The diary of James Gallatin, secretary to Albert Gallatin, a great peace maker

Preface

In 1875 my grandfather, James Gallatin, handed me a large sealed packet, telling me it contained his Diary from 1813 until 1827, also many important private documents.

I was not in any case to publish any part of it until 1900. He died the following year. It lay unopened and nearly forgotten until last year. On reading it, I found it of the deepest interest. This decided me (after weeding out large portions and suppressing anything that might offend) to offer it to the public.

It throws a very clear light on the events leading up to the Treaty of Ghent, and on the actual conclusion of that treaty. James accompanied his father, Albert Gallatin, as private and confidential secretary. He was sixteen years of age when the Diary opens.

Albert Gallatin held a unique position. Born at Geneva in 1761, of one of the most aristocratic families, he was left an orphan at an early age, and was brought up by his grandmother, Madame de Gallatin-Vaudenet. She was a woman of very strong character, an intimate friend of the Landgrave of Hesse Cassel, and also of Voltaire.

Albert Gallatin was much influenced by the latter's liberal theories; also he had imbibed the ideas of Rousseau and Condorcet. At the age of nineteen his grandmother informed him that she intended placing him in the army of the Landgrave with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. His answer was, "I will not serve a tyrant." A sharp box on the ears from her decided

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his future. Without the knowledge of any of his relations, and at that time the possessor of but a small fortune, he suddenly disappeared. The next heard of him was in America.

In this connection the following letter of May 24, 1780, from Benjamin Franklin to Richard Bache, Postmaster- General of the United States, is of interest:

Dear Son,

Messieurs Gallatin and de Serre, two young gentlemen of Geneva of good families and very good characters, having an inclination to see America, if they should arrive in your City I recommend them to your Civilities, Counsel and Countenance.

I am ever your affectionate father,

B. Franklin.

At the age of forty, Albert Gallatin held the position of Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. This post he held until 1814.

In 1813, an official offer having been made by the Russian Minister, Count Dashkoff, of the mediation of Russia, with a view to making peace between England and the United States, Mr. Madison, the President, sent for Mr. Gallatin and requested him to proceed at once to St. Petersburg as head of a mission, appointing Mr. Adams (Minister to Russia) and Mr. Bayard as the other two delegates.

On April 1, 1813, the Treasury was empty; but, with the assistance of John Jacob Astor,* Gallatin was enabled to make terms with the banking houses of Parish and Girard, and so saved the United States from bankruptcy. It was a bitter pill for the Federalists to swallow that

* John Jacob Astor from Waldorf, Germany. At the age of sixteen he joined his elder brother, a dealer in musical instruments, in London. At the age of twenty with a small pack of furs he started on his own account in New York. Later he carried on a fur trade with the Indians, purchased real estate in New York and accumulated an immense fortune.

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three foreigners (Parish was a Bohemian) should have achieved this; it also rather put American patriotism to shame.

As the Diary will show, the mission to Russia was futile. But Gallatin made every effort, and with the aid of his friends, Madame de Stael, Generals Lafayette and Moreau, and Baron Humboldt, he obtained a personal interview with the Emperor Alexander in London. There is no doubt that the latter's influence had great weight. That Albert Gallatin under the greatest difficulties (particularly with his own colleagues) made the Treaty of Peace is now universally acknowledged. His being a foreigner was a great advantage to him as a negotiator in Europe — but placed him at a disadvantage in America.

Lord Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington were glad to treat with him, and in 1815 he practically completed the Commercial Treaty, though by his tact he allowed Mr. Adams to imagine that he had done so.

He was Minister in France from 1816 until 18213, and was the United States Ambassador in England from 1826 to 1827. He was a man of the most simple tastes but of deep learning. Louis XVIII once laughingly said to him, "Your French is more perfect than mine, but my English is far better than yours."

John Jacob Astor made him the most generous offer of a share in his business, Alexander Baring* did the same; he refused them both with the same answer, "A man holding the position I have must not die rich."

He was offered the Treasury again in 1844. He did not answer the letter, but simply endorsed it, "Folly of which I take no notice."

He died in 1849 at the age of eighty-eight. It was always his wish that my father, his eldest grandson, should return to Geneva, and that his children should not be brought up in America.

* Alexander Buring. First Lord Ashburton. vii

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I was brought up by my grandfather, James Gallatin, the author of this Diary. My father died at Geneva, in 1859.

London,

Introduction

Just one hundred years ago three envoys from the United States met, at Ghent, three from Great Britain, in order to negotiate for a peace which should close the aimless and indecisive war which those countries had been waging for two years. After many weeks of wrangling, during which they often despaired of success, they succeeded, and on December 24, Christmas Eve, the treaty of the two nations was signed, which has given one hundred years of a peace several times endangered, but never broken, and now far more likely to continue unbroken than it ever was before.

This result was mainly due to the tact, patience, selfcontrol, and wisdom of Albert Gallatin, one of the American Commissioners, the others being John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Bayard and Russell. Born at Geneva in 1761 of an ancient family, originally from Savoy, he had gone to the United States in 1780, had entered Congress in 1795, and had at once risen to distinction there by his remarkable gifts — clearness of thought, power of logical argument, and steadfastness of purpose. As Secretary of the Treasury in the administrations of Jefferson and Madison from 1800 to 1813, he had resumed the wise financial policy of Alexander Hamilton, another naturalized American citizen, and brought the finances of the country into a sounder condition than had ever been seen before. His eldest son, James Gallatin, then a boy of seventeen, acted as his father's secretary in the peace negotiations of 1814, and had already begun, when he accompanied his father to Europe in 1813, a private Diary which he continued during the period (1815-23)

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when the latter was United States Minister in Paris, and which covers also the period (1820-27) of Albert Gallatin's last special diplomatic mission to England. The latest entry is October 9, 1827.

This Diary, given many years ago by James Gallatin to his grandson, is now published by the latter, Count Gallatin. It is a singularly fresh, frank, and vivid record of the incidents which the young man saw in Holland, France, and England during his stay there, and of the sentiments which those incidents evoked when they happened. Young Gallatin had great advantages as an observer, for while his father's position gave him access to the society of the ruling classes in the countries named, he was himself able to move about more freely than his father could, and see life on its unofficial side. Being moreover a detached observer, and in character and tastes more a Genovese than an American, he was able to survey men and things with an impartially critical eye, which in its youthful confidence spared nobody, except his father, and saw the faults of his American citizens at least as clearly as he did those of Frenchmen or Englishmen.

The intimacy of his daily jottings gives us a lively picture of the Gallatin family. His mother, daughter of a distinguished naval officer, Commander Nicholson, and granddaughter of Sir Francis Nicholson, once Governor of Maryland, was a typical American Protestant and highly estimable Southerner of that time, altogether well regulated, and so loyal to her Puritan piety that she refused to attend on a Sunday any of the State and Court functions which the customs of the Bourbon Restoration allotted to that day. His sister, also well regulated, was not without liveliness and spirit. James, the diarist, is a bright fellow with plenty of humour and by no means well regulated. The ruling figure is, of course, the illustrious father. The picture of his character is all the more interesting because Albert Gallatin was a

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singularly reserved and to strangers cold and even austere man, the product of generations of Calvinist ancestors, an aristocrat by sentiment, and though by conviction a stern republican, yet under no illusions as to the weak sides of democracy. His perseverance, his high sense of duty, and his clear, strong judgment came out both in the notices of his conduct in difficult moments and in the letters from his pen, some few of which have been very properly inserted in the book. Students of American history will value these familiar glimpses of a man who did not in his own day receive from the general American public the credit which his disinterestedness as well as his abilities deserved. He was not made for popularity, and he certainly never sought it, but those with or under whom he worked recognized his powers, and though there had often been friction between him and John Quincy Adams, that upright and public-spirited man insisted on his accepting the mission to London in 1826, which Gallatin had sought to avoid.

There are in this book many interesting sidelights on the remarkable events and personages of the time. Napoleon Bonaparte (during the Hundred Days) and the Duke of Wellington pass across the stage. Louis the Eighteenth appears frequently, and the Duke of Berri, of whose assassination in 1820 there is a vivid account. So does King George the Fourth and the Tsar Alexander I of Russia, and his Minister Pozzo di Borgo, the only Corsican, except the Bonapartes and Paoli, who has figured in European history since the tenth century. We hear a good deal about Lafayette and Madame de Stael, and Joseph Bonaparte and Madame Patterson Bonaparte (the wife of Jerome Bonaparte), while among the other personages more or less fully touched on, there are Alexander von Humboldt, Lord Castlereagh, Chateaubriand, Talleyrand (of whom there is a good anecdote), Count d'Orsay, Madame Recamier, Count Walevski, George Canning, Lord Goderich, and those two well-

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known memoir writers, the Countess de Boigne and Charles Greville. The anecdotes are often slight but generally diverting. There is a good deal of scandal, but it is so softened by the lapse of a century that even the descendants of the persons implicated need not greatly care. The anecdotes and the gossip present a lively picture of the society of the time, more dissolute in France, more intemperate in England, more crude in America. On the social as well as the political side, the book is a contribution to history, and Europeans as well as Americans may be glad that the Diary of this youthful diplomatist has not shared the common fate of those to which young men consign their personal experiences.

James Bryce.

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THE MINISTRY IN FRANCE: FROM THE ASSASSINA- TION OF THE DUC DE BERRI TO THE RETURN OF ALBERT GALLATIN TO AMERICA 165