Albert Gallatin

Albert Gallatin (1761-1849), American statesman and financial expert, born in Geneva, and educated at the Academy of Geneva. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1780 and became successively a merchant, a French tutor at Harvard College, and a land speculator in western Pennsylvania and Virginia. He served in the Pennsylvania state legislature from 1790 to 1792. In 1793 he was elected to the U.S. Senate but in the following year was unseated because he was not a U.S. citizen of nine years' standing. He returned to his home in western Pennsylvania and from 1795 to 1801 served in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was instrumental in establishing the Finance Committee (now the Ways and Means Committee) in the House and became recognized as the financial expert among the Republican minority. He was an advocate of free trade and a severe critic of the Federalist party, opposing its financial policy and its advocacy of commercial treaties of reciprocal advantage with other nations.

In 1801 Gallatin was appointed secretary of the treasury by President Thomas Jefferson and served in that capacity until 1814. Between 1801 and 1807 he managed to reduce the public debt considerably and create a surplus of funds, despite the Louisiana Purchase, which he had strongly supported. He opposed war as detrimental to the national economy and worked to bring a quick end to the War of 1812. At the close of hostilities in 1814, he was prominent in the peace negotiations with Great Britain and in drawing up the Treaty of Ghent. Gallatin served as minister to France from 1816 to 1823 and as minister to Britain in 1826-27. In 1827 he retired from politics and settled in New York City, where from 1831 to 1839, he was president of a bank. He was interested in ethnology, and in 1842 he was instrumental in founding the American Ethnological Society in New York City and was elected the first president. From 1843 until his death he was president of the New-York Historical Society.