For Honour's Sake Read Online Free PDF

permission of her mother, a woman much younger than himself. She died just a few months later.
    As a palliative to his grief, Gallatin threw himself into politics. He was elected to the Pennsylvanian state legislature in 1790 and three years later to the United States Senate. In 1793, Gallatin married Hannah Nicholson less than a month before taking his seat in the Senate that December. Unlike his first wife, Hannah was no beauty, but, raised in a family tightly linked to the navy (her father was a retired commodore with close ties to Washington), she possessed a keen political mind. His twenty-seven-year-old bride, Gallatin confided to a friend, was “far less attractive than either her mind or her heart …. Her understanding is good, she is as well informed as most young ladies … and she is a pretty good democrat (and so, by the bye, are all her relations).” 10 Two years later, on December 7, 1795, Gallatin was elected to Congress and hooked his wagon to Thomas Jefferson’s rising star. When Jefferson won the presidency in March 1801, he appointed Gallatin federal secretary of the treasury. It was a position Gallatin had held ever since.
    In charge of the federal finances, Gallatin clearly understood how ill prepared the nation was for war. As the men behind Jefferson gathered for another sweaty meeting to discuss how the government should react to the
Chesapeake
incident, Gallatin’s face was sallower than normal. His hair, sharply receding from a high, sloping forehead, was a tangled, dark mass. His long nose thrust like a sword out from between dark eyes. Gallatin was a hardened survivor, a politician who had held the reins of the treasury for six years despite many House and Senate attempts to get rid of this foreigner, this fiscal rationalist who so opposed incurring national debt that many capital projects that would benefit political colleagues and adversaries alike died for lack of federal funding.
    In his cold and ever-rational manner, Gallatin argued for a war he acknowledged would be “calamitous.” 11 But this was a war forced on America by the
Chesapeake
incident and the ever-tightening economic screws of the orders-in-council. Gallatin feared economic chaos and depression, but he feared more that turning the other cheek would be ahumiliation the nation would never rise above because its moral supremacy in relation to the corruption of Europe would be forever lost. America’s essence required it to stand up for independence and act against violations of the rights of man. When
Leopard
tore into
Chesapeake
with its broadsides, killing three sailors and maiming many others, Gallatin considered a line had been crossed and war was the ultimate and only redress available to the aggrieved nation.
    â€œWe will be poorer, both as a nation and as a government, our debt and taxes will increase, and our progress in every respect be interrupted. But all those evils are … not to be put in competition with the independence and honor of the nation; they are, moreover, temporary, and very few years of peace will obliterate their effects. Nor do I know whether the awakening of nobler feelings and habits than avarice and luxury might not be necessary to prevent our degenerating, like the Hollanders, into a nation of mere calculators.” 12
    Gallatin not only advocated war but he had much considered the means by which it could be waged. America’s navy, severely reduced by his own conservative national fiscal policies, could not best the Royal Navy. From a treasury point of view, Gallatin held that “it would be an economical measure for every naval nation to burn their navy at the end of a war and to build a new one when again at war, if it was not that time was necessary to build ships of war.” 13 The best the navy could do was to huddle inside the safety of the few well-fortified American ports or act individually as privateers by preying on helpless British