By Gregory May
Albert Gallatin by
Rembrandt Peale, 1805.
Albert Gallatin
and a Nation
Free from Debt
20 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Fall 2018 | www.MoAF.org
When Thomas Jefferson appointed Albert
Gallatin to be Secretary of the Treasury
in the spring of 1801, the Treasury was
by far the largest department of the fed-
eral government. Seventy-three of the 127
executive officials in Washington worked
for the Treasury, and the 1,200 revenue
officers in the rest of the country were the
government’s largest civilian work force.
The Washington staff worked in a hast-
ily constructed brick building just east of
the President’s House, where the vastly
larger Treasury building stands today. The
two-story structure had 16 rooms on each
floor, laid out along intersecting central
hallways, and it already felt crowded. A
fire that began behind a shoddily-built
fireplace had destroyed some records a few
months earlier, and Jeffersonian Republi-
cans muttered that the Federalists had set
the fire to stop an inquiry into the outgo-
ing Federalist administration’s misuse of
federal money. The House of Representa-
tives had investigated. But because the
flames had destroyed the relevant account
books, the evidence of shoddy construc-
tion had not dispelled suspicion.
The Republican opposition to the Fed-
eralist regime had arisen from more fun-
damental suspicions about what went on
at the Treasury, and it was clear that Galla-
tin would play a central role in the new
government. Jefferson epitomized the new
administration’s objectives in his call for
“a government rigorously frugal & simple,
applying all the possible savings of the
public revenue to the discharge of the pub-
lic debt.” Whether Jefferson’s administra-
tion could keep that promise depended on
Gallatin. He was the only leading Republi-
can with demonstrated expertise in public
finance. And although Federalists and
even some Republicans criticized him
for jockeying his way into the Treasury
post, none of them doubted his ability or
offered an alternative candidate.
Gallatin and his family took a house
on Capitol Hill, and Gallatin usually rode
to the Treasury along the ridge down
F Street to avoid the soggy causeway
called Pennsylvania Avenue. His physical
appearance did not impress anyone. He
was 40 years old, and a lean man of above
average height. But he had never been
handsome, and he was now growing bald
and a bit stooped. A Federalist senator
complained that he was “very inattentive