This is a general observation, and more applicable to futurity than to the present. The acts of South Carolina are outrageous and unjustifiable. The difficult part for our government is how to nullify nullification and yet to avoid a civil war. A difficult task, but, in my humble opinion, not impossible to perform.
Do not write to me long letters which tire you; but now and then drop me three or four lines. All my family unite in affectionate remembrance and sympathy. Give my love to your wife and tell her that, whilst I live, she has a friend to whom she may apply under any circumstances. Farewell, my dear friend. May God throw comfort on your last years!
Ever your own faithful friend.
GALLATIN TO BADOLLET.
New York, 3d February, 1834.
My dear Friend,—...I sympathized most truly and deeply with you in the irreparable loss with which you have been afflicted. I had no consolation to offer you, and felt so painfully, that very wrongfully and shamefully I postponed and postponed writing to you. Even now what can I say but what must renew and embitter your grief? For no one knew more thoroughly, appreciated more highly than I did, the merits of your beloved partner. She was the solace of your checkered and in many respects troubled life, a singular blessing bestowed on you and long preserved. With heartfelt thanks to Him who gave it, resignation to his will is a duty, but this does not lessen the loss or the pain. May-be it was best that of the two you should have been the survivor. Do you now live with any of your children, and with which of them? I hardly dare ask how your health stands.
I have no other infirmities but a derangement of the functions of the stomach, which I manage without medicine, and an annually increasing debility which none could cure. It is only within the last year that I have discovered a sensible diminution in the facility of thinking and committing thoughts to writing. But this and other symptoms advise me that my active career is at an end, and that I cannot continue to vegetate very long.... My daughter has already three children, who engross the attention of my wife. Mine has for some time been turned, and will be still more devoted, to the education of James’s son, who has tolerable talents and a most engaging disposition. He is the only young male of my name, and I have hesitated whether, with a view to his happiness, I had not better take him to live and die quietly at Geneva, rather than to leave him to struggle in this most energetic country, where the strong in mind and character overset everybody else, and where consideration and respectability are not at all in proportion to virtue and modest merit. Yet I am so identified with the country which I served so long that I cannot detach myself from it. I find no one who suffers in mind as I do at the corruption and degeneracy of our government. But I do not despair, and cannot believe that we have lived under a perpetual delusion, and that the people will not themselves ultimately cure the evils under which we labor. There is something more wanted than improved forms of government. There is something wrong in the social state. Moral still more than intellectual education and habits are wanted. Had I another life before me, my faculties would be turned towards that object much rather than to political pursuits. But all this is for our posterity. Farewell, my dear friend.
Ever most affectionately yours.
The only specimen of Mr. Gallatin’s conversation which seems to claim a place in his biography is that recorded by Miss Martineau in her journal. Concise as it is, it has the merits of both the speaker and the listener.
MISS MARTINEAU’S JOURNAL. 1834.