Swiss-American ethnologist, linguist, politician, and diplomat
1761 CE
to 1849 CE
Abraham Alfonse Albert Gallatin (January 29, 1761 – August 12, 1849) is a Swiss-American ethnologist, linguist, politician, diplomat, congressman, and the longest-serving United States Secretary of the Treasury.
In 1831, he founds the University of the City of New York.
In 1896, this university is renamed New York University; it is now one of the largest private, nonprofit universities in the United States.
Born in Switzerland, Gallatin immigrates to America in the 1780s, ultimately settling in Pennsylvania.
He is politically active against the Federalist Party program, and is elected to the United States Senate in 1793, but is removed from office by a 14–12 party-line vote after a protest raised by his opponents suggests he has fewer than the required nine years of citizenship.
In 1795, he is elected to the House of Representatives and serves in the fourth through sixth Congresses, becoming House Majority Leader.
He is an important leader of the new Democratic-Republican Party, its chief spokesman on financial matters, and leads opposition to many of the policy proposals of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.
He also helps found the House Committee on Finance (later the Ways and Means Committee) and often engineers withholding of finances by the House as a method of overriding executive actions to which he objects.
While Treasury Secretary, his services to his country are honored in 1805 when Meriwether Lewis names one of the three headwaters of the Missouri River after Gallatin.
