Gallatin, ALBERT

Gallatin, ALBERT, financier and statesman, was born at Geneva in 1761, and graduated at the university there in 1779. In 1780 he went to the United States, where he engaged in trade, and was for a time teacher of French in Harvard College. Afterwards he purchased land in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and made his entrance into political life in the latter state in 1789. In 1793 he was elected to the United States senate, and in 1795 entered congress. In 1801-13 he was Secretary of the Treasury, in which post he was of signal service to his adopted country, and showed himself one of the first financiers of his day. He took an important part in the negotiations for peace with England in 1814, and signed the treaty of Ghent. From 1815 to 1823 he was minister at Paris, and in 1826 he was sent to London as ambassador-extraordinary. On his return in 1827 he settled in New York, and devoted much of his time to literature, being chiefly occupied in historical and ethnological researches. He was one of the founders and the first president of the Ethnological Society of America; and from 1843 to his death he was president of the New York Historical Society. He died August 12, 1849. His works include publications on finance, politics, and ethnology; among these last are The Indian Tribes east of the Rocky Mountains, &c. (1836), and Notes on the Semi-civilised Nations of Mexico, Yucatan, and Central America (1845). See the Lives by Henry Adams (1879) and J. A. Stevens (in the 'American Statesman' series, 1883).