The Life of Albert Gallatin

1807.

The greater measures of public policy which were to crown the edifice of republican government, and to realize all those ideal benefits to humanity which Mr. Jefferson and his friends aimed at, fell of necessity and properly to the President’s charge. Nowhere in all the long course of Mr. Jefferson’s great career did he appear to better advantage than when in his message of 1806 he held out to the country and the world that view of his ultimate hopes and aspirations for national development, which was, as he then trusted, to be his last bequest to mankind. Having now reached the moment when he must formally announce to Congress that the great end of relieving the nation from debt was at length within reach, and with it the duty of establishing true republican government was fulfilled, he paused to ask what use was to be made of the splendid future thus displayed before them. Should they do away with the taxes? Should they apply them to the building up of armies and navies? Both relief from taxation and the means of defence might be sufficiently obtained without exhausting their resources, and still the great interests of humanity might be secured. These great interests were economical and moral; to supply the one, a system of internal improvement should be created commensurate with the magnitude of the country; “by these operations new channels of communication will be opened between the States, the lines of separation will disappear, their interests will be identified, and their union cemented by new and indissoluble ties.” To provide for the other, the higher education should be placed among the objects of public care; “a public institution can alone supply those sciences which, though rarely called for, are yet necessary to complete the circle, all the parts of which contribute to the improvement of the country and some of them to its preservation.” A national university and a national system of internal improvement were an essential part, and indeed the realization and fruit, of the republican theories which Mr. Jefferson and his associates put in practice as their ideal of government.

In this path Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Gallatin went hand in hand. The former, indeed, thought an amendment of the Constitution necessary in order to bring these objects within the enumerated powers of the government, while Mr. Gallatin, here, as in regard to the bank and the Louisiana purchase, found no difficulty on that score; but Mr. Jefferson looked forward to the adoption of such an amendment before the three years’ interval had elapsed, and in the mean while Mr. Gallatin was actually putting his schemes into operation. The first report of the commissioners appointed to lay out the Cumberland Road, from the Potomac to the Ohio, was laid before Congress in January, 1807. A month later Congress passed the act under which the coast survey was authorized, and appropriated $50,000 to carry it into effect. A few weeks afterwards, Senator Worthington, of Ohio, one of Mr. Gallatin’s closest friends, caused a resolution to be adopted directing the Secretary of the Treasury to prepare and report to the Senate a general scheme of internal improvement.

Few persons have now any conception of the magnitude of the scheme thus originated. The university was but a trifle, which Mr. Gallatin was ready to take upon his shoulders at once without waiting for other resources than he already had. He seemed to have a passion for organization. The land system, the sinking fund system, the Cumberland Road, the coast survey, were all in his hands, and were, if not exclusively yet essentially, organized by him. He now turned his attention to the creation of a new scheme, in comparison with which all the others were only fragments and playthings. His report on internal improvements was sent in to the Senate on the 12th of April, 1808, after a year’s preparation. It presented a plan the mere outlines of which can alone find place here.

According to this sketch, the projected improvements were classified under the following heads:

I. Those parallel with the sea-coast, viz., canals cutting Cape Cod, New Jersey, Delaware, and North Carolina, so as to make continuous inland navigation along the coast to Cape Fear, at an estimated cost of $3,000,000; and a great turnpike road from Maine to Georgia, at an estimated cost of $4,800,000.

II. Those that were to run east and west, viz., improvement of the navigation of four Atlantic rivers, the Susquehanna, the Potomac, the James, and the Santee, and of four corresponding western rivers, the Alleghany, the Monongahela, the Kanawha, and the Tennessee, to the highest practicable points, at an estimated cost of $1,500,000; and the connection of these highest points of navigation by four roads across the Appalachian range, at an estimated cost of $2,800,000; and finally, a canal at the falls of the Ohio, $300,000, and improvement of roads to Detroit, St. Louis, and New Orleans, $200,000.

III. Those that were to run north and northwest to the lakes, viz., to connect the Hudson River with Lake Champlain, $800,000; to connect the Hudson River with Lake Ontario at Oswego by canal, $2,200,000; a canal round Niagara Falls, $1,000,000.

IV. Local improvements, $3,400,000.

The entire estimated expense was $20,000,000; by an appropriation of $2,000,000 a year the whole might be accomplished in ten years; by a system of selling to private parties the stock thus created by the government for turnpikes and canals, the fund might be made itself a permanent resource for further improvements.

Naturally the improvements thus contemplated were so laid out as to combine and satisfy local interests. The advantage which Mr. Gallatin proposed to gain was that of combining these interests in advance, so that they should co-operate in one great system instead of wasting the public resources in isolated efforts. He wished to fix the policy of government for at least ten years, and probably for an indefinite time, on the whole subject of internal improvements, as he had already succeeded in fixing it in regard to the payment of debt. By thus establishing a complete national system to be executed by degrees, the whole business of annual chaffering and log-rolling for local appropriations in Congress, and all its consequent corruptions and inconsistencies, were to be avoided.

Nor did Mr. Gallatin in making these propositions overlook the pressing necessity of providing for the national defence. His anticipated surplus exceeded five millions of dollars, and he intended that while two millions were annually set aside for internal improvements, the other three millions should be applied simultaneously for arsenals, magazines, and fortifications, or, if desired, for building a navy, while even from a military point of view the proposed roads and canals were as essential as arms, forts, or ships to national defence. In one respect, however, Mr. Gallatin differed rather widely from Mr. Jefferson, and this difference of opinion concerned a cardinal point of the President’s policy. The famous gun-boat scheme, which seems to have been the creation of Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Robert Smith, took shape during the winter, of 1806-7, in a special message, dated February 10, which recommended the immediate building of two hundred gun-boats. When the draft of this message was sent to Mr. Gallatin for his criticisms, he wrote that he was “clearly of opinion” there was no necessity for building so many of these vessels, and he urged that the seventy-three already in course of construction were more than enough in a time of peace. “Of all the species of force which war may require, – armies, ships of war, fortifications, and gun-boats, – there is none which can be obtained in a shorter notice than gun-boats, and none therefore that it is less necessary to provide beforehand. I think that within sixty days, perhaps half the time, each of the seaports of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore might build and fit out thirty, and the smaller ports together as many, especially if the timber was prepared beforehand. But beyond that preparation I would not go, for exclusively of the first expense of building and the interest of the capital thus laid out, I apprehend that, notwithstanding the care which may be taken, they will infallibly decay in a given number of years, and will be a perpetual bill of costs for repairs and maintenance.”77

Mr. Jefferson’s reply to this argument will be found in his letter of February 9, 1807, to Mr. Gallatin. When he fairly mounted a hobby-horse he rode it over all opposition, and, of all hobby-horses, gun-boats happened at this time to be his favorite. He insisted that the whole two hundred must be built, for five reasons: 1. Because they could not be built in two, or even in six months. 2. Because, in case of war, the enemy would destroy them on the stocks in New York, Boston, Norfolk, or any seaport. 3. “The first operation of war by an enterprising enemy would be to sweep all our seaports of their vessels at least.” 4. The expense of their preservation would be nothing. 5. The expense of construction would be less than supposed.78

Mr. Jefferson was a great man, and like other great men he occasionally committed great follies, yet it may be doubted whether in the whole course of his life he ever wrote anything much more absurd than this letter. When war came, each of his three former reasons was shown to be an error, and long before the war arrived, his two concluding reasons were contradicted by facts. These letters were written in February, 1807. In June, 1809, barely two years later, the then Secretary of the Navy, Paul Hamilton, reported that 176 gun-boats had been built, of which 24 only were in actual service. The aggregate expense to that date had been $1,700,000, or about $725,000 a year; while the reader will remember that the whole navy expenditure for 1807 was $1,722,000, and in 1808 nearly $1,900,000, against the modest $650,000 which had been agreed upon at the beginning of Mr. Jefferson’s Administration. Any one who is curious to see how far Mr. Gallatin’s opinion as to the “perpetual bill of costs for repairs” was correct, may refer to Paul Hamilton’s letter of June 6, 1809, to the Senate committee.79 Had all this expenditure improved the national defences, the waste of money would have seemed less outrageous even to Mr. Gallatin, who was its chief victim; but, as most naval officers expected, the gun-boats were in some respects positively mischievous, in others of very little use, and they were easily destroyed by the enemy whenever found. At the end of the war such of them as were not already captured, burned, wrecked, or decayed were quietly broken up or sold.80

Friends and enemies have long since agreed that Mr. Jefferson’s gun-boats were a grievous mistake. How decidedly Mr. Gallatin remonstrated against the development given to this policy, may be seen in the letter of which a portion has been quoted. He strongly urged that no more gun-boats should be built till they were wanted, and he begged Mr. Jefferson to let Congress decide whether they were wanted or not. Mr. Jefferson did not take the advice, and, as usual, Mr. Gallatin was the one to suffer for the mistakes of his chief; the gun-boats lasted long enough to give him great trouble and to be one of the principal means of bankrupting the Treasury even before the war; unfortunately, he had exhausted his strength in complaints of the Navy Department; he had spoken again and again in language which for him was without an example; in the present instance he had Mr. Jefferson himself for his strongest opponent, and there was nothing to be done but to submit.

With this exception, one merely of detail and judgment, Mr. Gallatin seems to have cordially supported the comprehensive scheme which the Administration of Mr. Jefferson pointed out to Congress as the goal of its long pilgrimage. Six years of frugality and patience had, as it conceived, fixed beyond question the republicanism of national character, established a political system purely American, and sealed this result by reducing the national debt until its ultimate extinction was in full view. To fix the future course of the republican system thus established was a matter of not less importance, was perhaps a matter of much greater difficulty, than the task already accomplished. To make one comprehensive, permanent provision for the moral and economical development of the people, to mark out the path of progress with precision and to enter upon it at least so far as to make subsequent advance easy and certain, this was the highest statesmanship, the broadest practical philanthropy. For this result Mr. Gallatin, in the ripened wisdom of his full manhood, might fairly say that his life had been well spent.

For a time he saw the prize within his grasps then almost in an instant it was dashed away, and the whole fabric he had so laboriously constructed fell in ruins before his eyes. That such a disaster should have overwhelmed him at last was neither his fault nor that of Mr. Jefferson; it was the result of forces which neither he nor any other man or combination of men, neither his policy nor any other policy or resource of human wisdom, could control. In the midst of the great crash with which the whole structure of Mr. Jefferson’s Administration toppled over and broke to pieces in its last days, there is ample room to criticise and condemn the theories on which he acted and the measures which he used, but few critics would now be bold enough to say that any policy or any measure could have prevented that disaster.

The story is soon told. Mr. Monroe and Mr. William Pinkney, appointed as a special commission to negotiate with the government of Great Britain, began their labors in July, 1806. They were fortunate enough to find the British government in friendly hands, for they happened to fall upon the short administration of Mr. Fox. With much difficulty they negotiated a treaty which was signed on the last day of the year. This treaty was doubtless a bad treaty; not so bad as that of Mr. Jay, but still very unsatisfactory, and, what was worse, the British government, by a formal note appended to it, reserved the right to render it entirely nugatory if the United States did not satisfy Great Britain that she would resist the maritime decrees of France. Whether, under these circumstances, the treaty was worth accepting, is doubtful; whether Mr. Jefferson erred in insisting upon modifications of it, may be a question. Certain it is that the Administration concurred in sending it back to England for essential changes, and that Mr. Jefferson, undaunted by his previous failure to influence France by fear of his alliance with England, now expected to control England by fear of his alliance with France. “It is all-important that we should stand on terms of the strictest cordiality” with France, he wrote to Paris in announcing his treatment of the British treaty; but this cordiality was to go no further than friendly favors. “I verily believe,” he wrote at the same time,81 “that it will ever be in our power to keep so even a stand between England and France as to inspire a wish in neither to throw us into the scale of his adversary.”

Never did a man deceive himself more miserably, for even while he wrote these lines the government of England was reverting to its policy of crushing the commercial growth of America. Mr. Fox was dead; a new Administration had come into power, strongly retrograde in policy, and with George Canning for its soul. Whatever the errors or faults of Mr. Canning may have been, timidity was not one of them, and the diplomatic ingenuity of Mr. Jefferson, with its feeble attempts to play off France against England and England against France, was the last policy he was likely to respect. Even the American who reads the history of the year 1807, seeing the brutal directness with which Mr. Canning kicked Mr. Jefferson’s diplomacy out of his path, cannot but feel a certain respect for the Englishman mingled with wrath at his insolent sarcasm. From the moment Mr. Canning and his party assumed power, the fate of Mr. Jefferson’s Administration was sealed; nothing he could do or could have done could avert it; England was determined to recover her commerce and to take back her seamen, and America could not retain either by any means whatever; she had no alternative but submission or war, and either submission or war was equally fatal to Mr. Jefferson’s Administration. Mr. Canning cared little which course she took, but he believed she would submit.

The first intimation of the new state of affairs came in an unexpected and almost accidental shape. The winter of 1806-7 had passed, and, so far as Congress was concerned, it had passed without serious conflicts. Burr’s wild expedition had startled and excited the country, but this episode had no special connection with anything actual; it was rather a sporadic exhibition of the personal peculiarities of Mr. Burr and his lurid imagination. Congress adjourned on the 3d March, 1807; as the summer advanced, Mr. Gallatin went with his family to New York; on the 25th June he was suddenly summoned back to Washington by a brief note from Mr. Jefferson announcing the capture of the American frigate Chesapeake by the British ship-of-war Leopard.

The story of this famous event, which more than any other single cause tended to exasperate national jealousies and to make England and America permanently hostile, is told in every American school history, and will probably be familiar to every school-boy in the United States for generations yet to come. Even time is slow in erasing the memory of these national humiliations, and the singular spectacle has been long presented of a great nation preserving the living memory of a wrong that the offending nation hardly noticed at the time and almost immediately forgot. The reason was that in this instance the wrong was a cruel and cynical commentary on all the mistakes of our national policy; it gave the sentence of death to the favorite dogmas and doctrines of the American Administration, and it was a practical demonstration of their absurdity, the more mortifying because of its incontestable completeness.

Mr. Gallatin hastened to Washington, sickened by anxiety and responsibility; his state of mind and that of his political friends may be shown by a few extracts from his papers:

GALLATIN TO HIS WIFEWashington, 10th July, 1807.

… I am afraid that in common with many more your feelings prevent your taking a correct view of our political situation. To spurn at negotiation and to tremble for the fate of New York are not very consistent. But every person not blinded by passion and totally ignorant of the laws and usages of civilized nations knows that, whenever injuries are received from subordinate officers, satisfaction is demanded from the government itself before reprisals are made; and that time to receive our property from abroad and to secure our harbors as well as we can is of importance to us, can any one doubt in New York? It is our duty to ask for reparation, to avert war if it can be done honorably, and in the mean while not to lose an instant in preparing for war. On the last point I doubt, between ourselves, whether everything shall be done which ought to be done. And for that reason alone I wish that Congress may be called somewhat earlier than is now intended. The President wishes the call for the last of October. I had at first proposed the middle, but from various circumstances I now want an immediate call. The principal objection will not be openly avowed, but it is the unhealthiness of this city. I am glad to see the spirit of the people, but I place but a moderate degree of confidence on those first declarations in which many act from the first impulse of their feelings, more from sympathy or fear, and only a few from a calm view of the subject. I think that I have taken such a view, probed the extent of the dangers and evils of a war, and, though fully aware of both, will perhaps persevere longer under privations and evils than many others. Our commerce will be destroyed and our revenue nearly annihilated. That we must encounter; but our resources in money and men will be sufficient considerably to distress the enemy and to defend ourselves everywhere but at sea. I have, in a national point of view, but one subject of considerable uneasiness, and that is New York, which is now entirely defenceless, and from its situation nearly indefensible. This last idea I keep altogether to myself. I think that I increased my sickness by intensity of thinking and not sleeping at nights. I certainly grew better as soon as my plans were digested, and, except as to New York, I feel now very easy, provided that our resources shall be applied with ability and in the proper direction. In the mean while the ships on our coast may accelerate hostilities. This we will try to avoid, and so will Mr. Erskine, who, having neither orders nor advice from his government on this subject, cannot be very easy and will not be very influential. (Admiral Berkeley’s order is, very curiously, drawn and dated as far back as 1st June.) But I think that these hostilities will be confined to blockade and captures till they receive new instructions, and that New York has no immediate danger to apprehend. At all events, against such a force it may be defended. The difficulty is in case a fleet of ten ships of the line shall attack it…

14th July, 1807.

… Of our public affairs I have nothing new to say. It is probable that the attack on our frigate was not directly authorized by the British government; it is certain that the subsequent acts of the commodore in the vicinity of Norfolk were without any order even from his admiral. But from the character and former orders of the last-mentioned (Berkeley) it is probable that, considering the proclamation as hostile, he will order all merchant vessels on our coast to be taken and the Chesapeake to be blockaded. They will not venture on any hostilities on shore until they receive orders from Great Britain; for their naval arrogance induces them to make unfounded distinctions between what is legal on land or on water even within our jurisdiction, and they have not really sense or knowledge enough to feel that their present conduct within the Chesapeake is as much an actual invasion as if an army was actually landed. Upon the whole, you will, I am persuaded, have time to do whatever is practicable for the defence of New York. I have seen Mr. Erskine, whom I treated with more civility than cordiality; but I could not help it. I believe that he is much embarrassed between what is right and his fear of the naval officers and of his own government.

NATHANIEL MACON TO GALLATINBuck Spring, 12th July, 1807.

Sir, – The attack of the British on the Chesapeake and their subsequent conduct near Norfolk has much irritated every one here, and all are anxious to learn what the President intends to do. From the tenor of his proclamation I suppose he intends to have a representation made to the British government, and, in case that does not produce the desired effect, to order our ministers home, and in the mean time to have all the preparations for war he can ready. I also suppose from the proclamation that Congress will not be called until he hears from London, unless there should be a change in the state of affairs…

If war must be, we ought to prosecute it with the same zeal that we have endeavored to preserve peace, and by great exertions convince the enemy that it is not from fear or cowardice that we dread it. But peace, if we can have it, is always best for us, and if the Executive can get justice done and preserve it, that Executive will deserve the thanks of every democrat in the Union.

JOSEPH H. NICHOLSON TO GALLATINChesterfield, 14th July, 1807.

Dear Sir, – …We are looking with great anxiety towards Washington for the measures to be adopted by the government. For myself I consider a war inevitable, and almost wish for it. An unqualified submission to Britain would not be more degrading than forbearance now. The Ministry may probably, and I think will, disavow the late act of their officer; but there are insults and injuries for which neither an individual nor a nation can accept an apology. I had hoped, therefore, that Mr. Erskine would have been ordered home and our own envoys recalled. Nothing is now left to negotiate on. No man ever saved his honor who opened a negotiation for it. It is no subject of barter. If Tarquin had begged pardon of Collatinus for ravishing his wife, I think it would not have been granted. At all events we cannot, or at least ought not, negotiate till our seamen are restored. In 1764, when France took possession of Turk’s Island, her minister at the Court of London proposed to negotiate for some claims that his master had upon it. George Grenville told him, “We will not hear you; we will listen to nothing while the island is in your possession. Restore it, and we will then hear what you have to say.” It was instantaneously given up. I wish Mr. Jefferson would read the history of that transaction, and also Lord Chatham’s celebrated speech on the business of Falkland Islands. Each furnishes an admirable lesson for the present moment. But one feeling pervades the nation. All distinctions of federalism and democracy are vanished. The people are ready to submit to any deprivation, and if we withdraw ourselves within our own shell, and turn loose some thousands of privateers, we shall obtain in a little time an absolute renunciation of the right of search for the purposes of impressment. A parley will prove fatal, for the merchants will begin to calculate. They rule us, and we should take them before their resentment is superseded by considerations of profit and loss. I trust in God the Revenge is going out to bring Monroe and Pinkney home.