In the pantheon of the heroes of the early republic, certain names stand out: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. These great men are the subject of bestselling biographies, television docudramas, and even Broadway musicals. But standing just behind these individuals are scores of important individuals who, though their contributions are often overlooked today, were nevertheless significant.
One such “forgotten founder” is Albert Gallatin. In a political career spanning more than 40 years, Gallatin was an accomplished legislator, administrator, and diplomat. Jefferson and Madison in particular made great use of his prudence and wisdom during their presidential administrations.
Along the way, Gallatin helped establish core practices —still employed by the House of Representatives– that increased the capacity of that body to make the Madisonian theory of “checks and balances” work in practice.
Gallatin was born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1761 to a family with deep aristocratic roots. He attended the Academy of Geneva, where he received a first-rate education. Frustrated by the lack of opportunities in conservative Switzerland, Gallatin absconded to the United States in 1780 without telling his family. He was just 19 years old. For the next few years, he bounced around the country — variously working as a woodcutter in Maine, teaching French at Harvard, and meeting Patrick Henry and George Washington in Virginia. In 1786 he purchased a farm in southwestern Pennsylvania.
Brimming with the republican ideals of the Revolution, Gallatin renounced his Genevan citizenship and threw himself into American politics. An Anti-Federalist opponent of the Constitution, Gallatin was elected to the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention in 1789, where he argued for greater democratic accountability. He was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1790, where he served for three years as part of the emerging Republican coalition that opposed the centralizing policies of the Federalists. His time in the state government provided an early education for Gallatin’s eventually vast understanding of public finances, unrivaled in the country except for Robert Morris and Hamilton. He was a relentless advocate for the economy in government, and helped establish a plan to balance the state budget. Unlike most skeptics of Hamiltonian economics, Gallatin understood the advantages of banks, and he proposed a charter for the Bank of Pennsylvania. The legislature chose him to serve in the United States Senate in 1793, where he became a tough critic of Hamilton. But a Federalist-dominated Senate judged that he had not been a citizen for a sufficient amount of time, and he was expelled from the upper chamber on a party-line vote of 14 to 9.
Undaunted, Gallatin secured election to the House of Representatives in 1795, where leadership of the Republican party was in flux. Madison had been the first organizer of the Republican coalition in the House, but he was beginning to step back by the time Gallatin had entered Congress,. Madison had married the young widow Dolley Todd the previous year, and in 1797 he would take his new bride and stepson to retire to his father’s (and later his own) Montpelier. Jefferson, meanwhile, had resigned from the State Department at the end of 1793, returning to Monticello for what he hoped would be a permanent retirement.
Gallatin quickly helped fill the power vacuum in his party. The Republicans had scored a strong majority of the House in the Fourth Congress (1795-97). Intent on consolidating Republican power, Gallatin pushed for institutional reforms of the House. Too often, Gallatin believed, the House had deferred to the recommendations of Hamilton’s Treasury Department. So, Gallatin championed a permanent committee on finance, the House Ways and Means Committee, to scrutinize the proposals of the Treasury. Gallatin further proposed that the House stop writing a “blank check” to the administration, where a lump sign was appropriated to the executive to spend as it pleased. Instead, he called for the House to make specific appropriations that reduced the discretion of the executive branch. Gallatin even went so far as to suggest that the House’s “power of the purse” entitled it to refuse appropriations for programs that had already been authorized by law — a tactic the Republicans would pursue in their efforts to undermine the Jay Treaty, which mandated neutral arbitration to adjudicate commercial disputes between American merchants and Great Britain. Following Gallatin, House Republicans attempted to deny the requisite funding for these “courts,” although ultimately the gambit failed.
By the election of 1800, Gallatin had emerged as de facto majority leader, following in Madison’s footsteps. After the electoral college deadlocked between Jefferson and Aaron Burr, Gallatin coordinated Republican strategy to break the tie in the House. It was Gallatin’s leadership that ensured that, across 36 ballots, Republicans maintained a united front in their support of Jefferson. Ultimately key Federalists members — encouraged by Hamilton — backed Jefferson.
Gallatin’s substantial economic and political skills earned him the acclaim of Madison and Jefferson, who named him secretary of treasury in 1801. With Madison as secretary of state, the two were a kind of “Brains Trust” during the entirety of Jefferson’s tenure. Madison retained Gallatin in the Treasury Department for most of his presidency. Though Madison intended to name him secretary of state, Gallatin’s commitment to frugality in government had alienated key senators who refuse to consent to the new role. Gallatin would later serve as the key negotiator in the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812. Madison and Jame Monroe would name him minister to France, and John Quincy Adams would make him minister to the United Kingdom, so he was overseas for most of the period between 1816 and 1827. Late in life, Gallatin helped establish New York University. He’s buried today at Trinity Churchyard in Wall Street, on the opposite side of the church as Hamilton.
Gallatin’s long and impressive career makes him one of the most important statesmen of the early republic. But he was more than this — he was also a founding father.
The Constitution establishes only the bare outline of the federal branches of the government. It was up to the early generation to fill in the framework with actual substance. Gallatin, by establishing both Ways and Means and itemized appropriations, helped realize the system of checks and balances in lasting ways. Gallatin recognized that the Federalists enjoyed a partisan advantage by virtue of Hamilton’s control of the Treasury Department. The solution was to establish greater independence and freedom of action of the House. In this way, Gallatin’s innovations gave life and substance to Madison’s idea in Federalist 51 that, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”
That the House still employs both practices is a testament to Gallatin’s far-sightedness. Indeed, a key insight of political scientists in the last generation has been that standing committees are a key way that House members mitigate informational uncertainty. Members of Congress must vote on all manner of policy questions, far beyond their own scope of practical knowledge. Without sufficient knowledge of the effects of their votes, mistakes are inevitable. Committees deal with this problem by incentivizing some members to develop specific policy expertise to better craft policy. If committee members are trusted allies, members can vote with greater confidence. Permanent committees thus can provide the House with an internal source of information on policy outcomes, independent of the executive departments or interest groups.
While most of Gallatin’s career in public life was in the executive branch, where he served for a quarter century under four different presidents, he made a positive and lasting impact on the function of the House of Representatives.
Jay Cost is the Gerald R. Ford Senior Nonresident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of five books, most recently Democracy or Republic? The People and the Constitution (AEI Press, 2023).
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