Secretary of the Treasury during the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
Albert Gallatin was born January 29, 1761, in Geneva, Switzerland. He emigrated to the United States and settled in Pennsylvania in 1795, where he founded New Geneva. This colony was meant to house emigres from the French Revolution and support itself with the production of glass products overseen by German glassmakers. Gallatin first made a name for himself as one of the moderate members of the Whiskey Rebellion in 1791, public protests and rioting that occurred after the federal government placed a tax on whiskey (a primary method of converting grain into a non-perishable commodity). He subsequently won election to the House of Representatives (where he served as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee) and the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania. During the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Gallatin served as secretary of the treasury (1800-1813), a post in which he planned to reduce the $80 million national debt in 1800 to $45 million in 1812 by the planned sale of federal lands and collection of customs revenue. The measure failed because of slow land sales and the cost of the War of 1812.
Gallatin strongly advocated building a federal infrastructure and pushed for the construction of the National Road— built using federal monies exclusively—and the beginning of the canal network in the Northeast. (The National Road began in Cumberland, Maryland, and ended first at Wheeling, West Virginia; it was later extended to St. Louis, Missouri.) Gallatin supported the Louisiana Purchase and found the money necessary to pay for it without raising the national debt; he also pushed for the immediate exploration of the new area by Meriwether Lewis and William by Thomas Freemont, an experienced astronomer, and Peter Custis, a medical student, who mapped the Red River area of Louisiana. Lewis named rivers for Madison, Jefferson, and Gallatin. After 1813, Gallatin served as minister to France and Great Britain before retiring to found the National Bank of the City of New York in 1817 and the American Ethnological Society in 1842. A keen scholar of Native American languages, Gallatin wrote several topics on ethnography, including the 1826 Table of Indian Languages. He died August 12,1849.
