Albert Gallatin, Renaissance Man
"In his “spare” time, he spoke out against slavery and in favor of fiscal responsibility, free trade and individual liberty. Most people never accomplish a tenth of what Gallatin did in his 88 years."
A town in Tennessee and counties in both Kentucky and Montana are named after him. One of the three rivers that converge to form the Missouri carries his name. So do a mountain range and a national forest here in the Treasure State.
Though these namesakes are notable, the man himself deserves so much more. His name was Albert Gallatin. One of his biographers, Nicholas Dungan, writes that Gallatin “came to America in his youth and, in a lifetime of public service to his adopted country, contributed to the welfare and independence of the United States as fully as any other statesman of his age.”
Residents of Montana’s Gallatin County, the second-most populated county in the state, can be immensely proud of the man for whom their county and nearby river and mountains are named. His resume remains one of the most impressive of his day.
Born in the Republic of Geneva in present-day Switzerland in 1761, Albert Gallatin was orphaned at an early age. Homeschooled by a distant relative for 7 years, from age 5 to 12, he then entered a private boarding school. He left for America in 1780 at age 19.
Though he hoped to make his fortune in buying and selling land, his first real job here was teaching French at Harvard University. He then settled in the mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania, where the home he built (he dubbed it “Friendship Hill”) stands today as a national historic site.
Politics soon drew his attention, mainly because so many people who came to know him urged him to seek office. He served as a delegate to the 1789 Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention before winning election to the Pennsylvania General Assembly, where he demonstrated a rare talent for analyzing and managing public finances. He quickly became a powerful anti-Federalist, Jeffersonian voice of the Republican Party.
Amazingly, Gallatin found himself named a U.S. Senator by his colleagues in the Pennsylvania legislature in 1793. He never sought the seat and even publicly declared himself ineligible because he had not yet been a U.S. citizen for the nine years the Constitution required to be chosen for the job. Nonetheless, he held the office for about two months (December 1793 to February 1794) until the Senate determined that he was right, namely, that he hadn’t yet fulfilled the citizenship rule.
Gallatin strongly opposed the Washington administration’s whiskey tax but did his best to quell the violence against it among his fellow western Pennsylvanians. Later in Thomas Jefferson’s Cabinet, he would get rid of it, as well as almost every other federal excise tax.
Months after leaving the Senate, and on the very same day in October 1794, Gallatin was elected both to the Pennsylvania General Assembly again and the federal Congress. He kept the two jobs simultaneously. He was subsequently elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for two more consecutive terms, serving there until President Thomas Jefferson tapped him for the post of Treasury Secretary, by which time, writes Nicholas Dungan, “he achieved recognition as an expert in economics and government finance unequaled in his party and perhaps in America.”
To this day, Gallatin remains the longest-serving Secretary of the Treasury in U.S. history (12 years, 9 months), holding the office for the entirety of Jefferson’s two terms as president and then for a portion of the first term of the subsequent president, James Madison.
Gallatin cut federal spending, adopted checks and balances for government expenditures, and financed the Louisiana Purchase. Despite issuing nearly $15 million in bonds for Louisiana, he still managed to slash the national debt by half in little more than a decade.
Perhaps his biggest challenge at the Treasury Department was dealing with the fallout from the year-and-a-half-long Embargo of 1807-1809. Over Gallatin’s objections, President Jefferson and the Congress prohibited all exports from the United States, severely limited imports, and forbade American ships to sail overseas. The law was aimed at Britain and France (then embroiled in war and threatening American commerce) but it backfired wildly, crippling federal revenues and crushing the private economy.
Jefferson should have listened to Gallatin, who warned him that “government prohibitions do always more mischief than had been calculated; and it is not without much hesitation that a statesman should hazard to regulate the concerns of individuals as if he could do it better than themselves.”
After his long tenure at Treasury, Gallatin’s next big assignment was negotiating an end to the War of 1812 between Britain and America. Many people, including historians of today, regard the result as his greatest achievement. Gallatin was easily the principal figure in securing the Treaty of Ghent that concluded hostilities. He was now a master diplomat.
He went on to serve as America’s minister first to France for seven years, and then to Britain for one year.
Returning from Europe at age 66, Gallatin resolved to retire from public office. But in the 22 years of life he still had in him, he managed to become a bank president, founder of New York University, founder of the American Ethnological Society, and an renowned authority in Native American languages. In his “spare” time, he spoke out against slavery and in favor of fiscal responsibility, free trade and individual liberty. Most people never accomplish a tenth of what Gallatin did in his 88 years.
Given the man’s role in the Louisiana Purchase alone, it is fitting that a river, a mountain range, a national forest and a county in Montana are named for him. But considering the full sweep of his massive contributions to America, perhaps a state should be named for him as well. Thank you, Albert Gallatin!
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Lawrence W. Reed writes a monthly column for the Frontier Institute in Helena, on whose board he serves. He is president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education and blogs at www.lawrencewreed.com.