1832.
Mr. Gallatin’s pamphlet was circulated as a campaign document by the bank. He became by this means its spokesman and one of its most influential allies, subjected to suspicion and attack on its account, although it need hardly be said that he not only received no compensation from the bank, but declined the ordinary pay of contributors to the Review. This attitude he was probably prepared to maintain so long as the bank charter was undecided; but after President Jackson had carried his point and the bank perished, after the independent Treasury was organized, and the Whig party was setting everything at stake upon success in effecting a counter-revolution and restoring the bank, there was naturally some irritation against Mr. Gallatin because he took very cautious ground and preferred to accept the situation.
The bank charter was, however, a subordinate and comparatively uninteresting question in the politics of 1831. Another and a more serious political issue was threatening the existence of the Union and entering into all the most earnest discussions of the Presidential election of 1832. This was the protective system, the American system of Mr. Clay, who, always true to his deep feeling for nationality, was himself the best product of the war of 1812, in its character of national self-assertion. All Mr. Gallatin’s feelings and education were opposed to protection; his voice had been, as he took pride in thinking, the first in America to make a public assertion of free-trade principles, and now, in 1831, his advocacy of tariff reduction was stimulated by the threatening attitude of South Carolina. That political theory which he had always made his cardinal principle, and which, in its practical form, consisted simply in avoiding issues that were likely to endanger the Union, led him now to urge timely concession. In September, 1831, a convention of the friends of free trade was held in Philadelphia, and delegated to a committee, of which Mr. Gallatin was chairman, the task of preparing a memorial to be presented to both Houses of Congress. This memorial forms a pamphlet of nearly ninety pages, and was such a document as he might have sent to Congress had he been still Secretary of the Treasury; it was, in fact, a Secretary’s report, and it probably had as much effect, for it became the text-book of the free-traders of that day.
The memorial began by ascertaining the annual expenditure of the government and the annual value of imports; from these data it concluded that an average duty of 25 per cent. ad valorem on the taxed imports would answer all requirements and should be assumed as the normal standard of taxation; after an argument on the general theory of free trade, the paper went on to examine and criticise the existing tariff and to show the propriety of the proposed reform.
When the memorial was presented to Congress, it called down upon Mr. Gallatin’s head a storm of denunciation. For this he was of course prepared, and he could not have expected to escape blows when, at a time of intense excitement, he voluntarily placed himself in the thickest of the mêlée. It was then, on the 2d February, 1832, that Mr. Clay made a famous speech in the Senate in defence of his American system, and into this carefully prepared oration he introduced the following remarks upon Mr. Gallatin:
“The gentleman to whom I am about to allude, although long a resident of this country, has no feelings, no attachments, no sympathies, no principles in common with our people. Near fifty years ago Pennsylvania took him to her bosom, and warmed and cherished and honored him; and how does he manifest his gratitude? By aiming a vital blow at a system endeared to her by a thorough conviction that it is indispensable to her prosperity. He has filled, at home and abroad, some of the highest offices under this government during thirty years, and he is still at heart an alien. The authority of his name has been invoked, and the labors of his pen, in the form of a memorial to Congress, have been engaged, to overthrow the American system and to substitute the foreign. Go home to your native Europe, and there inculcate upon her sovereigns your Utopian doctrines of free trade, and when you have prevailed upon them to unseal their ports and freely admit the produce of Pennsylvania and other States, come back, and we shall be prepared to become converts and to adopt your faith!”
Mr. Clay, in the course of his career, uttered a vast number of rhetorical periods as defective as this in logic, taste, and judgment; but he very rarely succeeded in accumulating so many blunders as in this attack on Mr. Gallatin. The bad taste of vilifying an old associate, in a place where he cannot reply; the bad logic of answering arguments on the proper rates of impost duties by remarks on the birthplace of any given individual; the bad temper of raising mean and bitter local prejudices against an honorable and candid opponent, who had never, under any provocation, condescended to use such weapons against others; all these faults are excusable, or, at least, are so common among orators and debaters as to pass almost unnoticed and unreproved. It is not these rhetorical flourishes which raise a smile in reading Mr. Clay’s remarks, nor even the adjuration to “Go home to your native Europe,” although this has a startling resemblance to the rhetoric which Charles Dickens, at about this time, attributed to Elijah Pogram. All these are faults, but this paragraph on Mr. Gallatin was worse than a fault: it contained two gross political blunders. One was the pledge that if Europe would adopt free trade America would be prepared to imitate her; a pledge which no sound or well-informed protectionist could, even by inadvertence, have let slip. The other was still more fatal. One principal motive that influenced Mr. Gallatin in pressing at this time his proposition of reducing duties below a maximum of 25 per cent. ad valorem, was the hope that by such a compromise the disunionist propaganda of South Carolina might be paralyzed and the national government might escape with dignity from its embarrassments, without really sacrificing Northern industry. The policy was wise and statesmanlike; in fact, the only solid ground, short of armed compulsion, which could claim logical coherence. Mr. Clay, however, characterized it in terms that cut him entirely away from all consistent recourse to it; yet within twelve months Mr. Clay actually assumed this same ground and went beyond Mr. Gallatin in his abandonment of the protective system. In fact, the difficulty with Gallatin’s scheme was that it did not go far enough to please South Carolina, as appears very clearly in a letter written by Gallatin on the 7th April, 1832, to William Drayton, one of the South Carolina representatives, in reply to his request for the sketch of a bill which should reduce the duties to an average of 10 per cent.[167] Mr. Clay’s compromise conceded everything, and that too in a worse form and with deplorable consequences. His reputation suffered, and deservedly suffered, in proportion to his previous dogmatism.
Meanwhile, Mr. Gallatin had at last fairly adopted a new career. Certain persons had obtained from the New York Legislature in April, 1829, the charter for a new bank, and finding themselves, after three successive attempts, unable to induce capitalists to subscribe for the stock, they applied to Mr. J. J. Astor for assistance, and Mr. Astor agreed to furnish the necessary capital on condition that Mr. Gallatin should be president of the bank. Thus the National (afterwards the Gallatin) Bank came into existence; a small corporation with a capital of only $750,000, and certainly not an institution calculated to inspire or gratify any ambitious thoughts or hopes. Mr. Gallatin drew from it the very modest compensation of $2000 a year, that being the sum which he considered necessary, in addition to his own income, to enable him to live in New York. He never wanted wealth, and was, to his dying day, perfectly consistent on this point with his early declarations. Indeed, his views were far more ambitious when he was surveying the Ohio wilderness with Savary than when he returned to America after nearly fifteen years passed at the most magnificent capitals and courts of the world. What he aimed at and enjoyed was the respect and consideration of his fellow-citizens. In this he was fully gratified. His acquaintance was sought by almost every person of any prominence who visited the city. He was exempted more and more from hostile attack and criticism, and his occupations were such as to keep him always agreeably employed and to bring him in contact with numbers of intelligent and educated men. One by one his old associates passed from the stage,—Jefferson, Monroe, Madison, La Fayette, Badollet,—but a younger generation had already supplied their places. His conversation was, perhaps, freer than when he was forced to weigh his words. His domestic relations were peculiarly happy, and in this respect his good fortune lasted till his death.
Under these pleasant conditions, Mr. Gallatin’s active mind turned to those scientific pursuits for which it was so well fitted and in which it took most delight. Perhaps one might not wander very far from the truth if one added that these pursuits were, on the whole, his most permanent claim to distinction. The first debater and parliamentarian of his day, his fame as a leader of Congress has long since ceased to give an echo, and his most brilliant speeches are hardly known even by name to the orators of the present generation. The first of all American financiers, his theories, his methods, and his achievements as Secretary of the Treasury are as completely forgotten by politicians as his speeches in Congress. First among the diplomatists of his time, his reputation as a diplomate has passed out of men’s minds. First as a writer and an authority on political economy in America, very few economists can now remember the titles of his writings or the consequences of his action. But he was the father of American ethnology, and there has been no time since his death when the little band of his followers have forgotten him; there never can come a time when students of that subject can venture to discard his work.
The reason of this steadiness in the estimate of his scientific reputation is simply that his method was sound and his execution accurate; having set to himself the task of constructing a large system of American ethnology, he laid its foundations broadly and firmly in an adequate study of comparative philology. Abstaining with his usual caution from all hazardous speculation and unripe theorizing, he devoted immense labor and many years of life to the routine work of collecting and sifting vocabularies, studying the grammatical structure of languages, and classifying the groups and families of our American Indians on the principles thus worked out. Thus it was he who first established the linguistic groups of the North American Indians on a large scale, and made the first ethnographical map of North America which had real merit.