Albert Gallatin was born in Geneva in 1761 to a wealthy aristocratic family, was orphaned young, and was educated at the Academy of Geneva, where he absorbed Rousseau, Voltaire and the French physiocrats. In 1780, at 19, he and a classmate slipped away and sailed to America, where he traded in Machias, Maine, tutored French at Harvard, and then built a stone house called Friendship Hill on 400 acres in western Pennsylvania. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1793, he was removed by the Federalist majority on the grounds that he had not been a citizen for nine years, and the dispute pushed the Senate to open its doors to the public for the first time.

He urged his western Pennsylvania neighbors to stand down during the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion, won a House seat, and served as Treasury Secretary under Jefferson and Madison from 1801 to 1814, the longest tenure in that office. He cut the national debt from $83 million to $45.2 million, required specific appropriations, financed the Louisiana Purchase with bonds bought by Barings in London and Hope & Co. in Amsterdam, and helped plan the Lewis and Clark expedition. When the national bank’s charter failed by one vote in 1811, he had to fund the War of 1812 with new taxes and loans from John Jacob Astor and Stephen Girard, and he later helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent.

• He persuaded a hesitant Jefferson not to wait for a constitutional amendment before buying Louisiana.
• At Ghent, John Quincy Adams envied his ability to cool tempers between Adams and Henry Clay.
• He helped found New York University in 1831 and became known as the father of American ethnology.
• He criticized forced removals such as the Trail of Tears, yet in 1799 argued against normalizing relations with revolutionary Saint-Domingue.
• He died in Astoria, New York, in 1849 at 88, the last surviving member of Jefferson’s cabinet.