Gad-Gan: Gadsen through Gano

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Sources include: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography and Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography.


GADSEN, Christopher Edwards, Reverend, 1785-1852, Charleston, South Carolina, clergyman.  Rector of St. Philips, later Bishop of South Carolina.  Agent of the American Colonization Society. 

(Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 568; Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, p. 71)

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 568:

GADSDEN, Christopher Edwards, P. E. bishop, born in Charleston, South Carolina, 25 November, 1785; died there, 24 June, 1852, obtained his early education in the “Associate Academy” in Charleston. In 1802 he entered the junior class in Yale college, and was graduated with honor in 1804. John C. Calhoun was a member of the same class, and the friendship formed with young Gadsden continued through life. He was ordained deacon by Bishop Benjamin Moore, in St. Paul's chapel, New York city, 25 July, 1807, and priest by Bishop Madison, in Williamsburg, Virginia, 14 April, 1810. In January, 1808, he took charge of the ancient parish of Berkeley, South Carolina, but in February, 1810, he was chosen to be assistant minister of St. Philip's church, Charleston. On the death of the rector, in 1814, Mr. Gadsden was elected to fill his place. He received the degree of D. D. from South Carolina college in 1815. After the death of Bishop Bowen in 1839, Dr. Gadsden was elected bishop, and was consecrated in Trinity church, Boston, Massachusetts, 21 June, 1840. Bishop Gadsden's episcopate of twelve years was marked by great devotion, energy, prudence, and discretion, and he displayed noble qualities which endeared him to both clergy and laity. On his visitations he was particularly attentive to the colored people, often collecting them for purposes of devotion and instruction. He confirmed more than twenty of them on the first occasion when he administered the rites. He edited for several years the “Gospel Messenger,” published several occasional sermons, a tract on “The Prayer-Book as it Is,” and three valuable charges to the clergy, and an essay on the life of Bishop Dehon (1833).  Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888.


GAGE, Frances Dana, 1808-1884, journalist, reformer, temperance leader, women’s rights, anti-slavery leader.  Lectured on abolition and was often threatened with physical violence.  Her home was burned three times.  During the Civil War, she taught newly freed slaves and was active as a volunteer with the Sanitary Commission.  In 1863, she was appointed Superintendent of a refuge of more than 500 freed slaves at Paris Island, South Carolina.   Gage was married to abolitionist James L. Gage, a lawyer from McConnelsville, Ohio.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 568-569; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 84; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 326-328; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 8, p. 605; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volume II. New York: James T. White, 1892, p. 321)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 84:

GAGE, FRANCES DANA BARKER (October 12, 1808-November 10, 1884), reformer, author, was born in Marietta, Ohio, where her father, Colonel Joseph Barker, a native of New Hampshire, was among the original settlers. Her mother, Elizabeth  Dana, was connected with the Dana and Bancroft families of Massachusetts. Frances secured such an education as the. little frontier: community afforded. On January 1, 1829, when 119t, yet twenty-one, she married James L. Gage, a lawyer of McConnelsville, Ohio. In spite of the demands upon her made, ultimately, by a family of eight children, she found time for reading, writing, and even speaking on temperance, slavery, and woman's rights. She later wrote to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "From 1849 to 1855 I lectured on this subject [ woman's rights] in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York, and wrote volumes for the press" (letter quoted in Parton, post, p. 386). In 1853 the family moved to St. Louis. Here Mrs. Gage's anti-slavery proclivities promptly branded her an Abolitionist, her articles were excluded from the press, and she herself was socially ostracized and threatened with violence. While in St. Louis the family suffered three disastrous fires, possibly the work of incendiaries, and James Gage failed in business and in health. Mrs. Gage thereupon took the post of assistant editor of art agricultural paper in Columbus, Ohio, which she held until the Civil War destroyed the circulation of the paper. On the outbreak of the war, four of her sons joined the Union armies, and in 1862 she went to Port Royal, Beaufort, and Paris Island, South Carolina, and Fernandina, Florida, where for thirteen months, with the aid of her daughter Mary, she ministered to the freedmen of the soldiers. She then returned North to lecture and arouse others to the needs of the freedmen and the armies. Later she served as an unsalaried agent of the Western Sanitary Commission in Memphis, Vicksburg, and Natchez. In September of 1864, however, her active war work was ended when she was thrown from her carriage in Galesburg, III., and crippled for a year. Following the war, she lectured widely on temperance. In August 1867, a stroke of paralysis brought her public life to an end, but she continued her writing, and, as "Aunt Fanny," became well known for her children's stories, sketches of social life, and poems. Her larger published works were Elsie Magoon; or the Old Still-House in the Hollow (1867), a temperance tale; Poems (1867); Gertie's Sacrifice (1869); and Steps Upward (1870). She was large and vigorous,. with a kindly face, easy manners, and a rich fund of conversation. An excellent extemporaneous speaker who never failed to interest her audiences, she was much in demand, and rendered valuable aid to the various causes in which she became interested. She died in Greenwich, Connecticut.

[Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Frances D. Gage," in Jas. Parton and others, Eminent Women of the Age (1868); E. F. Barker, Barker Genealogy (1927), p. 401; E. C. Sta,1ton, S. B. Anthony, and M. J. Gage, History of Woman Suffrage (3 volumes, 1881-87), passim; L. P. Brockett and M. C. Vaughan, Woman's Work in the Civil War (1867), pp. 683-90; obituary in New York Tribune, November 13, 1884.]

W.R.W.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 568-569:

GAGE, Frances Dana, reformer, born in Marietta, Ohio, 12 October, 1808; died in Greenwich, Connecticut, 10 November, 1884. Her father, Colonel Joseph Barker, went from New Hampshire with the first company of pioneers that settled Ohio. Miss Barker married in 1829 James L. Gage, a lawyer of McConnellsville, Ohio. She early became an active worker in the temperance, anti-slavery, and woman's rights movements, and in 1851 presided over a woman's-rights convention in Akron, Ohio, where her opening speech attracted much attention. She removed in 1853 to St. Louis, where she was often threatened with violence on account of her anti-slavery views, and twice suffered from incendiarism. In 1857-'8 she visited Cuba, St. Thomas, and Santo Domingo, and on her return wrote and lectured on her travels. She afterward edited an agricultural paper in Ohio; but when the civil war began she went south, ministered to the soldiers, taught the freedmen, and, without pay, acted as an agent of the Sanitary commission at Memphis, Vicksburg, and Natchez. In 1863-'4 she was superintendent, under General Rufus Saxton, of Paris island, South Carolina, a refuge for over 500 freedmen. She was afterward crippled by the overturning of a carriage in Galesburg, Illinois, but continued to lecture on temperance till August, 1867, when she was disabled by a paralytic shock. Mrs. Gage was the mother of eight children, all of whom lived to maturity. Four of her sons served in the National army in the civil war. Mrs. Gage wrote many stories for children, and verses, under the pen-name of “Aunt Fanny.” She was an early contributor to the “Saturday Review,” and published “Poems” (Philadelphia, 1872); “Elsie Magoon, or the Old Still-House” (1872); “Steps Upward” (1873); and “Gertie's Sacrifice.” Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 568-569.


GAGE, James L., 1800-1863, McConnelsville, Ohio, lawyer, abolitionist.  Husband of Francis Dana Gage. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 568)


GAGE, Matilda Joslyn, 1826-1898, abolitionist, reformer, woman’s suffrage advocate.  Daughter of noted abolitionist Dr. H. Joslyn. From 1852 until 1861, she actively supported reform movements and was a strong advocate of the abolition of slavery.  In 1872, she was elected President of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association.  She wrote The History of Woman’s Suffrage with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 569; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 86; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 8, p. 607)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 86:

GAGE, MATILDA JOSLYN (March 24,1826-March 18, 1898), woman's suffrage advocate, and author, was born in Cicero, New York, the only daughter of Dr. Hezekiah and Helen (Leslie) Joslyn. Her mother was the daughter of Sir George Leslie of Scotland. Dr. Joslyn's home in Cicero appears to have been one of the intellectual centers of the community; he was keenly interested in reform movements of every kind and made his house the gathering place for such advanced thinkers as visited the town. The atmosphere in which Matilda spent her childhood and youth greatly influenced her character and life work. Her early education was received at home, where her father instructed her in physiology, Greek, and mathematics, and taught her to think for herself. Later she completed the liberal education afforded young women of the period at the Clinton Seminary. At eighteen she married Henry H. Gage, a merchant of Cicero, with whom she removed first to Syracuse, then to Manlius, and finally to Fayetteville, where she made her home in the same house for thirty-eight years. At the Syracuse National Woman's Rights Convention, September 8-10, 1852, she made her first public appearance as an advocate of woman's rights. As the youngest woman taking part in the convention, she attracted not a little attention. Soon afterward she associated herself with Elizabeth Cady Stanton [q.v.], becoming one of the most effective of the woman's rights lecturers. She was also active in the organization of the suffrage movement. In 1869 she took part in the organization of both the New York State Woman's Suffrage Association and the National Woman's Suffrage Association, and served both of these organizations as president, or in some other official capacity, for many years. In 1878 she founded the Woman's National Liberal League, of which she remained the president until her death in 1898. She undertook also the literary advocacy of the cause, published Woman as Inventor (187 0) and Woman's Rights Catechism (1871), joined with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony [q.v.] in the authorship of Woman's Declaration of Rights (1876) and in 1880 issued Who Planned the Tennessee Campaign of 1862? Or Anna Ella Carroll vs. Ulysses S. Grant. On the historical status of woman, Mrs. Gage seems to have been better informed than any of her fellow crusaders, and Woman, Church and State (1893) she considered the most important of her works, although she is now remembered more commonly as joint author and editor with Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony of the first three volumes (1881-86) of their great History of Woman Suffrage. Besides these literary activities she published several of her speeches, contributed many articles on woman's rights to the public press, and edited and published The National Citizen and Ballot Box at Syracuse (1878-81). On several occasions she addressed congressional committees on the suffrage question. The closing years of her life were spent with a married daughter in Chicago, where the winter of 1897-98 found her busily engaged in the preparation of a paper to be read before the February meeting of the National American Woman's Suffrage Association-a meeting commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the organized woman's suffrage movement. Ill health prevented her undertaking the journey to Washington, but she sent her paper, which was read to the convention. A few clays later she suffered a paralytic stroke, and the end came quickly.

Matilda Joslyn Gage was one of the "strong minded" women of her age-a woman of rare courage, energy, and character. Her portrait seems to indicate no lack of sympathetic understanding, and the possession of a saving gift of humor. Intellectually she was without doubt among the ablest of the suffrage leaders of the nineteenth century. An excellent speaker and capable organizer, her greatest strength apparently lay in her thorough grasp of the historical status of woman through the ages. "She always had a knack of rummaging through old libraries," said Elizabeth Cady Stanton (History of Woman Suffrage, I, 466 n.), "bringing more startling facts to light than any woman I ever knew."

[In addition to the History of Woman Suffrage see Ida H . Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (3 vols . 1899-1908); D. H. Bruce, Onondaga's Centennial (1896); Woman's Jour. (Boston), March 26, 1898; Woman's Tribune, June 25, 1898; Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), and Boston Transcript, March 19, 1898.]

W.R. W.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 569:

GAGE, Matilda Joslyn, reformer. born in Cicero, New York, 24 March, 1826. Her father, Dr. H. Joslyn, was an active abolitionist, and she inherited from him an interest in the questions of woman suffrage and slavery. She was educated in De Peyster and Hamilton, New York, and in 1845 was married to Henry H. Gage, a merchant in Cicero. From 1852 till 1861 she wrote and spoke on reform measures, and was an eager advocate of the abolition of slavery at any cost. In 1862, on the presentation of colors to a company of the 122d Now York regiment, Mrs. Gage made an address in which she prophesied the failure of any course that did not abolish slavery. In 1872 she was elected president of the National woman suffrage association, and of the New York state woman's suffrage society, and she is now (1887) vice-president of each, and one of a special committee to arrange for an international council of women to meet in Washington in 1888. From 1878 till 1881 Mrs. Gage edited and published the “The National Citizen” in Syracuse, New York. She is the author of “Woman as an Inventor” (New York, 1870), and “The History of Woman Suffrage,” with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (3 vols., New York, 1881-'6). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 569.


GALBRAITH, David L., abolitionist, New Garden, Ohio, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1843-53.


GALBRAITH, Nathan, Columbiana County, Ohio, Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, Vice-President, 1835-39.


GALE, George Washington, 1789-1861, Galesburgh, Illinois, anti-slavery advocate, clergyman.  Presbyterian minister.  Founder of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, which was anti-slavery.  Founder Oneida Manuel Labor Institute.  American Anti-Slavery Society Manager, 1837-1840. 

(Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, p. 159; Filler, Louis. The Crusade Against Slavery, 1830-1860. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960, p. 32; Muelder, 1959; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 574; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 99; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 8, p. 630)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 99:

GALE, GEORGE WASHINGTON (December 3, 1789-September 13, 1861), Presbyterian clergyman, educator, was born at Stanford, Dutchess County, New York His father was Josiah Gale, a son of emigrants who came from Yorkshire, according to family tradition; his mother, Rachel Mead, whose family came from Connecticut. After a varied experience of study and teaching, including a year in the Academy of Middlebury College, he was graduated from Union College in 1814. Five years later, after an interruption due to ill health, he completed the course at Princeton Theological Seminary and became pastor of a church in Adams, Jefferson County, New York. While here he was the theological instructor of Charles G. Finney [q.v. ], the famous evangelist. Teacher and student did not agree in their theological views, but they remained good friends. In 1824, because of another break in health, Gale resigned his pastorate and a year later settled on a small farm in Western, Oneida County, New York. Here he developed a plan for making manual labor an essential feature in education. Impressed by the need of an educated ministry and by the lack of means of many who desired schooling, he took several young men into his family and gave them books and instruction in return for a few hours' work each day. This principle he also applied at the Oneida Institute in Whitesboro, New York, which was founded mainly by his efforts and of which he was the head from 1827 to 1834. During this time he formed the more ambitious purpose of establishing a college on the same principle, for both men and women, in what was then known as the West. His plan was to organize a company, purchase a tract of government land, sell part of it to individual members at an advanced price, and give the profits to the college. The result was th e founding of
Knox College and the town of Galesburg in Knox County, Illinois. The college was chartered February 15, 1837, as the Knox Manual Labor College. The manual labor feature, however, was apparently not a success, and after a few years the name of the institution was shortened to Knox College.

Gale was the first pastor of the local church, a trustee of the college until his death, president of the board for a few years, acting professor of languages until 1842, and from 1843 to 1857 professor of moral philosophy and belles lettres. A man of intense religious convictions, he was chiefly concerned with the spiritual welfare of his fellow men and his greatest ambition was to bring about their salvation. His theological views were characterized by Finney as hyper-Calvinism. He was married three times: in 1820, at Troy, New York, to Harriet Selden: in 1841, at Galesburg, to Mrs. Esther (Williams) Coon; and in 1844, at New Haven, Connecticut, to Lucy Merriam.

[An unpublished autobiography in the possession of the Gale family; Geo. Gale, The Gale Family Records (1866); Union University Centennial Catalog, 1795-1895 (1895); Princeton Theol. Seminary Biographical Catalog (1909); G. W. Gale, A Brief  History of Knox College (1845); official records of Knox College; M. F. Webster, The Story of Knox College (1912); Memoirs of Reverend Charles G. Finney (1876); date of death from probate records, Knox County Court.]

W. L. R.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 574:

GALE, George Washington, educator, born in Northeast, Dutchess county, New York, 3 December, 1789; died in Galesburg, Illinois, 13 September, 1862. He was graduated at Union in 1814, and licensed as a Presbyterian clergyman in October, 1819, when he took charge of the church at Adams, Jefferson county, New York. His pastorate was distinguished by a powerful revival of religion, in which Charles G. Finney and other eminent men were among the converts. He resigned his charge in 1823, and afterward established the Oneida manual labor institute at Whitesboro, New York, where he remained from 1827 till 1834. His life work was the organization of Knox college at Galesburg, Illinois, in 1835. He was a man of strong prejudices and acute intellect. He received the degree of D. D. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 574.


GALE, Milton, Boston, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Abolition Society, Manager, 1850.


GALES, JOSEPH Sr. (February 4, 1761-August 24, 1841), journalist, reformer.  Raleigh, North Carolina, Washington, DC, newspaper editor.  Editor of the Raleigh Register.  Was for six years secretary and treasurer of the American Colonization Society. Executive Committee, 1839-40, officer of the Raleigh auxiliary of the ACS.  An ardent Unionist and emancipationist, he nevertheless believed only the states had the right to emancipate slaves. In 1839 careless expenditures and severe criticisms of the Colonization Society led to the employment of a financial secretary in his place.

(Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 574-575; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 100; Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, pp. 71,77, 235)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, pp. 100-101:

GALES, JOSEPH [Sr.](February 4, 1761-August 24, 1841), journalist, reformer, was born at Eckington, near Sheffield, England, the eldest son of Thomas Gales, a village school-teacher who has been described as "an Israelite in whom there was no guile." He worked for his father and studied at night until he was thirteen years of age, at which time he was apprenticed to a printer in Manchester. The printer's shrewish wife threatened his life, and he fled with half a crown in his pocket to Eckington. He was then apprenticed to a kindly typographer in Newark-on-Trent, under whose guidance he became a master printer and binder. There he met Winifred Marshall, a cousin of Lord Melbourne, and married her on May 4, 1784. He established himself in the printing and publishing business in Sheffield, where he founded the weekly Sheffield Register in 1787. His wife, a novelist and student of the classics, helped him to make a home to which reformers were attracted. He was able, alert, mild-tempered, firm in his convictions, stalwart in physique, and a champion of liberalism and the cause of labor. He became popular with the radicals and laborers in North England. Joseph Priestley found in him a warm friend and helper in the cause of Unitarianism. He applauded the French Revolutionists; he sold Thomas Paine's Rights of Man and befriended the author; he advocated the abolition of slavery and imprisonment for debt, universal manhood suffrage, and the reform of the judicial system; and he very actively supported the Constitutional Society. His strictures on the Pitt government brought upon him the condemnation of that government, and after the suspension of the habeas corpus, he fled to Altona, Schleswig-Holstein, in 1794. Mrs. Gales sold the Register to his assistant editor, James Montgomery, the poet, and with her two children joined h er husband. He improved his knowledge of shorthand, learned French and Spanish, and soon sailed with his family for America, landing at Philadelphia, July 30, 1795, after an eventful voyage. He obtained employment first as a compositor, then as bookkeeper and reporter for the American Daily Advertiser, in which capacity he startled the Americans by making the first verbatim report of proceedings in Congress.

He then bought and edited the Independent Gazetteer. Among his newly found friends were congressmen of North Carolina who persuaded him to establish a journal in their new state capital at Raleigh. He sold his paper to S. Harrison Smith and in the same year founded the weekly Raleigh Register (October 22, 1799), a Jeffersonian journal. He served as mayor of Raleigh nineteen years and was elected state printer annually after 1800 until Jackson's party ousted him. In 1832 he transferred his journal, printing establishment, and bookstore to his son Weston Raleigh Gales and went to live with his son Joseph [q.v.] in Washington. He compiled the first two volumes (1834) of the Annals of Congress published by Gales & Seaton, served as secretary of the Peace Society, and was six years secretary and treasurer of the American Colonization Society. An ardent Unionist and emancipationist, he nevertheless believed only the states had the right to emancipate slaves. In 1839 careless expenditures and severe criticisms of the Colonization Society led to the employment of a financial secretary in his place. Gales, nearly fourscore, retired and returned to Raleigh, where he died.

[W. G. Briggs, "Joseph Gales, Editor of Raleigh's First Newspaper," in the North Carolina Booklet, October 1907; Mrs. J. R. Chamberlain, "Two Wake County Editors Whose Work Has Influenced the World," in Proc. State Lit. and History Commission of North Carolina, December 1922; Josephine Seaton, Wm. Winston Seaton: A Biographical Sketch (1871); files of the Raleigh Register (1799-1833); obituary in Raleigh Register and North Carolina Gazette, August 27; 1841.]

W.E.S.

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 574-575:

GALES, Joseph, journalist, born in England in 1760; died in Raleigh, North Carolina, 24 August, 1841. He was originally a printer and bookseller at Sheffield, where he established and published the “Register.” His democratic principles having involved him in difficulty with the government, he sold his journal in 1793 to James Montgomery, the poet, who had been brought up in his family, and emigrated to the United States, settling in Philadelphia. There he edited the “Independent Gazetteer,” in which, being a proficient stenographer, he first printed short-hand reports of the debates in congress. In 1799 he sold the paper to Samuel Harrison Smith and removed to Raleigh, North Carolina, where he founded a new “Register,” the publication of which he continued until he had reached an advanced age, when he transferred it to his son, Weston Raleigh, and went to Washington to spend the remainder of his life with his eldest son, Joseph. Here he became interested in African colonization, and was an active member of the American colonization society almost to the day of his death. Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888.


GALES, Joseph, Jr., 1786-1860, Washington, DC, journalist, newspaper editor.  Vice-President, American Colonization Society, 1833-41. 

(Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 575; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 100; Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, pp. 100-101:

GALES, JOSEPH (April 10, 1786-July 21, 1860), journalist, was born in Eckington, England, the eldest son of Joseph [q.v.] and Winifred (Marshall) Gales. In 1795 he was taken to America by his father who was a political refugee. Four years of his boyhood and youth were spent in Philadelphia, the remainder in Raleigh, North Carolina. His mother taught him to read Latin fluently and to appreciate the works of Shakespeare, Milton, and Adam Smith before he reached the age of fourteen years. He at tended a private school in Raleigh, and later, for a time, the University of North Carolina, and learned the printer's trade from his father, who also taught him shorthand and sent him to Philadelphia and Washington to develop his skill as a reporter.

In 1807 he went to the Capital to report congressional proceedings for S. Harrison Smith, editor of the tri-weekly National Intelligencer. He sat next the vice-president and "shared his snuff-box" with him from 1807 to 1820 while he was the sole reporter of the proceedings of the Senate. In 1809 he was made a partner of Smith, and in 1810 he became sole proprietor of the National Intelligencer, the "recognized organ," or "Court Paper." In 1812 he took into partnership William W. Seaton [q.v.], who had been associated with the elder Gales on the Raleigh Register and had married the latter's daughter Sarah. The brothers-in-law equally divided their work and as long as Gales lived maintained a common bank-account. A warm supporter of Madison in the War of 1812, Gales volunteered as a private in a company of infantry which saw service about Washington, accepting hazardous missions to prove his loyalty to his adopted country. Meanwhile the paper, which was introduced to the public as a daily on January 1, 1813, was published regularly until the invasion of Washington, the editors returning from camp on alternate days to supervise its preparation. When the British captured the Capital they destroyed Gales's library and equipment, but, at the earnest request of an old lady, spared his building. On December 14, 1813, he married Sarah Juliana Maria Lee, daughter of Theodorick Lee of Virginia and niece of "Light Horse Harry." They made their home on Ninth Street, just above "the Avenue," until business houses crowded them out. Gales had selected a likely spot for a country estate before he married, and later realized his dreams in "Eckington," about two miles from his office on New Jersey Avenue. Here he found recreation in walking or shooting, and indulged his taste for a rich cellar and a heavy table. His free giving and careless bookkeeping almost bankrupted him, but the guests entertained by the Galeses included the Adamses, Websters, and Calhouns, the British minister, and other celebrities. Gales was responsible for most of the editorials in the Intelligencer. They were short and compact, unless the gibes of his enemies stirred him to retaliation. Contrary to the public opinion of his time, few statesmen wrote editorials for his paper. He was not a skilled "political" journalist. In turn a Republican, a Whig, and a Constitutional Democrat, he did not believe in government by the masses and considered the election of Andrew Jackson a national calamity. He warmly supported the United States Bank, national free education, and Clay's "American System"; encouraged liberalism in religion, being a member of the first Unitarian church organized in Washington; and materially aided the American Colonization Society. He had some share in local politics, being mayor of Washington from 1827 to 1830. His most permanent work, however, was the preservation of the proceedings of Congress throughout a considerable period. Condensed running reports of proceedings were printed in the National Intelligencer, the files of which are thus the most valuable sources of Congressional debates down to 1833, when the Congressional Globe began to report in more detail. Gales & Seaton also published, from 1825 to 1837, a Register of Debates in Congress (29 volumes), covering those years; the Annals of Congress (volumes I and II, 1834; volumes III-XLII, 1849-56), covering the period 1789-1824; and the American State Papers (38 volumes, 1832-61). Although Gales was employing other reporters at the time of the Webster Hayne debate, at Webster's request he reported that debate himself, and saved it in a volume of 100 pages.

[A. C. Clark, "Joseph Gales, Jr., Editor and Mayor," in Columbia Historical Society Records (Washington, D. C.), Volume XXIII (1920); Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the U. S. (1873); Josephine Seaton, Wm. Winston Seaton: A Biographical Sketch (1871); files of the Washington Globe (1830-45); and the National Intelligence1(1810-60) and obituary in the latter, July 23, 1860; "The National Intelligencer and Its Editors," in Atlantic Monthly, October 1860; H. W. Crew, Centennial History of the City of Washington (1892); S. C. Busey, Pictures of the City of Washington in the Past (1898); W. B. Bryan, A History of the National Capital (2 volumes, 1916); A. K. McClure, Recollections of Half a Century (1902); letters in the Van Buren MSS. in the Library of Congress]

W. E. S.

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 575:

GALES, Joseph, journalist, born in Eckington, near Sheffield, Eng., 10 April, 1786; died in Washington, D. C., 21 July, 1860, was educated at the University of North Carolina, learned printing in Philadelphia, and in 1807 became the assistant, and afterward the partner, of Samuel Harrison Smith, who had removed the “Independent Gazetteer” to Washington and changed its name to the “National Intelligencer.” In 1810 he succeeded to the sole proprietorship of the journal, which was then published tri-weekly. In 1812 he formed a partnership with his brother-in-law, William Winston Seaton, and in January, 1813, began the daily issue of the “Intelligencer,” which was finally suspended, after the death of both partners, in 1869. From the time of their coming together up to 1820, Gales and Seaton were the exclusive reporters as well as the editors of their journal, one devoting himself to the house, the other to the senate. As a rule they only published running reports, but on special occasions the proceedings were given entire. But for their industry, a most important part of our national record would now be lost. Notably was this true in the case of the memorable debate between Hayne and Webster. The original notes of the latter's speech form a volume of several hundred pages, and, corrected and interlined by the statesman's own hand, were carefully treasured by Mr. Gales. At this period he had abandoned the practice of reporting, and the full reproduction of that particular oration was an exception to the custom of the office. The “Intelligencer” was a strong advocate of the war of 1812, and when the British under Admiral Cockburn entered Washington, the anger of that officer seemed to be especially aroused against the journal, one of whose editors was English by birth. He at first proposed burning the office, but being dissuaded by occupants of the adjoining houses, wreaked his revenge upon the printing materials and other property. He ordered the valuable library to be taken into the street and burned, himself assisting in the destruction, the type thrown from the windows, and the presses broken, thus causing a loss of several thousand dollars. Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, pp. 102-103.

GALES, JOSEPH (April 10, 1786-July 21, 1860), journalist, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Bernard Gallagher, an Irish refugee and compatriot of Robert Emmett, and Abigail Davis Gallagher, daughter of a Welsh farmer who died at Valley Forge while a soldier in Washington's army. He spent his youth with his widowed mother on a farm near Mount Pleasant, in Southern Ohio, and attended elementary school there. Later he attended a Lancasterian seminary. His first verse was published in 1824 in the Literary Gazette. In 1826 he began his journalistic career which for the next thirteen years was varied and financially precarious. He was connected successively with the Western Tiller; the Cincinnati Emporium; the Cincinnati Register; the Western Minerva, a literary magazine attempted in conjunction with his brother Francis; the Backwoodsman, a campaign paper at Xenia, Ohio, devoted to the presidential candidacy of Henry Clay; the Cincinnati Mirror, fourth literary periodical published west of the Alleghany Mountains; the Western Literary Journal and Monthly Review; the Western Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal; the Ohio State Journal at Columbus; and the Hesperian, his most important literary magazine. While he was at Xenia he was married to Emma Adamson, daughter of Captain Adamson of Boston.

Attracted by Gallagher's political correspondence for the paper, Charles Hammond, editor of the Cincinnati Gazette, invited him in 1839 to become his assistant at a liberal salary, and the days of his early struggle were ended. After Hammond's death in 1840, Gallagher did much political writing and took an active part in Whig politics. A brief editorship of the Daily Message, an Abolitionist newspaper, provided the only break in his connection with the Gazette until 1850 when he resigned to become private secretary to Thomas Corwin, secretary of the treasury. Two years later he bought an interest in the Daily Courier at Louisville, Kentucky, and assumed the editorship. He sold his interest in the Courier in 1854 and accepted the editorship of the Western Farmer's Journal, having found that his opposition to slavery made his paper unpopular.

Gallagher was a delegate to the Republican national convention of 1860, in which he supported Abraham Lincoln for the presidential nomination, and was one of those who carried the news to Springfield. When Salmon P. Chase was appointed secretary of the treasury he made Gallagher his secretary. President Lincoln later appointed him a special collector of customs and commercial agent in the upper Mississippi Valley. He intercepted provisions and stores valued at millions of dollars en route to the Confederates and turned them over to the Union armies. Late r he was surveyor of customs for Louisville and pension agent. He suffered financial reverses after the war and for a time did clerical work as secretary of the Kentucky Land Company. He published his first volume of poetry, Erato No.11, in the spring of 1835 and followed it with Erato No. 11 in August 1835 and Erato No. III in 1837. He edited Selections from the Poetical Literature of the West, containing a number of his own poems, in 1841. His Miami Woods, A Golden Wedding and Other Poems was published in 1881 at Cincinnati. Much of his poetry appeared in newspapers and magazines. Many of his lyrics were set to music and were popularized in the theater. Preeminent among early Ohio poets, he exerted a formative influence in the Middle West comparable to that which his more distinguished New England contemporaries made felt in their wider field. In his blank verse of Miami Woods, which was Wordsworthian both in its style and in its sympathetic portrayal of nature, he immortalized the charm of the forests of Ohio as Bryant had the eastern woodlands and Longfellow the grove s of Louisiana

[W. H. Venable, "Wm. Davis Gallagher," Ohio Archeology and Historical Quarterly, March, September 1888, reprinted as a separate biography in 1889 and later in Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley (1891). See also Emerson Ven able, Poets of Ohio (1909), pp. 15-33; the Courier Journal (Louisville, Kentucky), the Louisville Commercial, and the Louisville Times, June 28, 1894.]

D. W. M.


GALLADAY, Peter H., Preble County, Ohio, Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1835-39.


GALLAGHER, WILLIAM DAVIS (August 21, 1808-June 27, 1894), editor, poet, public official. 


GALLATIN, Abraham Alfonse Albert, 1761-1849, statesman, diplomat, Secretary of the Treasury, U.S. Congressman from Pennsylvania.  Opposed extension of slavery to new territories.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 577-579; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 103; Locke, Mary Stoughton. Anti-Slavery in America from the Introduction of African Slaves to the Prohibition of the Slave Trade (1619-1808). Boston: Ginn & Co., 1901, pp. 93, 127, 160, 161; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 8, p. 639)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 103:

GALLATIN, ABRAHAM ALFONSE ALBERT (January 29, 1761-August 12, 1849), secretary of the treasury, diplomat, the son of Jean and Sophie Albertine (Rolaz) Gallatin, dropped the first two alliterative forenames, retaining only the Albert from his mother. As early as the fourteenth century his aristocratic family was prominent in the history of the Duchy of Savoy, and after the city of Geneva established its independence in 1536 th e house furnished an almost unbroken succession of councilors and great lords of the syndic. Albert was the eleventh in direct de scent from the Jean Gallatin who signed the decree which freed Geneva from the episcopal- papal control of Savoy. Left an orphan at the age of nine, he was taken into the care of a distant relative, Mlle. Catherine Pictet, whose wise and affectionate guidance won the lasting gratitude, if only the intermittent acknowledgment, of her ward. A rich heritage of culture, exposure to the exceptionally enlightened society of pre-revolutionary Geneva, and an excellent education at the Academy, from which he graduated in 1779, all combined to give the youth of eighteen a refinement of manners and an alertness of mind which he retained throughout the remaining three score and ten years of his life. But no amount of persuasion or pressure could keep the young Gallatin faithful to the aristocratic traditions of his family. He gravitated toward the more radical group of students in the Academy, applauded the summons of Rousseau to seek freedom from the conventions of civilization in a romantic return to nature, and felt something stifling in the political atmosphere of the oligarchy of Geneva. He indignantly refused his grandmother's offer to procure for him a lieutenant-colonelcy in the mercenary troops which her friend the Landgrave of Hesse was sending to George III to help put down the rebellion in the American colonies. Chafing under what he believed to be a disposition on the part of his guardian and family to force him into a distasteful career, Gallatin left Geneva a few weeks before his nineteenth birthday, without warning to family or friends, and in company with an impecunious but optimistic chum, Henri Serre, took passage at Bordeaux for America, "the land of freedom."

If Gallatin had refused to fight against the Americans as an officer of the Hessian troops, no more did he come, like the young Lafayette, to fight for the Americans. When he landed on the Massachusetts coast in the midsummer of 1780, the fortunes of Washington's army were at a low ebb. But Gallatin took no notice of this state of affairs. He had come to America for his own freedom, not hers. He had bought with his few thousand francs, not bullets to shoot at the British, but tea, a notorious commodity; to sell to the Americans. The statement that he "fought in our Revolution" (E. Channing, A History of the United States, IV, 1917, 266) is based on the slender fact that the young adventurer, not being able to sell to the impecunious farmers of Machias, Maine, the stock of West Indian goods for which he had exchanged his tea, had sought relief from the monotony of a winter in that frontier village by joining a small group of volunteers who marched to Passamaquoddy Bay on the rumor of a British attack, and was for a few days "left accidentally in command of some militia, volunteers and Indians" there. "As I never met the enemy," he wrote sixty-five years later, "I have not the slightest claim to military services" (Writings, II, 621). He returned from the Maine frontier to the unwelcome atmosphere of puritanical Boston in the very month (October 1781) of Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown; and during the year of the peace negotiations he was allowed by the president and fellows of Harvard College to give a sort of "extension course" in French to such students as secured the permission of parents or guardians to take it.

At Boston Gallatin met M. Savary, representative of a firm in Lyons which had a claim against the state of Virginia, and willingly joined him as companion and interpreter. Savary soon bought warrants at Philadelphia for 120,000 acres of land adjoining the "Washington bottom lands" on the south side of the Ohio, making over one-fourth (later one-half) of the purchase to Gallatin, on condition that the latter should give his personal attention to the development of the lands until the receipt of his patrimony on his twenty-fifth birthday (January 29, 1786) should provide him with the funds for the purchase of his share of them. In the spring of 1784 Gallatin crossed the Alleghanies with a small exploring party and established headquarters and a store at Clare's Farm on the Monongahela River, in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, about four miles north of the Virginia line. A little later he located his permanent western home, "Friendship Hill," a few miles up the river. Henry Adams deplored the fact that a man of Gallatin's gifts was led by his youthful enthusiasm for Rousseau to bury his talents and sink his modest fortune in the wilderness of western Pennsylvania. It is true that Gallatin was neither a good farmer nor a successful land speculator; that neither his own need for cultural contacts nor his family's social ambitions found satisfaction in the bucolic atmosphere of "Friendship Hill." In his old age he wrote of his western land, "It is a troublesome and unproductive property, which has plagued me all my life. I could not have invested my patrimony in a more unprofitable manner" (Adams, post, p. 67). Yet the western residence was no political detriment. The obvious superiority of Gallatin's talents marked him from the first as a leader of the homespun democracy of western Pennsylvania, and caused him, before he had reached his thirty-ninth year, to be launched upon a public career which was to continue unbroken for almost four decades.

Gallatin made his debut in politics as a member of a conference held at Harrisburg, in September 1788, to consider ways and means for revising the new Constitution of the United States, which had been ratified by the Pennsylvania convention the previous December by a vote of 46 to 23. The very presence of Gallatin at this conference classed him with the men who objected to the centralizing features of the Constitution. The radical resolutions which he prepared called for a single chamber of Congress, a strictly limited executive, elected for a brief term by popular vote, and a Supreme Court with no appellate jurisdiction except by writ of error from the state courts. Disappointed in his projects of colonization and dejected by the death of his bride of a few months, Sophia Allegre, whom he had brought from Richmond to the banks of the Monongahela, Gallatin thought seriously of returning to Geneva in 1789. But the impossibility of retrieving the money which he had sunk in real estate, together with the upheaval caused in his native city by the outbreak of the French Revolution, kept him in America. In the winter of 1789-90 he sat in the convention which revised the constitution of Pennsylvania, contributing notably to the discussions of the suffrage, representation, taxation, and the judiciary. In October 1790, he was elected to the state legis1ature as a representative of Fayette County, and was reelected in 1791 and 1792 without a contest.

In a memorandum of his career in the legislature Gallatin wrote: "I enjoyed an extraordinary influence in that body, the more remarkable as I was always in a party minority. . . . The laboring oar was left almost exclusively to me. In the session of 1791-21 was put on thirty-five committees, prepared all their reports, and drew all their bills" (Adams, p. 84). Reading of Gallatin's work for the reform of the penal code, the establishment of a state-wide system of public education, the removal of antiquated survivals from the statute law, and the abolition of slavery, one is strongly reminded of the vigorous program of Jefferson in the Virginia legislature in the years from 1776 to 1779. The parallelism extends even to the simile of "the laboring oar." But Gallatin's greatest service was in a field in which Jefferson was never more than a novice public finance. Gallatin laid the foundation of his reputation by preparing the report of the committee of ways and means in his very first term, and thereafter was recognized as the leader of the House in financial legislation. His measures included proposals for the rehabilitation of the currency by the extinction of the state paper money, the full payment of the public debt in specie, the wise management of the funds from the sale of the public lands, the establishment of the Bank of Pennsylvania, and the creation of a revenue adequate to meet "all the expenses of government without any direct tax during the forty ensuing years" (Adams, p. 86). In many respects this program was similar to that which was being carried into effect at the same time by Alexander Hamilton as secretary of the treasury. A democrat by conviction and a representative of the agricultural West, Gallatin naturally espoused the Republican cause in the sharp party struggle of the day. It was therefore a testimony to his personal prestige and accomplishments that the Federalist legislature of the state elected him on joint ballot (45 to 37) to the Senate of the United States, on February 28, 1793. He took his seat at the opening of the Third Congress in December, but his eligibility was immediately challenged on the ground that he had not been nine years a citizen of the United States. On a fair interpretation of the Constitution Gallatin was entitled to his seat, but the Federalist Senate, for political reasons, deprived him of it by a vote of 14 to 12, on February 28, 1794. Brief as his stay in the Senate had been, he had aroused the ire of the Federalists by a motion calling upon the secretary of the treasury for a detailed statement of the government's finances down to January 1, 1794, a motion which drew from Hamilton a testy letter of complaint that he should be hectored by "unexpected, desultory, and distressing calls for lengthy and complicated statements" (Adams, pp. 17-18). It was not till the year 1800 that a law was passed requiring the secretary of the treasury to submit an annual report to Congress.

Gallatin was not greatly distressed by his removal from the Senate. On November 1, 1793, he had married Hannah, the daughter of Commodore James Nicholson of New York, and was even more concerned to get his private affairs straightened out than to probe the administration of the public finances. His second wife, unlike the landlady's pretty daughter with whom he had eloped from Richmond four years before, was a woman of high family standing and wide social connections, with uncles and brothers in the navy, and sisters married to members of Congress. In April 1794, Gallatin sold his western lands to Robert Morris for $4,000 Pennsylvania currency, payable (but not paid) in three yearly instalments. The next month he took his bride to the rustic mansion on the Monongahela. The whole of their little fortune, as he confided to her, consisted in the notes of Morris, together with their farm and five or six hundred pounds in cash.

When, after an absence of a year and a half, he returned to his home in Fayette County, the whole of western Pennsylvania was seething with the Whiskey Rebellion, provoked by Hamilton's excise bill of 1791. A group of radicals, headed by a blatant demagogue named David Bradford, staged incendiary meetings, to which they summoned the militia in arms, terrorized Pittsburgh, forced revenue officers to flee for their lives, and urged the western counties to resist the law to the death. In this crisis Gallatin played a dominant role. With superb courage and persuasive oratory he faced the excited and armed crowd, enheartened the moderates, won over the wavering, and at last secured a vote of 34 to 23 in the revolutionary committee of sixty for peaceable submission to the law of the country. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Gallatin saved western Pennsylvania from a civil war. When the militia which Washington had sent out under the command of Governor Henry Lee of Virginia reached the scene of disturbance, it found, instead of "embattled farmers" to subdue, only a few lawbreakers to arrest and carry to Philadelphia for trial. Hamilton, who accompanied the troops to Pittsburgh, is said to have tried hard to show that Gallatin was implicated in disloyal propaganda, but no proof of the latter's disloyalty in the crisis of 1794 could be found. He had amply atoned for what he called his "only political sin" in acting as clerk of a meeting of the protesting farmers in Pittsburgh two years before. Nevertheless, such is the virulence of partisan rancor that to the end of his life he was maligned by his political opponents as the arch-instigator of the Whiskey Rebellion.

The inhabitants of the western counties pronounced a more just verdict on Gallatin's services when they elected him to the federal House of Representatives in the autumn of 1794. He took his seat at the opening of the Fourth Congress and served for three terms. These six years (1795-1801) constituted perhaps the stormiest period in American political history. In all the turmoil of debate over the Jay Treaty, the insults of the French Directory, the Alien and Sedition Acts, naval and commercial policies, the war with France, and the election of 1800, Gallatin showed an unrivaled grasp of constitutional and international law, great power of argument, and a calmness of temper unruffled by the personal attacks of the New England Federalists, who sneered at his foreign birth and French accent and grossly misrepresented the part he had taken in the Whiskey Rebellion. When Madison and William Branch Giles retired from the House in 1797, Gallatin became the recognized leader of the Republican minority. His signal service was in the field of finance. Insisting on the strict accountability of the Treasury to Congress, he caused the creation of a standing committee on finance (the famous committee of ways and means) to receive and advise on the reports of the secretary on revenues, debts, loans, expenditures, and estimates; and he urged that no moneys should be spent except for the specific purposes for which they had been appropriated. Secretary Wolcott wrote to Hamilton in desperation: "Gallatin ... is evidently intending to break down this department, by charging it with an impracticable detail" (G. Gibbs, Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams, 1846, II, 45). Against the combined opposition of the Federalist majority in the House and the Federalist officials in the cabinet Gallatin was unable to carry through his plan of financial reform, but he clearly announced the more orderly procedure which he himself was soon to follow as secretary of the treasury. In the last days of his final session in the House, during the Jefferson-Burr deadlock, as party leader he directed the fight for the election of Jefferson, displaying tact and firmness, refusing to be frightened or cajoled by the Federalists into schemes for a new election or a "regency," and remaining confident that the Burrite obstructionists would give way to the manifest will of the people.

That Gallatin should head the Treasury Department in the new administration was as inevitable as that Jefferson should head the administration itself. There was no other man in the Republican party to dispute his eminence in the field of finance. Appointed secretary of the treasury in May 1801, he held the position until February 1814, although ceasing to perform its actual duties in May 1813. No other secretary of the treasury has yet equaled Gallatin in length of service. The labor which he devoted to the details of the office in the first two years was the most arduous of his life, and, as he told his son long years afterward, it nearly undermined his constitution. Only the reading of his voluminous reports to Congress and his correspondence with his chief will enable one to gain an adequate idea of his large conception of the role of the guardian of the public treasure in an administration aiming at the establishment of pure Republican principles. For Gallatin was not content, as he wrote to Jefferson on November 8, 1809, "to act the part of a mere financier, to become a contriver of taxes, a dealer of loans ... fattening contractors, pursers and agents" (Adams, p. 410). He was a statesman first, shaping his policy to further the political and social ends which he envisaged as the destiny of the United States, a new and powerful nation, free from the burden of military and naval preemptions, free from political entanglements with the Old World, free from the curse of party faction and the canker of social privilege. He felt that, by following the peaceful paths of industry and commerce, the country, favored by its geographical position and its abundant natural resources, would grow prosperous; and the government, without recourse to oppressive taxation, would not only have ample means to perform its restricted functions, but an increasing surplus to devote to national projects for education and internal improvements.

Gallatin's administration of the Treasury was made difficult by circumstances over which he had no control, such as the war with the Barbary pirates, the vexation of American commerce by British Orders in Council and Napoleonic decrees, the inefficient management of the Navy Department by Robert Smith, and the bitter, factious opposition in the Senate, against which he had but indifferent support from Jefferson and hardly any from the more temporizing Madison. The public debt on January 1, 1801, was slightly over $80,000,000. By setting aside $7,300,000 (about three-fourths of the estimated revenue for 1802) each year for the payment of interest and principal, Gallatin calculated that, if peace continued, the debt would be wiped out by 1817. And so, undoubtedly, it would have been. After ten years of Gallatin's administration the debt had been reduced to $45,000,000, in spite of the Barbary wars, the purchase of Louisiana, and the commercial losses from embargoes and non-intercourse. But the War of 1812 sent the debt up to $123,000,000 and postponed its extinction twenty years beyond the elate set by Gallatin. The internal revenue duties, which he was loath to sacrifice, in spite of his condemnation of them at the time of the Whiskey Rebellion, were swept away, on motion of John Randolph, in 1802. But a special Mediterranean fund of two and a half per cent increase in ad valorem duties was imposed in March 1804, to defray the expense of the Barbary wars. At the close of Jefferson's highly prosperous first administration all the expenses of the government, including the interest on the $11,250,000 stock for the Louisiana purchase, had been easily met, and the treasury showed a surplus of $1,000,000, which increased the next year (1806) to over $4,000,000.

Then came the evil clays. In April 1807, a Tory majority of 200 was returned to Parliament, and George Canning became foreign secretary. "From the moment Mr. Canning and his party assumed power, the fate of Mr. Jefferson's Administration was sealed; ... England was determined to recover her commerce and to take back her seamen, and America could not retain either by any means whatever; she had no alternative but submission or war, and either submission or war was equally fatal to Mr. Jefferson's Administration" (Adams, p. 356). The developments of the next six years, especially the American efforts to exert peaceful coercion by means of commercial restriction and the ultimate recourse to war, wrecked Gallatin's policies. Not only was he forced to become "a contriver of taxes, a dealer of loans," but he had to abandon the project which he had worked out with Jefferson for the expenditure of $20,000,- 000 in the construction of a vast system of canals and highways running from Maine to Georgia and connecting the eastern rivers with the Mississippi basin. With characteristic imperturbability and diligence he set himself to the unwelcome tasks which filled the last years of his secretaryship. To enforce the Embargo he had to issue orders as drastic as those which he had condemned in the Federalist regime. As the revenue from exports sank, the hated internal taxes had to be revived and extended. Congress refused to re-charter the Bank of the United States (1811), in spite of Gallatin's plea that it was a necessity, with the result that the paper of the prolific state banks compelled the suspension of specie payments outside the New England states. The latter maintained a constant opposition to "Mr. Madison's war." Of the $16,000,- 000 which Gallatin was authorized to raise in December 1812, Boston subscribed $75,000 as against $5,720,000 from New York and $6,858,000 from Philadelphia. Finally, the faction opposed to Gallatin in the Senate, led by Samuel Smith [q.v.], grew so bitter-after Gallatin had forced the latter's incompetent brother Robert Smith [q.v.] to resign from the State Department in 1811-that Gallatin became convinced of the futility of remaining longer in the cabinet. He took advantage of the Russian offer of mediation to request the President to send him to St. Petersburg.

When Gallatin dropped down Delaware Bay on May 9, 1813, on his voyage to Russia, he was leaving behind him forever the turmoil of American domestic politics. For the next ten years he was to be engaged almost uninterruptedly in diplomatic service abroad. The six months which he spent in St. Petersburg with James A. Bayard and John Quincy Adams were fruitless, owing to Great Britain's refusal to accept Russian mediation. Gallatin learned in October 1813 that the Senate had rejected his nomination as peace commissioner. When the British offered to treat with the United States directly, Madison omitted Gallatin's name from the new list of commissioners, supposing that he was coming back to his post at the Treasury. But Gallatin preferred to stay, and the President added his name as a fifth member of the commission, with Adams, Bayard, Henry Clay, and Jonathan Russell, appointing a new secretary of the treasury. This chapter of confusion resulted in Gallatin's name being at the foot instead of the head of the new commission, but it did not prevent him from again wielding "the laboring oar" when the British and the American negotiators finally set to work at Ghent in the midsummer of 1814. He not only prepared or revised the drafts on the most important points in dispute, with great patience and skill wearing down the exorbitant demands of the British, but with even greater patience and skill he kept a degree of harmony in the American commission itself between Adams and Clay, whose pugnacious tempers and sectional interests clashed over the relative value of the Newfoundland fisheries and the navigation of the Mississippi. There were moments in the autumn of 1814 when Gallatin despaired of the success of the negotiations and apprehended that the full force of the British army and navy, released by the triumph of the Allies over Na pol eon, might be turned against the United States. But agricultural distress, a rapidly mounting debt, Macdonough's victory on Lake Champlain, the sound advice of Wellington, and the fluttering of European danger signals at Vienna, combined to persuade the British to follow the wiser course. The treaty of peace was signed at Ghent on Christmas eve, 1814. Henry Adams calls it "the special and peculiar triumph of Mr. Gallatin" (post, p. 546).

On completing his work at Ghent, Gallatin visited Geneva after an absence of thirty-five years, and arrived at Paris in March 1815, to be received in audience, cordially by the departing Bourbon King and rather brusquely by the returning Emperor. In April he crossed the Channel to England, where he labored, with Adams and Clay, to conclude a favorable commercial treaty with the British. On his return to America in September he was confronted with an embarrassment of choices. Friends in Philadelphia begged him to accept nomination for Congress; John Jacob Astor offered him a share of one fifth of his lucrative business; Secretary of State Monroe urged him to accept the post of minister to France, which Madison had proffered to him before his return to America. Yielding to the wishes of his family, and perhaps to his own unacknowledged preference for a residence in Paris over one on the banks of the Monongahela, Gallatin accepted the French mission early in 1816, only to be faced in a few days with still another offer. Alexander J. Dallas resigned from the Treasury and Madison asked Gallatin to return to his place in the cabinet. He was only fifty-five years old, at the height of his powers. His continued service at the head of the Treasury would have been of far more value to his country than anything he could accomplish in France under the Bourbon Restoration. But he declined the Treasury post with the lame explanation that "an active young man" was needed, and sailed with his delighted family for France. The seven years in Paris (1816-23) were a diplomatic deadlock. Indeed, one gathers from the diary kept by Gallatin's son and secretary, James, that official business was completely stifled by social amenities at Paris. Gallatin performed his duties with conscientious diligence; like Martin Luther, he "could not do otherwise." But in the main business of his mission, the claims for injury done to American commerce by the Napoleonic decrees, he made no progress with the successive ministries of Louis XVIII; while the tangle of red tape caused by the interpretation of the Louisiana treaty could have been as well unraveled by a second-rate minister. The only service rendered by Gallatin on this mission at all comparable to that rendered at Ghent was the aid which he gave in 1818 to the American minister in London, Richard Rush, in negotiating a treaty renewing the commercial clauses of 1815, gaining some concessions in colonial trade and the Newfoundland fisheries, drawing the boundary line between the United States and Canada from the Lake of the Woods to the Rockies, and providing for the joint occupation of the Oregon Territory for a period of ten years.

Gallatin returned to America in the summer of 1823 to find the country already seething with the factional politics which brought to a speedy close the "era of good feeling." He reluctantly allowed his name to be used with Crawford's on the "regular" Republican ticket, only to be asked to withdraw it later, when Van Buren conceived the preposterous hope of inducing Clay to be content with vice-presidential ambitions. Gallatin acceded more readily to the second solicitation than to the first, for he had no personal desire for office. But the whole transaction was rather scabrous, and it confirmed the impression which Gallatin had formed on his return from Paris, that American politics had declined from the high level of principles by which he believed it was guided in the Jeffersonian era.

Gallatin anticipated retiring to the new stone mansion which he had built at "Friendship Hill" and living as a gentleman-farmer on his modest income of $2,000 a year. He actually spent only a single year at New Geneva, where his family, except for the second son Albert, chafed under a feeling of social rustication. In 1826 he was for a third time drafted for a foreign mission. When failing health obliged Rufus King to resign, President Adams persuaded Gallatin to accept the appointment to St. James's for such a period at least as would be necessary for the settlement of new difficulties over old questions, which had been accentuated by the accession of the implacable Canning to power in 1822 and the retaliatory navigation acts of Congress at the instigation of the no less implacable Adams. After laboring for more than a year in London. Gallatin came home in November 1827 with enough concessions to earn from the President, who was never over-generous in praise of a colleague or appreciation of a rival, congratulations on the "reason and good temper" with which he had accomplished the “salutary effect" of his mission. The commercial treaties of 1815 and 1818 were renewed, the joint occupation of Oregon was to be continued indefinitely, subject to a twelve-months notice of change by either party, and the settlement of the northeast boundary was left to the arbitration of a friendly sovereign, the King of the Netherlands. For two years after his return Gallatin was hard at work on the preparation of the historical data for the royal arbiter. The arbitration proved a failure, however, and the northeast boundary was not settled until Gallatin's old friend, Alexander Baring, now Lord Ashburton, came to America a decade later (1842).

Though Gallatin's public career ended with his mission of 1826-27 to England, the score and more years of life that remained to him were not spent in that bucolic retirement which had been his persistent illusion. He settled in New York City, and at the urgent solicitation of his friend John Jacob Astor accepted the presidency (1831-39) of the newly established National (later Gallatin) Bank, using his great influence in banking circles to hasten the return to specie payments after the disastrous panic of 1837. His Considerations on the Currency and Banking System of the United States (1831) was circulated as a campaign document in 1832 by the United States Bank. It is characteristic of the scrupulous honor of Gallatin that he refused to accept any pay from Nicholas Biddle for the use of his pamphlet. His Memorial of the Committee Appointed by the "Free Trade Convention" held in Philadelphia in ... 1831 (1832), a trenchant pamphlet condemning the high protective tariff, drew from Henry Clay a vituperative speech in which he charged Gallatin with being "still at heart an alien." In his eighty-fourth year he stood with superb courage before a hostile and turbulent crowd in New York to protest against the annexation of Texas as the prelude to a war of imperialistic aggression. He was one of the founders and the first president of the council of the University of the City of New York in 1831, but withdrew his support from the institution when it fell under the influence of theological zealots. In 1843 he was made president of the New York Historical Society, in the gallery of whose building hangs the Powell portrait of him, with the penetrating, kindly, hazel eyes and the long aristocratic nose above the mobile mouth. But his most absorbing interest in these years was the study of Indian tribes. He has been called "the father of American ethnology." Founder of the American Ethnological Society in 1842, Gallatin defrayed most of the cost of its two volumes of Transactions, and wrote for them "Notes on the Semicivilized Nations of Mexico, Yucatan and Central America" and an introduction to "Hale's Indians of North-West America and Vocabularies of North America" (Transactions American Ethnological Society, Volume I, 1845; Volume II, 1848). He wrote to a friend in 1842 that except for his papers on the Indians all his writings were of only "a local and ephemeral importance." Posterity has not so judged them. His annual and special reports as secretary of the treasury, his diplomatic notes, his voluminous correspondence, his pamphlets on finance, the public lands, the tariff, the Oregon question, the French debt, and the Mexican War are still mines of information for the student of American history and economics. With his eighty-seventh year his powers began to wane. He had outlived his generation. During the winter of 1848-49 he was confined for the most part to his room, and in the spring he suffered the cruelest blow of all in the death of his wife, the companion of more than half a century. He was taken to the country home of his daughter Frances at Astoria, L. I., in the summer and there he died in her arms on August 12, 1849, at the age of eighty-eight years and six months.

The services of this great financier, diplomat, and statesman have never been adequately recognized by his adopted country, partly, perhaps, because it was his adopted country. He never made parade of his patriotism, which was sincere and abiding. He never sought to ingratiate himself with the multitude by the specious art of aggressive or defensive oratory. His appeal was always addressed to men's reason and judgment, not to their emotions and prejudices. No prospect of political preferment or threat of personal loss could tempt or frighten him from what he felt to be the path of duty, honor, and truth. The false gods of wealth, power, and vulgar fame were as impotent to deflect his devotions as African idols are to attract the worship of a philosopher. In intellect he was the peer of any of his contemporaries- as constructive as Hamilton, as astute as Jefferson, as logical as Adams, as comprehensive as Webster. And in that innate nobility of character which meets malice with charity and "fears a stain as a wound" he was without a superior.

[The standard biography is Henry Adams, The Life of Albert Gallatin (1879), of which John A. Stevens, Albert Gallatin (1885), is hardly more than a condensation. A Great Peacemaker, The Diary of James Gallatin (1914) covers the years of his father's diplomatic career. Henry Adams also published The Writings of Albert Gallatin (3 volumes, 1879), containing his letters from 1801 on, his speech of January 1795 in the Pennsylvania legislature on the Whiskey Rebellion, six of his major pamphlets on political and financial questions, and a list of his publications. See also American State Papers, Finance, volumes I, II (1832), Foreign Relations, volumes III (1832), IV (1834), VI (1859); W. P. Bacon, Ancestry of Albert Gallatin (1916); New York Tribune, August 13, 14, 1849. The unsorted Gallatin papers, now stored in the attic of the building of the New York Historical Society, have not yet been made available.]

D. S. M.

Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888,Volume II, pp. 577-579:

GALLATIN, Albert, statesman, born in Geneva, Switzerland, 29 January, 1761; died in Astoria, L. I., 12 August, 1849. He was descended from an ancient patrician family of Geneva, whose name had long been honorably connected with the history of Switzerland. His father, Jean Gallatin, was engaged in trade, and died when the boy was two years old, while his mother, Sophie Albertine Rolaz du Rosey, survived her husband seven years. Young Albert, who had been baptized by the name Abraham Alfonse Albert, was confided to the care of Mademoiselle Pictet, a relative of his father, and from her he received his early education. In 1773 he was sent to a boarding-school, and a year later entered the University of Geneva, where he was graduated in 1779, standing first in mathematics, natural philosophy, and Latin translation. The liberal spirit of the times was not without its influence on the young man. His grandmother, Madame Susanne Gallatin-Vaudenet, was a woman of strong character, with many friends, among whom were Frederick, landgrave of Hesse Cassel, and Voltaire. Through her influence, a commission of lieutenant-colonel in the Hessian troops, then serving in America, was offered to Gallatin; but he declined it, saying that he would “never serve a tyrant.” In opposition to the wishes of his family, he secretly left Geneva in April, 1780, with his college friend, Henri Serre, for America, where they might “drink in a love for independence in the freest country of the universe.” He sailed from l'Orient late in May, 1780, and reached Boston on 14 July. His experiences for the ensuing year or so were far from encouraging; he wandered from Boston to Maine, where he engaged in trading. He served as a volunteer against a threatened invasion by the British, and at one time was in temporary command of a small fort in Passamaquoddy. His trading ventures failed, and he returned to Boston with a reduced purse in October, 1781. Here for a time he supported himself by giving instruction in the French language, and in July, 1782, was granted permission to teach the students of Harvard in that language, receiving from the corporation a compensation of $300 for his services. When peace was restored, he left Boston and went to Philadelphia, by way of New York, to deliver the letters to eminent Americans which he had received in Paris. In Philadelphia, through the influence of his friend, Savary de Valcoulon, he was led to invest in large tracts of land in West Virginia. This venture proved successful, and in February, 1784, he settled in Fayette county, Pennsylvania, then a part of Virginia, where he opened a country store. During the next few years he was constantly engaged in purchasing property and in locating claims for others, spending his winters generally in Richmond, then the gayest city in the Union. He appears to have been interested in politics, and his ideas seem to have influenced the speeches of John Smilie, who represented Fayette county in the convention of ratification held in September, 1787. Two years later he was a member of the State constitutional convention held in Philadelphia, and was among those who shared the anti-federalist views then prevalent. This was his entrance into the public service. In 1790 he was sent to the legislature from Fayette county, and was re-elected in the two following years. He took an active part in its proceedings, and in 1793 was elected to the U. S. senate; but, after serving two months, he was declared ineligible by a strict party vote on the ground that he had been a citizen of the United States only eight years, having taken the oath of allegiance in October, 1785. In November, 1793, he married Hannah, the daughter of Com. James Nicholson, and this alliance greatly widened his political connection. A year later, through his tact, courage, and fidelity, he succeeded in bringing about a peaceful settlement of the “Whiskey Insurrection.” Indeed, historians have agreed in giving to Gallatin the honor of preventing a more serious outbreak. At the subsequent election he was chosen to represent Fayette county in the Pennsylvania legislature, and also was elected to congress. His election to the legislature was contested, and finally declared void after a long debate, during which he made his speech “on the western elections.” Another election was then held, in which Gallatin was victorious. After remaining in the legislature till 12 March, he obtained leave of absence. He entered congress on 7 December, 1795, as a follower of James Madison, who was then the leader of the Republican opposition, and continued a member of that body until his appointment as secretary of the treasury in 1801. One of the first measures introduced by him was a bill calling for the precise condition of the treasury. His object was to establish the expenses of the government in each department of the service on a permanent footing, for which annual appropriations should be made, and for any important expenditure to insist on a special appropriation. He also came into prominence when the house demanded from the president papers connected with the treaty of 1796 with Great Britain. The president returned answer that he considered it a dangerous precedent to admit the right of the house to see the papers, and absolutely refused compliance with the request. In the debate that followed, Gallatin charged John Jay and other Federalists with having pusillanimously surrendered the honor of their country. In reply to this, Uriah Tracy, of Connecticut, said: “I cannot be thankful to that gentleman for coming all the way from Geneva to give Americans a character for pusillanimity.” Throughout his congressional career Gallatin participated in all of the important debates, but always made the treasury department and its control, past and present, the object of his unceasing criticism. The establishment of the committee of ways and means was due to his suggestion, and he was ever a warm advocate of internal improvements. His third term closed in 1801. In the first term he asserted his power, and took his place in the councils of the party. In his second, he became its acknowledged chief. In the third, he led its forces to final victory. Besides maintaining his views in debate, he published pamphlets on “A Sketch of the Finances of the United States” (Philadelphia, 1796) and “Views of the Public Debt, Receipts and Expenditures of the United States” (1800). When Thomas Jefferson became president, Gallatin was made secretary of the treasury, and held the office continuously until 1813. He at once applied himself to the mastery of the details of the public finances, and undertook not only the reduction of the debt, but also of the taxes. His management of the treasury department was eminently successful, and he soon obtained a reputation as one of the greatest financiers of the age. The public debt on 1 January, 1802, was $86,712,632.25, and this he reduced until, on 1 January, 1812, it was only $45,209,737.90. In his annual reports, which were models of clearness, he pointed out methods for the gradual extinction of the debt. In 1812 his report says: “The redemption of principal has been effected without the aid of any internal taxes, either direct or indirect, without any addition during the last seven years to the rate of duties on importations, which, on the contrary, have been impaired by the repeal of the duty on salt, and notwithstanding the great diminution of commerce during the last four years.” The war of 1812 then occurred, and the national debt increased steadily until it reached, on 1 January, 1816, $127,334,933.74. After negotiating several loans, he severed his connection with the treasury department, and he was sent with James A. Bayard to St. Petersburg as U. S. commissioner to treat for peace with Great Britain under the mediation which the emperor Alexander had offered to the United States. The British government refused to accept the intervention of a foreign power, and the conference was not held. Meanwhile he was continued as commissioner, and subsequently was associated in the negotiations conducted at Ghent. After months of tedious delay, during which the British, flushed with their successes on the continent over Napoleon, made exorbitant demands, a treaty was signed on Christmas day of 1814. Gallatin's biographer, Henry Adams, says: “Far more than contemporaries ever supposed, or than is now imagined, the treaty of Ghent was the special work and the peculiar triumph of Mr. Gallatin.” John Austin Stevens says: “By his political life Mr. Gallatin acquired an American reputation; by his management of the finances of the United States he placed himself among the first political economists of the day; but his masterly conduct of the treaty of Ghent showed him the equal of the best of European statesmen on their own peculiar ground of diplomacy.” His services were rewarded with the appointment of minister to France in February, 1815, but he spent some time in travel both in Europe and in the United States, finally entering on the duties of his office in January, 1816. Meanwhile he took part in the commercial convention held in London during the summer of 1815. During his career in Paris he aided John Quincy Adams in preparing a commercial treaty with Great Britain, and also was associated with William Eustis in negotiating a treaty with the Netherlands in 1817. He left France in 1823, and returned to the United States, where he was occupied for some time in attention to his private affairs, refusing a seat in the cabinet as secretary of the navy, and declining to be a candidate for the vice-presidency, to which he was nominated by the Democratic party. In 1826, at the solicitation of President Adams, he accepted the appointment of envoy extraordinary to Great Britain, and negotiated commercial treaties by means of which full indemnification was obtained from England for injuries that had been sustained by citizens of the United States in consequence of violations of the treaty of Ghent. On his return to the United States he settled in New York city, where from 1831 till 1839, he was president of the National bank of New York. In 1831 he published his “Considerations on the Currency and Banking System of the United States,” and during the same year he was a member of the free-trade convention held in Philadelphia, preparing for that body the memorial which was submitted to congress. Mr. Gallatin was likewise associated in the movement which led in October, 1830, to the foundation of the New York university. He became the first president of the council, but resigned at the end of the year. After his resignation from the bank, his life was devoted to literature, and especially to historical and ethnological researches. In 1839 he prepared an argument in behalf of the United States to be laid before the king of the Netherlands as an umpire on the Maine boundary question, and in connection with this undertaking he collected a statement of the facts, which he revised and, together with the speech of Daniel Webster, a copy of the Jay treaty, and eight maps, published at his own expense as the “Right of the United States to the Northeastern Boundary” (New York, 1840). He presided in 1844 at a meeting held in New York to protest against the annexation of Texas, and, in the course of the address which he made, said that “the resolution of the house declaring the treaty of annexation by the United States of America and the republic of Texas to be the fundamental law of union between them was a direct and undisguised usurpation of power and a violation of the constitution.” The war with Mexico he regarded as “the only blot upon the escutcheon of the United States,” and he published “Peace with Mexico” (1847) and “War Expenses” (1848), pamphlets of which 150,000 were gratuitously circulated, and which had undoubted influence in bringing about peace. In 1846, when Lord Ashburton visited the United States in connection with the treaty which bears his name, Mr. Gallatin published a pamphlet on the “Oregon Question,” which was distinguished by impartiality, moderation, and power of reasoning. It put before the people, as well as the negotiators, the precise merits of the controversy, and powerfully contributed to the ultimate peaceful settlement. In 1842 he was associated in the establishment of the American ethnological society, becoming its first president, and in 1843 he was elected to hold a similar office in the New York historical society, an honor which was annually conferred on him until his death. His scientific publications include “Synopsis of the Indian Tribes within the United States east of the Rocky Mountains, and in the British and Russian Possessions in North America” (Cambridge, 1836) and “Notes on the Semi-Civilized Nations of Mexico, Yucatan, and Central America, with Conjectures on the Origin of Semi-Civilization in America” (New York, 1845). John Austin Stevens says of him: “To a higher degree than any American, native or foreign born, unless Franklin, with whose broad nature he had many traits in common, Albert Gallatin deserves the proud title, aimed at by many, reached by few, of Citizen of the World.” See “Writings of Albert Gallatin,” by Henry Adams (3 vols., Philadelphia, 1879); “Life of Albert Gallatin,” by Henry Adams (1879); and “Albert Gallatin,” by John Austin Stevens, in “American Statesman Series” (Boston, 1883). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 577-579.


GALLAUDET, Thomas Hopkins, 1787-1851, Hartford, Connecticut, clergyman, educator.  Principal of the Hartford Deaf and Dumb Asylum.  Active in Boston auxiliary of the American Colonization Society (ACS).  Raised considerable funds for colonization.  Worked with ACS agent Leonard Bacon.  Member and supporter of the Connecticut Colonization Society. 

(Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 579; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 111; Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, pp. 126-134, 158, 162-163, 193-194)

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 579:

GALLAUDET, Thomas Hopkins, educator, born in Philadelphia, 10 December, 1787; died in Hartford, Connecticut, 9 September, 1851. His family was of Huguenot origin. At an early age he moved with his parents to Hartford, Connecticut. He was graduated at Yale in 1805, and after hesitating for some time as to whether he should study law, engage in trade, or study divinity, entered the Theological seminary at Andover in 1811. He was licensed to preach in 1814. His attention having been called to the neglected condition of the deaf and dumb in this country, he went to Europe in 1815, visiting in suc­cession London, Edinburgh, and Paris. The work which had been begun in France in 1760, by De l’Epée, was successfully carried on by the Abbé Sicard; and that which had been begun near Edinburgh, at an earlier date, by Thomas Braidwood, and later transferred to London, was under the charge of Dr. Joseph Watson, a nephew of Braidwood. Gallaudet made himself familiar with the methods in use at both establishments, and, returning to the United States in 1816, he brought with him as assistant Laurent Clerc, a deaf-mute, and pupil of Sicard. In the following year, his arrangements having been completed, he began work in Hartford, Connecticut, with seven pupils. His school soon became a prosperous asylum, and its founder, amid much encouragement, remained in charge as president until 1830, when he resigned on ac­count of ill health. He continued, however, to take an active part in the management of the institution, as one of its directors, and to give it the benefit of his wisdom and experience. In 1838 he became chaplain of the retreat for the insane at Hartford, Connecticut, which office he retained till his death. During his lifetime he published extensively. Among his works are “Sermons Preached to an English Congregation in Paris” (London, 1818); “Bible Stories for the Young”; “Child’s Book of the Soul” (3d ed., 1850); “Youth's Book of Natural Theology,” and other similar works. He also was a contributor to the “Annals of the Deaf and Dumb” (Hartford). A biography of Gallaudet was published by Heman Humphrey, D. D. (New York, 1858). Appletons’ Cylcopædia of American Biography, 1888.


GALLOWAY, Abraham Hankins, 1737-1870, African American, fugitive slave, abolitionist, Union spy. 

(Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 4, p. 577)


GALLOWAY, Samuel, 1811-1872, lawyer, U.S. Congressman, Ohio, educator, opponent of slavery.  When the question of slavery began to agitate the country, Galloway allied himself with the anti-slavery men, although he preferred working within the Whig party to joining any of the avowedly anti-slavery political parties. In 1854 he was elected to Congress, where he added to his reputation as an orator.

(Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, p. 219; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 582; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 117)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 17:

GALLOWAY, SAMUEL (March 22, 1811-April 5, 1872), educator, congressman, was of Scotch-Irish ancestry. The first Galloway came to America from Northern Ireland and settled in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and about the same time the Buchanans, another Scotch-Irish family, settled in the same neighborhood. James Galloway, the father of Samuel, married a Buchanan. Galloway received his early education in Gettysburg, but when he was seventeen or eighteen years old, upon the death of his father, he moved to Greenfield, Highland County, Ohio. In 1829 he entered Miami University, from which institution he graduated four years later at the head of his class. He then began the study of law at Hillsboro, Ohio, but abruptly abandoned his legal studies to enter Princeton Theological Seminary as a student. He remained only a year (1836) at Princeton and then, possibly on account of financial difficulties, began teaching. He was appointed professor of Greek in his alma mater, but ill health compelled him to resign within a year. Upon his recovery, he resumed his teaching, first in Hamilton, Ohio, then at Miami University, 1837-38, and later as professor of classical languages at Hanover College, Hanover, Ind., 1838-40. During this period he was in great demand as a lecturer upon education and temperance. He was by nature deeply religious and for many years was undecided whether to select the ministry or the law for his life-work. In 1841, however, he decided to return to Ohio and resume his study of law. In 1842 he was admitted to the bar and the following year formed a partnership with Nathaniel Massie at Chillicothe. His analytical mind, sound logic, careful preparation, and clear and forcible delivery soon brought him recognition. In 1843 he was married to Joan Wall in of Cincinnati and in the same year was elected secretary of state; in 1844 he moved to Columbus. As secretary of state (1844-50) he was ex-officio superintendent of schools. Because of his Calvinistic educational traditions and his association with Horace Mami and Calvin E. Stowe [qq.v.], he became an enthusiastic advocate of popular education. His reports to the legislature dwelt upon the deplorable condition of the common schools in Ohio and embodied many valuable suggestions looking toward reform. Through Galloway's efforts the standard of teaching in the state was raised; teachers' institutes were organized; district and county superintendents were appointed to supervise the work; educators were inspired with new vigor, and the public was awakened to the needs of education. Within ten years the school system of Ohio was completely reconstructed.

When the question of slavery began to agitate the country, Galloway allied himself with the anti-slavery men, although he preferred working within the Whig party to joining any of the avowedly anti-slavery political parties. In 1854 he was elected to Congress, where he added to his reputation as an orator. A trenchant address on Kansas (March I7, 1856; Congressional Globe, 34 Congress, I Session, App., pp. 210-12), was highly commended for its keen satire and vigorous argument at home and abroad, but Galloway was defeated for reelection by Samuel S. Cox [q.v.]. He thereupon resumed his legal practise and took an active interest in the affairs of the Presbyterian Church. During the Civil War he was in close relations with President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton, both of whom frequently consulted him. He was appointed judge advocate of Camp Chase, the only federal office he ever held. After the war he practised law, and in 1871 his name was suggested for the governorship. His failure to receive the nomination, which went to Rutherford B. Hayes, was a keen disappointment to him. He died the following year, in Columbus.

[Washington Gladden, in Ohio Archaeology and History Pubs., IV (1895), 263-78; Wm. A. Taylor, Centennial History of Columbus and Franklin County, Ohio (1909); A History of Educ. in Ohio (1876), published by the Ohio General Assembly; J. J. Burns, Educ. History of Ohio (1905), p. 410; Chas. Robinson, The Biographical Encyclopedia of Ohio in the Nineteenth Century (1876); Princeton Theological Seminary Biographical Catalog (1909); obituaries in Cincinnati Times and Chronicle and Cincinnati Commercial, April 6, 1872, and in American Educ. Monthly, March 1873.]

R.C.M.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 582:

GALLOWAY, Samuel, lawyer, born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 20 March, 1811; died in Columbus, Ohio, 5 April, 1872. He was of Scotch-Irish parentage. After removing to Ohio in 1819, he was graduated at Miami in 1833, at the head of his class, and in the following year taught a classical school at Hamilton, Ohio. In 1835 he was elected professor of ancient languages in Miami, but resigned in consequence of ill health in 1836. He resumed teaching in 1838, first at Springfield, Ohio, and later as professor of ancient languages at South Hanover college, Indiana. In 1841 he returned to Ohio, where he studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1842. He practised in Chillicothe, Ohio, until1844, when he was elected to be secretary of state and removed to Columbus. He held this office for eight years, and after declining a re-election resumed his profession. In 1854 he was elected to congress as a Republican and served one term. He was defeated by S. S. Cox in 1856, and again in 1858. Mr. Galloway took an active part in the political conflicts arising out of the Kansas question. He rendered important legal services to the war department during the civil war. He was active in religious matters, and was for thirteen years a ruling elder in the Presbyterian church. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 582.


GALT, Thomas, 1805-1857, Pennsylvania, Illinois, abolitionist, clergyman.  Founder and Vice President of the Illinois Anti-Slavery Society.


GALUSHA, Elon, 1790-1859, Perry, NY, anti-slavery activist, abolitionist leader, Baptist clergyman, lawyer, reformer.  Co-founder and first President of the Baptist Anti-Slavery Society.  Co-founder in 1843 of the American Baptist Free Mission Society, which admitted no slaveowners.  Manager, American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), 1837-1840.  Supported the Liberty Party. 

(Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, p. 349; Goodell, 1852, pp. 496, 499; Sorin, Gerald. The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Corporation, 1971; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 584)

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 584:

GALUSHA, Elon, clergyman, born in Shaftsbury, Vt.; died in Lockport, New York, 13 June, 1859, was ordained to the Baptist ministry in early life, and served as pastor of churches in Whitesborough, Utica, Rochester, and Lockport, New York. At one time he was president of the Baptist missionary convention of New York. He was an attractive preacher, and one of the most widely known and esteemed among the Baptist ministers of his generation. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 584.


GALUSHA, Jonas, 1753-1834, New Hampshire, statesman, lawyer, jurist.  Former Governor of New Hampshire.  Headed local auxiliary of the American Colonization Society. 

(Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 584; Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, p. 132)

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 584:

GALUSHA, Jonas, statesman, born in Norwalk, Connecticut, 11 February, 1753; died in Shaftsbury, Vt., 24 September, 1834. He removed to Shaftsbury in 1775, and in the battle of Bennington led two companies. Besides filling many minor offices, he was councillor for thirteen years, judge of the supreme court for two years, and governor of the state from 1809 till 1813, and again from 1815 till 1820. In 1808, 1820, and 1824 he was a presidential elector. He was president of the constitutional conventions of 1814 and 1822. In his religious sentiments Governor Galusha took an interest in the affairs of the Baptist church, of which he was a member. –His son, Elon, clergyman, born in Shaftsbury, Vt.; died in Lockport, New York, 13 June, 1859, was ordained to the Baptist ministry in early life, and served as pastor of churches in Whitesborough, Utica, Rochester, and Lockport, New York. At one time he was president of the Baptist missionary convention of New York. He was an attractive preacher, and one of the most widely known and esteemed among the Baptist ministers of his generation. Appletons’ Cylcopædia of American Biography, 1888.


GAMBLE, Hamilton Rowan, 1798-1864, lawyer, political leader.  Member of the American Colonization Society. Governor and Secretary of State of Missouri.  Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice (Whig Party).  Dissented in Missouri Supreme Court decision of “Dred Scott v. Emerson” case, 16th Governor of Missouri, 1861-1864.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 587; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 120; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 8, p. 670)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 120:

GAMBLE, HAMILTON ROWAN (November 29, 1798-January 31, 1864), lawyer, judge, governor, was born in Winchester, Virginia, the son of Irish immigrants, Joseph Gamble and Anne Hamilton. He was educated at Hampden-Sidney College. Admitted to the Virginia bar at eighteen, he followed the familiar course westward, arriving in the Territory of Missouri in 1818. After successful administration of a judicial office, he served as secretary of state, but retired to devote his entire time and attention to his profession. He was a recognized authority in important land and title suits, and had extensive practise before the state and federal appellate courts. In 1827 he was married to Caroline J. Coalter. Reentering politics in 1846, he served one term in the legislature, refusing a second term. The Whig state convention of 1850, however, insisted upon nominating him for the supreme bench, and he was elected by a large majority in a Democratic state (Missouri Statesman, September 26, 1851). From 1851 to 1854 he served as the presiding justice, his opinions being marked by brevity, learning, and conservatism. In the case of Scott, a Man of Color vs. Emerson (1852; l 5 Missouri, 576)' Dred Scott's first unsuccessful suit for freedom, he rendered a dissenting opinion, holding that "a master who takes his slave to reside in a State or Territory where slavery is prohibited, thereby emancipates his slave" (Ibid., p. 590). This view was in accord with eight earlier Missouri precedents. In 1854 he resigned because of ill health and definitely retired from political and professional life, removing to Norristown, near Philadelphia. Early in 1861, the political situation became so critical in Missouri that Gamble returned to that state and declared that "going out of the Union would be the most ruinous thing Missouri could do." He was elected in February a member of the state convention, called to consider the relation of the state to the Union. In this body he was the leader of the Conditional Unionists, those who favored compromise and who refused to pledge the state to secession. He was chairman of the committee on federal relations, whose report declaring that “there is at present no adequate cause to impel Missouri to dissolve her connection with the Federal Union" was adopted by the convention. In June 1861, upon the flight of the secessionist state officials, the convention assumed constituent powers, declared vacant the administrative and legislative offices, and selected Gamble as provisional governor. He organized two separate forces of the militia and secured from the Lincoln administration money and equipment to sustain them. Despite the dangerous conflicts of opinion over military policy, he was able in 1863 truthfully to say that no successful invasion of the state had occurred and that lawlessness and disorder had been materially reduced. He was unable, however, to solve the most difficult problem with which the provisional government had to deal, that of emancipation. By the end of 1862 the Unionist party in Missouri had divided into two bitterly hostile factions which respectively advocated and opposed the immediate abolition of slavery. Gamble, essentially conservative, in his message of December 30, 1862, discussed in general terms a plan for gradual, compensated emancipation which he recommended to the consideration of the legislature (Journal of the Senate of Missouri, 22 General Assembly, 1 Session, p. 24). When in the following year the convention adopted a gradual emancipation plan, the Radicals, open in their opposition to Gamble, denounced it and demanded the Governor's resignation. He was willing to resign, but would not be forced out of office, and he was supported by men of moderate views. His health had long been frail, and in January 1864, after a short illness, he died. Despite obvious mistakes, his administration of the provisional government had succeeded in its chief objectives. The supremacy of the federal government had been maintained in Missouri; the state had been saved for the Union; free labor had definitely triumphed over slavery.

[In Memoriam: Hamilton R. Gamble (1864); Missouri History Review, October 1910; The Messages and Proclamations of the Governors of the State of Missouri, Volume III (1922); Journal and Proc. Missouri State Convention (5 volumes, 1861- 63); obituaries in Missouri Republican (St. Louis), February 1, 2, 1864.]

T.S.B.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 587:

GAMBLE, Hamilton Rowan, governor of Missouri, born in Winchester, Virginia, 29 November, 1798; died in Jefferson City, Missouri, 31 January, 1864. His education was received principally at Hampden Sidney, and when about eighteen years of age he was admitted to the bar of Virginia. In 1818 he went to Missouri, and resided several years in Franklin, Howard county He was elected secretary of state in 1824, which office he held one year. He then became a successful lawyer in St. Louis, served on the bench from 1851 till 1855, and was presiding judge of the supreme court of Missouri. At one time he was a member of the state house of representatives. In 1861 he was elected to the State constitutional convention, which body appointed him provisional governor of Missouri, the regular governor, Claiborne F. Jackson, having joined the secession party. He held this office until his death. In the State convention of 1861, as chairman of the committee on Federal relations, Governor Gamble made a report expressing a hope for an amicable adjustment of the existing difficulties without civil war. He pronounced the president's call for troops unconstitutional, and appealed to the legislature to unite for the preservation of the state. Later the governor was authorized to receive a loan of $500,000 and to purchase ammunition, and the state military was put under his command, On 12 June, 1861, he issued a proclamation calling into service 50,000 of the state militia “for the purpose of repelling invasion, and for the protection of the lives, liberty, and property of the citizens.” On 12 June, 1862, the State convention passed a resolution expressing confidence in the integrity and patriotism of the governor and state officers. On 13 June he submitted a message to the convention, declaring that he would furnish aid to any state that would adopt a measure of emancipation. On 22 July, Governor Gamble summoned the militia to defend the state against Confederate guerillas. He called the adjourned State convention to reassemble in June, 1863, to consult and act on the subject of emancipation, and, after expressing a desire for peace, offered his resignation, which was not accepted. Governor Gamble in 1838 organized the 2d Presbyterian church in St. Louis. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 587.


GANNETT, EZRA STILES (May 4, 1801- August 26, 1871), Unitarian clergyman. Co-founder of the Young Men’s Colonization Society in Boston.  Co-founded monthly paper, The Colonizationist and Journal of Freedom.  Strong supporter of the American Colonization Society (ACS).  He defended the ACS and its policies against criticism by William Lloyd Garrison.  Gave sermons against slavery in his church. 

(Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 588-589; Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, pp. 134, 206, 214)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, pp. 122-123:

GANNETT, EZRA STILES (May 4, 1801- August 26, 1871), Unitarian clergyman, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of Reverend Caleb Gannett, for nearly forty years steward of Harvard College, and his second wife, Ruth Stiles, daughter of President Ezra Stiles [q. v.] of Yale College. His father was a slow, dignified, exact, trustworthy person with a taste for mathematics, and his mother a refined, sensitive, deeply religious woman who had read the Bible through twenty-two times. Ezra grew up a sober-minded, conscientious boy with scholarly proclivities. He prepared for college at Phillips Academy, Andover, and at the age of fifteen entered Harvard, graduating with first honors in 1820. After a period of hesitation during which he contemplated taking up the study of law and taught in a private grammar school at Cambridgeport, he decided to become a Unitarian minister and enrolled in the Harvard Divinity School. He finished the course there in 1823, and on May 27, 1824, accepted an invitation to become assistant to Dr. William Ellery Channing [q.v.] at the Federal Street Church, Boston, where he was ordained, June 30, 1824. With this church, which later moved to a new edifice on Arlington Street, he was associated as assistant and, after Channing's death, as pastor during the remainder of his life. On October 6, 1835, he married Anna Linzee Tilden of Boston, who died on Christmas Day 1846.

For more than forty years he not only ministered faithfully to the needs of his parish but was conspicuous as well among the New England proponents of liberal religion. He lived a life of unselfish, enthusiastic activity, although a sense of duty beyond his power to perform inclined him to habitual somberness and self-reproach. Gifted with reasoning faculties of a high order, the ability to express ideas in clear and cogent language, an eloquence which sprang from intensity of feeling, and no little executive talent, he exerted a strong influence as preacher, lecturer, editor, and administrator. The year after his ordination he was active in organizing the American Unitarian Association for which he is said to have written the constitution, and of which he was the first secretary, serving for six years. Later (1847-51) he was its president. In 1834 he was instrumental in the formation of the Benevolent Fraternity of Churches for the Support of the Ministry-at-large, which became the principal Unitarian missionary society of Boston. As secretary he directed its early work, and from 1857 to 1862 was its president. He assisted Henry Ware, Jr. [q.v.] in the editorship of the Christian Register, and in 1831 started the Scriptural Interpreter which he conducted until 1835. Broken in health, he went to Europe in 1836, returning in 1838. In 1840 he suffered a paralytic stroke which deprived him of the use of his right leg, but he was soon active again, and the click of his short crutch-canes became a familiar sound on the Boston streets. A conservative Unitarian, with a tenacious belief in the miraculous mission and superhuman authority of Christ, he vigorously opposed the Transcendental movement, his lectures expounding "old-fashioned Unitarianism" drawing large audiences. From 1839 to 1843 he edited the Monthly Miscellany of Religion and Letters, and from 1844 to 1849 he was co-editor of the Christian Examiner. To the latter he contributed some notable articles on Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism. He was an advocate of temperance, education, and peace, was opposed to slavery, but was wholly unsympathetic toward the Abolitionists. To the activities of the Civil War he gave little support, but on the bronze bas-reliefs of the Soldiers' Monument, Boston Common, his face appears in the Sanitary Commission group. Death came to him in a railroad wreck on the evening of August 26, 1871, while he was on his way from Boston to Lynn to fill a preaching engagement.

[Wm. C. Gannett, Ezra Stiles Gannett (1875), with an appendix containing a long list of printed sermons, addresses, essays, and magazine articles; Heralds of a Liberal Faith, Volume III (1910), ed. by Samuel A. Eliot; Services in Memory of Ezra Stiles Gannett, D.D. (1871); John R. Dix, Pulpit Portraits, or Pen Pictures of Distinguished American Divines (1854); Geo. W. Cooke, Unitarianism in America (1902); Unitarian Review, May 1875; Monthly Religious Magazine, December 1871; E. E. H ale, in Old and New, October 1871; Liberal Christian, September 9, 1871; Christian Register, September 2, 1871; Boston Transcript, August 28, 1871.]

H. E. S.

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 588-589:

GANNETT, Ezra Stiles, clergyman, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 4 May, 1801; died near Boston, Massachusetts, 25 June, 1871. He was a grandson of President Ezra Stiles of Yale. He was graduated at Harvard with first honors in 1820, studied divinity, and in 1824 became the colleague of Dr. William E. Channing in Boston, finally succeeding him as pastor. He was a foremost figure in the Unitarian controversy which agitated the New England churches in 1825-'35, but in the latter year was driven by illness to Europe, and during the summer following his return was seized with a paralytic stroke, which left him a cripple for life. He became co-editor of the “Christian Examiner,” and his lectures on Unitarian doctrines were the delight of Boston theologians. He delivered the annual election sermon in 1842, in 1843 the “Dudleian lecture,” and in that year was given the degree of D. D. by Harvard. He took part in a second controversy which arose in the Unitarian denomination, and, circumscribed as he was by his infirmity, he did a large amount of ministerial and literary work. He was president of the American Unitarian association in 1847-'51, of the Benevolent fraternity of churches in 1857-'62, and an overseer of Harvard in 1835-'58. On the bronze bas-reliefs of the soldiers’ monument on Boston common his face appears in the sanitary commission group; and the Freedman's aid society had his best labors in its behalf. He was killed by a railway accident. Appletons’ Cylcopædia of American Biography, 1888.

GANO, Stephan, Reverend, 1762-1828, Providence, Rhode Island, clergyman.  Committee member, American Colonization Society, Rhode Island. 

(Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 589; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 125; Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, p. 86)

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 589:

GANO, Stephen, clergyman, born in New York city, 25 December, 1762; died in Providence, Rhode Island, 18 August, 1828, was prevented by the Revolutionary war from receiving a collegiate education, and pursued a short course of study with reference to the medical profession. He was appointed a surgeon in the army at the age of nineteen, and for two years was in the public service. While practising as a physician at Tappan, now Orangetown, New York, he was converted, and, at once feeling it his duty to give himself to the Christian ministry, was ordained 2 August, 1786. After preaching for a time in the vicinity of New York he was called, in 1792, to the pastorate of the 1st Baptist church in Providence, Rhode Island. He accepted the call and spent the remainder of his days in ministering, with distinction and success, to this, the oldest Baptist church in the United States. He was one of the overseers of Brown university from 1794 till his death. Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888.



Sources:
Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volumes I-VI, Edited by James Grant Wilson & John Fiske, New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1888-1889.