Secretary Of The Treasury And Diplomat

Democratic Heritage.

Albert Gallatin was born on 29 January 1761 into an aristocratic French family with a history of over four hundred years of leadership in the area around Geneva in what is now Switzerland. Geneva was the birthplace of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century democratic political philosopher, and as a young man Gallatin embraced Rousseau's romantic ideas about returning to nature and celebrating the common man. These ideas inspired him to go to the United States in 1780, rejecting an offer to be an officer in the Hessian army sent by King George III to fight the American Patriots. Once in America, Gallatin took little part in the conflict, instead attempting to set up a trading business.

Western Politics.

After the Revolution, Gallatin moved to the frontier area of western Pennsylvania, settling along the Monongahela River. He was not successful as a...