Repeatedly interrupted; at moments absolutely stopped by uproar and rioting; able to make his feeble voice heard only by those immediately around him, he still resolutely maintained his ground and persisted to the end. Mr. Gallatin was at that time in his eighty-fourth year; nothing but the most conscientious sense of duly could possibly have induced him to appear again in public, especially on an occasion when it was well known that the worst passions of the worst populace in the city of New York would be aroused against him. Not even when he risked his life before the rifles of the backwoodsmen at Redstone Old Fort had he given so striking proof of his moral courage.
Perhaps it was this final proof that gave point to a short speech of Mr. J. Q. Adams, which has been already alluded to. In the month of November following the annexation meeting, the New York Historical Society, of which Mr. Gallatin was now president, held a celebration, followed by a dinner, given in his honor. Mr. J. Q. Adams was one of the invited guests, and took the occasion to make the following remarks. Readers of his Diary will appreciate how much his concluding words meant to him; honesty, as both Mr. Gallatin and himself had found, was not only the highest, but one of the rarest, public virtues:
“To the letter,” said Mr. Adams, “which was sent me, your honorable president added a line, saying, ‘I shall be glad to shake hands with you once more in this world.’ Sir, if nothing else could have induced me, these words would have compelled my attendance here, and I can conceive of nothing that would have prevented me. I have lived long, sir, in this world, and I have been connected with all sorts of men, of all sects and descriptions. I have been in the public service for a great part of my life, and filled various offices of trust in conjunction with that venerable gentleman, Albert Gallatin. I have known him half a century. In many things we differed; on many questions of public interest and policy we were divided, and in the history of parties in this country there is no man from whom I have so widely differed as from him. But on other things we have harmonized; and now there is no man with whom I more thoroughly agree on all points than I do with him. But one word more. Let me say, before I leave you and him,—birds of passage as we are, bound to a warmer and more congenial clime,—that among all the public men with whom I have been associated in the course of my political life, whether agreeing or differing in opinion with him, I have always found him to be an honest and honorable man.”
1848.
In spite of all the opposition of the North, the war with Mexico took place. Every moral conviction and every lifelong hope of Mr. Gallatin were outraged by this act of our government. The weight of national immorality rested incessantly on his mind. He would not abandon his faith in human nature; he determined to make an appeal to the moral sense of the American public, and to scatter this appeal broadcast by the hundred thousand copies over the country. With this view he wrote his pamphlet on “Peace with Mexico,”[172] yet accompanying it with another on “War Expenses,” which invoked more worldly interests. His object was to urge the conclusion of a peace on moral and equitable principles, and, feeling that time was short, he pressed forward with feverish haste. On the 15th February, 1848, he said, “I write with great difficulty, and I become exhausted when I work more than four or five hours a day. Ever since the end of October all my faculties, impaired as they are, were absorbed in one subject; not only my faculties, but I may say all my feelings. I thought of nothing else: Age quod agis! I postponed everything else, even a volume of ethnography which was in the press; even answering the letters which did not absolutely require immediate attention.”
The warnings to be quick came thick and fast. Only a week after he wrote this letter, his old associate, J. Q. Adams, breathed his last on the floor of Congress. A few weeks more brought the news that Alexander Baring was dead. In Europe society itself seemed about to break in pieces, and everything old was passing away with a rapidity that recalled the days of the first French revolution. Mr. Gallatin might well think it necessary to press his pace and to economize every instant that remained; and yet in that eventful year the world moved more rapidly still, and he had time—though not much—to spare. His pamphlets were sent in great numbers over the North and East, and certainly had their share in leading the government to accept the treaty of peace which was negotiated by Mr. Trist, notwithstanding instructions to leave Mexico, and signed by him at Guadalupe Hidalgo on the 2d of February.
1849.
These pamphlets were his last intellectual effort. As the year advanced, symptoms of decline became more and more evident. His memory began to fail. When alone, he caught himself talking in French as when a boy. His mind recurred much to his early youth, to Geneva, to his school, to Mlle. Pictet, and undoubtedly to that self-reproach for his neglect of her and of his family which seems to have weighed upon him throughout life. The Presidential election of 1848 was a great satisfaction to him; but he thought more frequently and naturally of his own past political contests and of the Presidents whom he had helped to make. His mind became more excitable as his strength declined. There was, however, little to be done or desired by him in the way of preparation; his life had left no traces to be erased, and his death would create no confusion and required no long or laborious forethought. He had felt a certain pride in his modest means; his avowed principle had been that a Secretary of the Treasury should not acquire wealth. He had no enemies to forgive. “‘I cannot charge myself with malignity of temper,’” he said; “‘indeed, I have been regarded as mild and amiable. But now, approaching the confines of the eternal world, I desire to examine myself with the utmost rigor to see whether I am in charity with all mankind. On this retrospect I cannot remember any adversary whom I have not forgiven, or to whom I have failed to make known my forgiveness, except one, and he is no longer living.’ Here he named a late eminent politician of Virginia”; doubtless William B. Giles.
During the last months of his life he turned with great earnestness to the promises and hopes of religion. His clergyman, Dr. Alexander, kept memoranda of his conversation on this subject. “I never was an infidel,” he said; “though I have had my doubts, and the habit of my thinking has been to push discoveries to their utmost consequences without fear.... I have always leaned towards Arminianism; but the points are very difficult. I am a bold speculator. Such has been the habit of my mind all my life long.”
He failed slowly as the winter of 1848-49 passed, and was for the most part confined to his room and his bed. In the month of May, 1849, while he thus lay helpless, his wife died in the adjoining room, leaving him deeply overcome and shaken by agitation and grief. Nevertheless, he survived to be taken, as the summer came on, to his daughter’s house at Astoria. There, on the 12th August, 1849, his life ended.