The Life of Albert Gallatin

by Henry Adams

Such was the situation of affairs when Congress met on the 3d December, 1810. One more step had been taken, but no man could certainly say whether it was towards a solution. Meanwhile, Mr. Gallatin was burdened with an undertaking that plunged him deeper into the miserable complications of political warfare, disorganizing his followers and his friends, stimulating personal hostilities, and yet leaving him no choice of action. The question of the bank charter was to be decided this winter before the Congress expired on the 4th March, 1811. As a matter of public welfare, more especially in the situation the country now occupied, Mr. Gallatin was obliged to do his utmost to prevent the destruction of the bank. It was no mere matter of party or of personal feeling; the bank at that moment was essential to public safety; to lose it might be a question of national life.

Every argument which Mr. Gallatin could use was put to the service of the bill. He was its open and earnest advocate both in his special reports and in his conversation, yet even the malignity of the Aurora and the less bitter but perhaps more dangerous hostility of the Richmond Enquirer failed to find in them a single expression that could be made to rouse personal irritation or popular feeling. He conducted his case with all his usual temper, tact, and persistence; it is due also to his opponents in Congress to say that they avoided personal attacks upon him, at least for the most part, and left vituperation to the press. Not the less, however, was it distinctly understood that the bank was the test of Mr. Gallatin’s power; that its overthrow was one and the most important step towards driving him from office; and that nothing less than the overshadowing growth of his influence could possibly make the continued existence of the bank even a subject of discussion in the Republican party.

The debate in the House was long and able, but when a vote was reached on January 24, 1811, the numbers stood 65 to 64 in favor of indefinite postponements. Many of Mr. Gallatin’s best friends voted with the majority; the Federalists in a mass voted on his side; his personal enemies turned the scale. Whatever Mr. Gallatin’s feelings were at this defeat, he made no display of them even to his intimates. On the 28th January, Mr. Macon wrote to Judge Nicholson: “I was at Gallatin’s yesterday; all well. He is, I fear, rather mortified at the indefinite postponement of the bill to renew the charter of the Bank of the United States. I am really sorry that my best judgment compelled me on that question to vote agreeable to what I believe to be the anxious wish of the invisibles. Mr. Madison was at the last session, I am informed, in favor of the renewal; that he considered it, according as my informant gave his words, res adjudicata. What cause has produced the change in his mind I have not heard. I have also been told that Mr. Giles was of the same opinion then and that he also has changed. These are natural rights, and ought to be exercised whenever the mind is convinced that opinions are founded in error; but when great men, or rather men in high, responsible stations, change their deliberate opinions it seems to me that they in some way or other ought to give the reason of the change. I incline to think that Mr. Madison’s opinion last winter had a good deal of weight, and it is presumed it may have been the means of inducing a few members to take pretty strong hold of the constitutional side of the question. Now that he has changed, they are thrown with Gallatin on the Federal side of the question. I also incline to think that his present opinion has had some weight in the late decision.”

Mr. Macon was probably mistaken in thinking that the President had changed his position; the letter is curious as showing what confusion Mr. Madison’s course created, but the story itself was apparently a mere rumor set afloat by the enemies of the bank, those “invisibles,” as the Smith faction were significantly called by Mr. Macon and his friends, and whose alliance with the Aurora was now complete. A few days later, on the 9th February, Mr. Macon wrote: “It seems to me not very improbable that Mr. Madison’s Administration may end something like Mr. Adams’s. He may endeavor to go on with the government with men in whom he has not perfect confidence, until they break him down, and then, as John did, turn them out after he has suffered all that they can do to injure him. It is true, if he means ever to turn out, he has now delayed it almost too long, because the senatorial elections are over, while these people retained their influence, if they can be said to have a fixed influence in the nation.”

Meanwhile the debate on the bank charter had begun in the Senate, and a curious debate it was. Mr. William H. Crawford, of Georgia, appeared as Mr. Gallatin’s champion, and supported the charter with such energy, courage, and ability as earned Mr. Gallatin’s lasting gratitude, and made Mr. Crawford the representative of the Administration in the Senate, and the favorite candidate of the Jeffersonian triumvirate for succession to the Presidency. Mr. Giles, on the other hand, spoke judicially. The Legislature of Virginia, like the Legislatures of Pennsylvania and Kentucky, had instructed their Senators to vote against the charter. Mr. Giles declared himself a representative of the people of the United States, not a mere agent of the Virginia Legislature, and his speech was an elaborate effort at candid investigation, unaffected, as he averred, by his personal sentiments towards the Secretary of the Treasury. But he, too, at last concluded that the bank was a British institution, which had not prevented the orders in council or the attack on the Chesapeake, and therefore should be suppressed. He admitted that the time was inauspicious for putting an end to the establishment, but the danger from British influence was greater than the danger from financial confusion. Henry Clay, the young Senator from Kentucky, followed and ridiculed the ponderous Mr. Giles, who had “certainly demonstrated to the satisfaction of all who heard him, both that it was constitutional and unconstitutional, highly proper and improper, to prolong the charter of the bank.” Mr. Clay was not disposed to enlist with Mr. Giles in factious opposition to the government, but he was still less disposed to join Mr. Crawford in its support; he hotly denied the constitutionality of the charter, and, like Mr. Giles, he declared that the bank was responsible for not preventing impressments and orders in council. Then General Smith, in a speech covering two days, proved that the whole theory of the usefulness of a national bank was a delusion; that State institutions were better depositaries of the public money; that the Secretary of the Treasury was quite mistaken in all his statements about the convenience of the bank, even in regard to remittances, and knew nothing about foreign exchange; that no possible trouble could arise from abolishing the bank; and that the constitutional objection was final.

On the 20th February, 1811, the Senate reached a vote. It was 17 to 17, and the Vice-President, George Clinton, whose personal hostility to the President was notorious, decided the question in the negative. Among the votes which then settled the fate of the bank, and incidentally the fate of Mr. Gallatin, were those of Joseph Anderson, of Tennessee, Henry Clay, of Kentucky, William B. Giles, of Virginia, Michael Leib, of Pennsylvania, and Samuel Smith, of Maryland. Readers who are curious in matters of biography will naturally ask how the opinions of these men stood the test of time. Less than four years later, after Mr. Gallatin had been fairly driven from the Treasury, his most intimate friend, Alexander J. Dallas, was called to fill the place. Government was bankrupt, the currency in frightful disorder, and loans impracticable. Mr. Dallas, as his last resource, insisted upon a bank, and he got it. Michael Leib was then no longer in the Senate; his political career had come to an untimely end. Gideon Granger, Postmaster-General, and one of the factious number, had exhausted President Madison’s patience by appointing Leib postmaster at Philadelphia, and had lost his office in consequence; Leib was removed, and disappeared into political obscurity. Giles was consistent in opposing the bank, and in 1816, so soon as his senatorial term expired, he too subsided into obscurity, from which he only rescued himself by his success in using the same tactics against John Quincy Adams that he had used against Albert Gallatin. Anderson, Clay, and Smith have left their names recorded among the supporters of the new charter.

Thus, in the face of difficulties and dangers such as might well have appalled the wisest head and the stoutest heart, the Legislature deprived the Executive of the only efficient financial agent it had ever had. What the financial consequences of destroying the bank actually were will be seen presently; it is enough to say that Congress acted in this instance with a degree of factious incompetence that cost the nation infinite loss and trouble, and was not far from imperilling its existence. No one knew better than Mr. Giles, General Smith, and George Clinton that whatever the objections to a bank might be, this was no time to destroy it, and even Henry Clay, with all his youthful self-confidence, had intelligence enough to make him inexcusable in refusing to prolong, if only for a very few years, the existence of an agent which the Treasury considered indispensable, in the face of a war which he was, against the will of the Administration, forcing upon its hands.

John Randolph was one of those who saw most clearly through the intrigues that beset the government. Never strong in common sense, Randolph’s mind was yielding more and more to those aberrations which marked his later years. Though all intimacy of relation between the two men had long ceased, Randolph had yet preserved as much respect for Gallatin as his universal misanthropy permitted, while at the same time his contempt for “the invisibles” was unbounded. Whatever mistakes Randolph made, he at least never descended so low as to make the Aurora his ally. On the 14th February he wrote to Judge Nicholson: “Giles made this morning the most unintelligible speech on the subject of the Bank of the United States that I ever heard. He spoke upwards of two hours; seemed never to understand himself (except upon one commonplace topic of British influence), and consequently excited in his hearers no other sentiment but pity or disgust. But I shall not be surprised to see him puffed in all the newspapers of a certain faction. The Senate have rejected the nomination of Alex. Wolcott to the bench of the Supreme Court—24 to 9. The President is said to have felt great mortification at this result. The truth seems to be that he is President de jure only. Who exercises the office de facto I know not, but it seems agreed on all hands that ‘there is something behind the throne greater than the throne itself.’ I cannot help differing with you respecting [Gallatins]’s resignation. If his principal will not support him by his influence against the cabal in the ministry itself, as well as out of it, a sense of self-respect, it would seem to me, ought to impel him to retire from a situation where, with a tremendous responsibility, he is utterly destitute of power. Our Cabinet presents a novel spectacle in the political world; divided against itself, and the most deadly animosity raging between its principal members, what can come of it but confusion, mischief, and ruin? Macon is quite out of heart. I am almost indifferent to any possible result. Is this wisdom or apathy? I fear the latter.”

A few hours later he added: “Since I wrote to you to-night, Stanford has shown me the last Aurora,—a paper that I never read, but I could not refrain, at his instance, from casting my eyes over some paragraphs relating to the Secretary of the Treasury. Surely, under such circumstances, Mr. G. can no longer hesitate how to act. It appears to me that only one course is left to him,—to go immediately to the P., and to demand either the dismissal of Mr. [Smith] or his own. No man can doubt by whom this machinery is put in motion. There is no longer room to feign ignorance or to temporize. It is unnecessary to say to you that I am not through you addressing myself to another. My knowledge of the interest which you take not merely in the welfare of Mr. G., but in that of the State, induces me to express myself to you on this subject. I wish you would come up here. There are more things in this world of intrigue than you wot of, and I should like to commune with you upon some of them.”

Again, on February 17, Randolph wrote: “I am not convinced by your representations respecting [Gallatin], although they are not without weight. Surely it would not be difficult to point out to the President the impossibility of conducting the affairs of the government with such a counteraction in the very Cabinet itself, without assuming anything like a disposition to dictate. Things as they are cannot go on much longer. The Administration are now in fact aground at the pitch of high tide, and a spring tide too. Nothing, then, remains but to lighten the ship, which a dead calm has hitherto kept from going to pieces. If the cabal succeed in their present projects, and I see nothing but promptitude and decision that can prevent it, the nation is undone. The state of affairs for some time past has been highly favorable to their views, which at this moment are more flattering than ever. I am satisfied that Mr. G., by a timely resistance to their schemes, might have defeated them and rendered the whole cabal as impotent as nature would seem to have intended them to be, for in point of ability (capacity for intrigue excepted) they are utterly contemptible and insignificant.”