Jefferson's Treasure by Gregory May

Author:Gregory May
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery History

Hannah and Albert Gallatin and their three children sailed for France in June 1816 on the Peacock, a Navy sloop refitted for their trip. Gallatin told Monroe that he still expected to be “very useless at Paris,” and he kept telling everyone that he hoped to return soon. Yet despite misgivings about his mission, Gallatin struck a celebratory note as he took a parting look at the American scene. The war with Britain had produced both “evil & good,” he told an old Congressional colleague, “but I think the good preponderates.” It was true that the war had “laid the foundation of permanent taxes & military establishments,” which he and other Republicans once thought “unfavorable to the happiness & free institutions of the country.” But under the austere old Republican system, it now seemed to him, “we were becoming too selfish, too much attached exclusively to the acquisition of wealth, above all, too much confined in our political feelings to local and state objects.” The war had changed all of that. It had “renewed & reinstated the National feelings & character” that had waned since the Revolution. The people are now “more Americans,” said Gallatin; “they feel & act more as a Nation, and I hope that the permanency of the Union is thereby better secured.”17

War also had changed things in France. Louis XVIII—once again restored to his throne after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo—was gouty, weak, and beholden to Britain and its allies. Allied troops remained in France to keep peace and ensure collection of the war indemnities that the allies had demanded after Waterloo. A severely cold summer in 1816 led to crop failures and fears of popular unrest, so Louis’s nervous government was subsidizing food for the volatile masses in Paris. Elite life in Paris, however, had blossomed after the Bourbon restoration. Military officers, politicians, and intellectuals came to the city from all over Europe. French Royalists scattered by the Revolution reclaimed their homeland, and French republicans exiled by Napoleon returned to press their case for a limited constitutional monarchy. Hannah and Albert Gallatin rented a spacious hôtel particulier in a quiet district along the Left Bank that had been popular with the lesser nobility before the Revolution. The house came furnished, and the Gallatins used part of the State department’s allowance for their outfit to equip it with an extensive dinner service from the fashionable Nast porcelain factory.18

Although he went to Paris insisting that he would not stay long, Gallatin stayed for seven years. Monroe picked John Quincy Adams to be his Secretary of State, giving the nod to the country’s most experienced diplomat to avoid choosing between Crawford and Clay. Gallatin did not write about his disappointment at the time, but he alluded to it in a letter to his son Albert Rolaz years later. “Mr Monroe,” he wrote then, “is the only person that I have a right to charge with ingratitude, but I am far from being the only one.” It was Gallatin who had paved the way for Monroe’s advancement by pushing Robert Smith out of the State department.

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