At the close of the year 1829 Mr. Gallatin attempted to carry out his old and favorite plan of the “establishment of a general system of rational and practical education fitted for all, and gratuitously open to all.” The want of an institution for education, combining the advantages of a European university with the recent improvements in instruction, was seriously felt. New York, already a great city, and rapidly growing, offered the most promising field for the national university on a broad and liberal foundation correspondent to the spirit of the age. The difficulty of obtaining competent teachers of even the lower branches of knowledge in the public schools, the system of which was in its infancy, was great. Persons could be found with learning enough, but they were generally deficient in the art of teaching. Governor Throop noticed this deficiency in his message of January, 1830, without, however, the recommendation of any remedy by legislation. The existing colleges could not supply the want. At this period religious prejudice controlled the actions of men in every walk of life; for the old colonial jealousies of Episcopalian and Presbyterian survived the Revolution. The religious distrust of scientific investigation was also at its height. Columbia College, the successor of old King's College, was governed in the Episcopalian interest. Private zeal could alone be relied upon to establish the new enterprise on a foundation free from the influence of clergy; an indispensable condition of success. These were the views of Mr. Jefferson in 1807. These were the views of Mr. Gallatin. In response to his request abundant subscriptions in money and material were at once forthcoming.
The project of a national university at New York was received by the literary institutions of the United States with great enthusiasm. In October, 1830, a convention of more than a hundred literary and scientific gentlemen, delegates from different parts of the country, and of the highest distinction, was held in the common-council chamber. The outcome of their deliberations was the foundation of the New York University. Mr. Gallatin was the president of the first council, but his connection with the institution was of short continuance. The reasons for his withdrawal were set forth in a letter to his old friend, John Badollet, written February 7, 1833. Beginning with an expression of his desire to devote what remained of his life “to the establishment in this immense and growing city (New York) of a general system of rational and practical education fitted for all and gratuitously opened to all,” he said, “but finding that the object was no longer the same, that a certain portion of the clergy had obtained the control, and that their object, though laudable, was special and quite distinct from mine, I resigned at the end of one year rather than to struggle, probably in vain for what was nearly unattainable.” The history of the university through its precarious existence of half a century amply justifies Mr. Gallatin's previsions and retirement. Instead of an American Sorbonne, of which he dreamed, it has never been more than a local institution, struggling to hold a place in a crowded field.
Mr. Gallatin followed the evolutions of French politics with interest. His friend Lafayette, who, during the Empire, lived in almost enforced retirement at his estate of La Grange, was a voluntary exile from the court of Charles X., whose autocratic principles and aggressive course were rapidly driving France into fresh revolution. In July, 1830, the crisis was precipitated by the royal decrees published in the “Moniteur.” Lafayette, who was on his estate, hurried instantly to Paris, where he became a rallying point, and himself signed the note to the king, announcing that he had ceased to reign. In September following it fell to him to write to Mr. Gallatin on the occasion of the marriage of Gallatin's daughter. In this union Lafayette had a triple interest. Besides his personal attachment for Mr. Gallatin, each of the young couple was descended from one of his old companions-in-arms. The groom, Mr. Byam Kerby Stevens, was a son of Colonel Ebenezer Stevens, of the continental service, who was Lafayette's chief of artillery in his expedition against Arnold in Virginia, in the spring of 1781; the bride, Frances Gallatin, was, on the mother's side, the granddaughter of Commodore James Nicholson, who commanded the gunboats which, improvised by Colonel Stevens, drove out the British vessels from Annapolis Bay and opened the route to the blockaded American flotilla.[22]
“Paris, September 8, 1830.
“My Dear Friend:—A long time has elapsed since I had the pleasure to hear from you. I need not, I hope, add, that my affectionate feelings have been continually with you, especially in what related to my young friend whose change of name has more deeply interested every member, and in a very particular manner, the younger part of the family. Let me hear of you all, and receive my tender regards and wishes, with those of my children and grandchildren. Lafayette.”
Both of the young people had the honor of Lafayette's acquaintance,—Mr. Stevens during a visit to Paris, and Miss Gallatin during her father's residence there as minister, when she was much admired, and was, in the words of Madame Bonaparte (Miss Patterson), 'a beauty.' In this letter Lafayette gives a picturesque account of the three days' fighting at the barricades, and of the departure of the ex-king and the royal army, accompanied by “some twenty thousand Parisians, in coaches, hacks, and omnibus.... The royal party, after returning the jewels of the crown, went slowly to Cherbourg with their own escort, under the protection of three commissioners, and were there permitted quietly to embark for England.”
In 1834 Mr. Gallatin's sympathies were greatly excited by the arrival at New York of a number of Poles, many of them educated men, and among them Etsko, a nephew of Kosciusko. A public committee was raised, called the Polish committee, of which Mr. Gallatin was chosen chairman. Besides superintending the collection of funds, he arranged and carried out in the minutest details a plan to quarter the exiles upon the inhabitants. A list of names ending in ski still remains among his papers; to each was assigned a number, and they were allotted by streets and numbers,—number 182, one Szelesegynski, was taken by Mr. Gallatin himself, to look after horses. These unfortunate men were then distributed through the country, as occupations could be found. In October Mr. Gallatin's notes show that all had been provided for except fourteen boys, for whom a subscription was taken up. A tract of land in Illinois was assigned by Congress to these political exiles.
Mr. Gallatin's first acquaintance with the American Indian was made at Machias. In the neighborhood of this frontier town, across the Canadian border, there were still remnants of the Abenaki and Etchemin tribes. They were French in sympathy, and all converts to the Roman Catholic faith. Mr. Lesdernier, with whom Gallatin lodged, had influence over them from the trade he established with them in furs, and as their religious purveyor. He had paid a visit to Boston at the time the French fleet was there in 1781, and brought home a Capuchin priest for their service. To the young Genevan, brought up in the restrictions of European civilization, the history of the savage was a favorite study. In the winter evenings, in the quiet of the log hut, with the aid of one familiar with the customs and traditions of the race, the foundations were laid of a permanent interest in this almost untrodden branch of human science. The Canadian Indians, however, hemmed in by French and English settlements, were semi-civilized. The Miamis and Shawnees, who ranged the valley of the Ohio, were the tribes nearest to Gallatin's home on the Monongahela. These, though for a long time under the influence of the French, retained their original wildness, and were, during the first years of his residence, the dread of the frontier.
The interest aroused in the mind of Mr. Gallatin by personal observation was quickened by his intimacy with Jefferson, whose “Notes on Virginia,” published in 1801, contained the first attempt at a classification and enumeration of American tribes. The earlier work of Colden was confined to the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. The arrangement of the Louisiana territory, ceded by France, brought Mr. Gallatin into contact with Pierre Louis Chouteau, and an intimacy formed with John Jacob Astor, who was largely concerned in the fur trade of the Northwest, widened the field of interest, which included the geography of the interior and the customs of its inhabitants. Mr. Gallatin's examination of the subject was general, however, and did not take a practical scientific turn until the year 1823, when, at the request of Baron Alexander von Humboldt, he set forth the results of his studies in the form of a Synopsis of the Indian tribes. This essay, communicated by Humboldt to the Italian geographer Balbi, then engaged upon his "Atlas Ethnographique du Globe,"—a classification by languages of ancient and modern peoples,—was quoted by him in his volume introductory to that remarkable work published in 1826, in a manner to attract the attention of the scientific world. Vater, in his “Mithridates,” first attempted a classification of the languages of the globe, but the work of Mr. Gallatin, though confined in subject, was original in its conception and treatment. In the winter of 1825-26 a large gathering of southern Indians at Washington enabled him to obtain good vocabularies of several of the tribes. Uniting these to those already acquired, he published a table of all the existing tribes, and at the same time, at his instance, the War Department circulated through its posts a vocabulary containing six hundred words of verbal forms and of selected sentences, and a series of grammatical queries, to which answers were invited. He also opened an elaborate correspondence with such persons as were best acquainted with the Indian tribes in different sections of the country.[23] The replies to these various queries were few in number, but the practical plan, adhered to in substance, has resulted in the collection by the Smithsonian Institution of a very large number of Indian vocabularies.[24]
This class of investigation, in its ample scope for original research and the ascertainment of principles by analysis and analogic expression, was peculiarly agreeable to Mr. Gallatin. His friend, du Ponceau,[25] who served in the American war as the secretary of Steuben, and was now established in Philadelphia, was likewise deeply engaged in philologic studies; in 1819 he had published a memoir of the construction of the languages of the North American Indians, which he followed later with other papers of a similar nature, among which were a “Grammar of the Languages of the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians,” and a memoir on the grammatical system of the languages of the Indian tribes of North America, a learned and highly instructive paper, which took the Volney prize at Paris.