedious; but of the rest this cannot be said, only that it is too elaborate and upon much too large a scale. We say this frankly, because we cannot but regret that a writer of Mr. Adams’s ability and exhaustive knowledge in the domain of our national history should permit his usefulness to be gravely impaired by what may be not unfairly described as doing his work too well.

J. T. M. Jr.