The effort of Giles and Smith to control Madison had no excuse. Gallatin’s foreign birth, the only objection urged against him, warranted doubt, not indeed of his fitness, but of difficulty in obliging European powers to deal with a native of Geneva, who was in their eyes either a subject of their own or an enemy at war; but neither Napoleon nor King George in the year 1809 showed so much regard to American feelings that the United States needed to affect delicacy in respect to theirs; and Gallatin’s foreign birth became a signal advantage if it should force England to accept the fact, even though she refused to admit the law, of American naturalization. Gallatin’s fitness was undisputed, and the last men who could question it were Giles and Samuel Smith, who had been his friends for twenty years, had trusted their greatest party interests in his hands, had helped to put the Treasury under his control, and were at the moment keeping him at its head when they might remove him to the less responsible post of minister for foreign affairs. Any question of Gallatin’s patriotism suggested ideas even more delicate than those raised by doubts of his fitness. A party which had once trusted Burr and which still trusted Wilkinson, not to mention Giles himself, had little right to discuss Gallatin’s patriotism, or the honesty of foreign-born citizens. Even the mild-spoken Wilson Cary Nicholas almost lost his temper at this point. “I honestly believe,” he wrote in 1811, “if all our native citizens had as well discharged their duty to their country, that we should by our energy have extorted from both England and France a respect for our rights, and that before this day we should have extricated ourselves from all our embarrassments instead of having increased them.” The men who doubted Gallatin’s patriotism were for the most part themselves habitually factious, or actually dallying with ideas of treason.
Had any competent native American been pressed for the Department of State, the Senate might still have had some pretext for excluding Gallatin; but no such candidate could be suggested. Giles was alone in thinking himself the proper secretary; Samuel Smith probably stood in the same position; Monroe still sulked in opposition and discredit; Armstrong, never quite trusted, was in Paris; William Pinkney and J. Q. Adams were converts too recent for such lofty promotion; G. W. Campbell and W. H. Crawford had neither experience nor natural fitness for the post. The appointment of Gallatin not only seemed to be, but actually was, necessary to Madison’s Administration.
No argument affected the resistance of Giles and Samuel Smith, and during the early days of March Madison could see no means of avoiding a party schism. From that evil, at such a stage, he shrank. While the subject still stood unsettled, some unknown person suggested a new idea. If Robert Smith could be put in the Treasury, his brother Samuel would vote to confirm Gallatin as Secretary of State. The character of such a transaction needed no epithet; but Madison went to Robert Smith and offered him the Treasury.[4] He knew Smith to be incompetent, but he thought that with Gallatin’s aid even an incompetent person might manage the finances; and perhaps his astuteness went so far as to foresee what was to happen,—that he should deal with the Smiths on some better occasion in a more summary manner. Madison’s resemblance to a cardinal was not wholly imaginary.[5]
While Robert Smith went to inquire into the details of Treasury business before accepting the offered post, the President consulted with Gallatin, who rejected the scheme at once. He could not, he said, undertake the charge of both departments; the President would do better to appoint Robert Smith Secretary of State, and leave the Treasury as it was. Madison seized this outlet of escape. He returned to Robert Smith with the offer of the State Department, which Smith accepted. In making this arrangement Madison knew that he must himself supply Smith’s deficiencies; but stronger wills than that of Madison had yielded to party discontent, and he gained much if he gained only time.
The true victim of the bargain was Gallatin, who might wisely have chosen the moment for retiring from the Cabinet; but after declining an arrangement in his favor, he could not fairly desert the President, who had offered to sacrifice much for him, and he was too proud to avow a personal slight as the motive of his public action. Weakened already by the unexpected decline of his influence in the Senate, his usefulness was sure to be still further lessened by the charge of clinging to office; but after weighing the arguments for retirement he decided to remain,[6] although he could not, even if he would, forget that the quarrel which had been forced upon him must be met as vigorously as it was made.
The War and Navy Departments remained to be filled. Dearborn, who had continued in the War Department chiefly to oblige President Jefferson, retired in the month of February to become Collector of the port of Boston. As his successor, Madison selected William Eustis, of Boston, who had served in Congress during Jefferson’s first Administration. Eustis was about fifty-six years old; in the Revolutionary War he had filled the post of hospital surgeon, and since the peace he had practised his profession in Boston. Little could be said of the appointment, except that no other candidate was suggested who seemed better qualified for the place.[7]
To succeed Robert Smith at the Navy Department, Madison selected Paul Hamilton, of South Carolina. Nothing was known of Hamilton, except that he had been governor of his State some ten years before. No one seemed aware why he had attracted the President’s attention, or what qualities fitted him for the charge of naval affairs; but he appeared in due time at Washington,—a South Carolinian gentleman, little known in society or even to his colleagues in the government, and little felt as an active force in the struggle of parties and opinions.
From the outset Madison’s Cabinet was the least satisfactory that any President had known. More than once the Federalist cabinets had been convulsed by disagreements, but the Administration of Madison had hardly strength to support two sides of a dispute. Gallatin alone gave it character, but was himself in a sort of disgrace. The Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and the Secretary of the Navy, overshadowed in the Cabinet by Gallatin, stood in a position of inevitable hostility to his influence, although they represented neither ideas nor constituents. While Gallatin exacted economy, the army and navy required expenditures, and the two secretaries necessarily looked to Robert Smith as their friend. Toward Robert Smith Gallatin could feel only antipathy, which was certainly shared by Madison. “We had all been astonished at his appointment,” said Joel Barlow two years afterward;[8] “we all learned the history of that miserable intrigue by which it was effected.” Looking upon Robert Smith’s position as the result of a “miserable intrigue,” Gallatin could make no secret of his contempt. The social relations between them, which had once been intimate, wholly ceased.
To embroil matters further, the defalcation of a navy agent at Leghorn revealed business relations between the Navy Department and Senator Samuel Smith’s mercantile firm which scandalized Gallatin and drew from him a sharp criticism. He told Samuel Smith that the transactions of the firm of Smith and Buchanan were the most extraordinary that had fallen within his knowledge since he had been in the Treasury, and had left very unfavorable impressions on his mind.[9] Smith was then struggling for a re-election to the Senate, and felt the hand of Gallatin as a chief obstacle in his way. The feud became almost mortal under these reciprocal injuries; but Samuel Smith gained all his objects, and for the time held Gallatin and Madison at his mercy. Had he been able to separate them, his influence would have had no bounds, except his want of ability.
Yet Madison was always a dangerous enemy, gifted with a quality of persistence singularly sure in its results. An example of this persistence occurred at the moment of yielding to the Smiths’ intrigues, when, perhaps partly in the hope of profiting by his sacrifice, he approached the Senate once more on the subject of the mission to Russia. February 27, the nomination of William Short to St. Petersburg had been unanimously rejected. March 6, with the nominations of Robert Smith and William Eustis to the Cabinet, Madison sent the names of J. Q. Adams as minister at St. Petersburg, and of Thomas Sumter as minister to Brazil. He asked the Senate to establish two new missions at once. March 7 the Senate confirmed all the other nominations, but by a vote of seventeen to fifteen, adhered to the opinion that a mission to Russia was inexpedient. Both Giles and Samuel Smith supported the Government; but the two senators from Pennsylvania, the two from Kentucky, together with Anderson of Tennessee and William H. Crawford, persisted in aiding the Federalists to defeat the President’s wish. Yet the majority was so small as to prove that Madison would carry his point in the end. Senators who rejected the services of Gallatin and John Quincy Adams in order to employ those of Robert Smith, Dr. Eustis, and Governor Hamilton could not but suffer discredit. Faction which had no capacity of its own, and which showed only dislike of ability in others, could never rule a government in times of danger or distress.