But if Mr. Adams irritated Mr. Gallatin by the manner of carrying out his recommendation of retaliatory laws against France, Mr. Gallatin irritated Mr. Adams by his treatment of another diplomatic difficulty still more delicate. A French ship, the Apollon, had been seized by order of our government in the river St. Mary’s, on the Spanish side, for infringing and evading our navigation laws. The seizure was a high-handed act, hardly defensible in law, and of the same class with many acts rendered, or supposed to be rendered, necessary by the inefficiency of the Spanish administration in Florida. Mr. Adams, who rarely allowed himself to be hindered by merely technical impediments in carrying out a correct policy, defended this act much as he defended the far more unjustifiable execution of Arbuthnot and Ambrister by General Jackson; that is, he made the best defence he could, and carried it off with a high hand. Mr. Gallatin, however, tried to justify the seizure by proving that it took place in American waters, and in discussing the subject in correspondence with Mr. Adams he added the remark which was, to any one who knew his mode of thought, quite inevitable as his summing up, that the tenor of Mr. Adams’s argument was dangerous and would not find acceptance in Europe. This seems to have extremely irritated the Secretary, and called out the following entry in his Diary:
“8th November, 1821.—The most extraordinary part of Gallatin’s conduct is that after a long argument to the French government upon grounds entirely new and different from those we had taken here, he gives us distinctly to understand that he considers all these grounds, ours and his own, as not worth a straw. I asked Calhoun to-day what he thought it could mean. He said perhaps it was the pride of opinion. I think it lies deeper. Gallatin is a man of first-rate talents, conscious and vain of them, and mortified in his ambition, checked, as it has been, after attaining the last step to the summit; timid in great perils, tortuous in his paths; born in Europe, disguising and yet betraying a supercilious prejudice of European superiority of intellect, and holding principles pliable to circumstances, occasionally mistaking the left for the right-handed wisdom.”
The character thus drawn by Mr. Adams is very interesting as a study of something more than Mr. Gallatin only. Mr. Gallatin certainly was a man of first-rate talents and was no doubt conscious of them; he would have been more than human had he not felt the injustice of that prejudice which had shut the door of the Presidency in his face because he was born in another republic; he certainly had the faculty of keeping his opinions, whatever they were, to himself, which is always an assumption of superiority; he was moreover an extremely adroit politician, full of resource, conciliatory and pliable in a remarkable degree; possibly, too, he may have at times mistaken his path. Timid he was not, but his courage was of a kind so perfectly self-assured that it often disregarded imputations of timidity which would have been intolerable to more sensitive men. Mr. Adams himself long afterwards and in the most public manner paid a tribute to his absolute honesty such as he would have been willing to pay hardly any other very prominent man of the time, unless it were Madison and Monroe. The character may, therefore, be admitted as at least half true, and as throwing much light on its subject; but it was very amusing as coming from the sources that produced it. Ambition is not, within reasonable limits, a deadly sin, but if it were, there was not a leading man of that time, from Thomas Jefferson to De Witt Clinton, whose chance of salvation was better than Mr. Gallatin’s. Vanity is a pardonable weakness, but the virtue of extreme modesty was not among those merits which most characterized the American statesmen of President Monroe’s day. Pliability in politics, if accompanied by honesty, is a virtue; business can be conducted in no other way; but in all Mr. Gallatin’s long career there was and was to be no parallel to the political pliability to be found among the Cabinet officers of President Monroe. Human nature is only relatively perfect; absolute perfection is a higher standard than statesmen are required to attain; but even as regards relative perfection, there is a curious suggestiveness in finding Mr. Gallatin singled out for pride of opinion, vanity, timidity, and tortuousness, pliability, superciliousness, and mistakes of judgment, among Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Adams, Mr. Crawford and Mr. Clay.
This, however, was merely one of those diplomatic quarrels which, like those at Ghent, have no real significance. Mr. Gallatin was probably right in the opinion which vexed his chief. At all events, the French negotiation went on undisturbed, and even after its transfer to Washington, which a very sensitive man would have felt as a slight, Mr. Gallatin continued his active assistance to Mr. Adams and pressed upon the French government with all his weight. Ultimately an agreement was effected and a treaty signed at Washington which, as Mr. Gallatin seems to have thought, conceded somewhat more than was necessary, but which at least put an end to the commercial war.
1822.
The conclusion of this treaty had been the principal object of Mr. Gallatin’s continuance at Paris, but this affair, the anxious condition of our relations with Spain, and his own increasing sense of satisfaction in diplomatic life, made him contented and even happy to remain over the year 1822. Mr. Crawford, whose candidacy for the succession to Mr. Monroe was then likely to prove successful, took pains to maintain close relations with Mr. Gallatin, and was especially anxious for his early return in order that his influence might be felt in the important State of Pennsylvania. This duty seems, however, to have little suited Mr. Gallatin’s taste. He remained of his own accord in Paris, his opinion agreeing with that of the President that his presence there was desirable. At the same time he declined the office of president of the Bank of the United States. While thus holding himself aloof from public interests in America, he took a resolution which seems to show how little he understood the change that time and experience had worked in his circumstances. He sent his younger son to New Geneva with directions to build a stone house in extension of the brick building he had constructed thirty years before; here he proposed to return with his family and to pass the remainder of his life.
One of Sir Walter Scott’s favorite sayings was that the wisest of our race often reserve the average stock of folly to be all expended upon some one flagrant absurdity. He might have added that when a shrewd and cautious man once commits such a folly there is more than a fair probability of his repeating it. Mr. Calhoun, who should have had some sympathy with this trait, may have been right in seeking for the source of unusual acts in “pride of opinion;” or a wider philosophy might trace such eccentricities to the peculiar structure of individual minds and to ineradicable habits of thought. Mr. Gallatin had in the pride of youth and the full fervor of fresh enthusiasm committed the folly of burying himself in the wilderness, and now, when more than sixty years old, after an active life of constant excitement, with a family of children almost entirely educated in Paris, and a wife who even thirty years before had found the western country intolerable, he proposed to return there and end his life. Had the great wave of western improvement swept New Geneva before it in its course, there might have been an excuse for Mr. Gallatin’s determination; but New Geneva remained what he had left it, a beautiful and peaceful mountain valley, where no human being could find other employment than that of cultivating the soil with his own hands. There Mr. Gallatin decided to go, on the extraordinary plea that he could afford to live nowhere else, and the loss of a part of his private income in 1823 only fixed him more firmly in his determination.
Had he wished to return to Congress or to political life, there might have been reason in his course; but the only political position he cared to hold was that of minister in Paris, and this he relinquished in order to live on the banks of the Monongahela. The following letters will show what his friends wished and expected him to do, and what he did. His own letters from Paris, in reply to Mr. Crawford and Mr. Astor, are lost or destroyed; but it is clear that he paid very little attention to their suggestions. His own preference would have been to take only a leave of absence in 1823, to arrange his affairs and settle his sons in business; then to return himself to Paris.
CRAWFORD TO GALLATIN.
Washington, 13th May, 1822.