biography
| name: |
Gallatin, (Abraham Alphonse) Albert
|
pronunciation:
[galatĩ]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1761–1849)
|
| biography:
| Financier and statesman, born in Geneva, SW Switzerland. He studied at Geneva in 1779, then went to the USA (1780), settling in Pennsylvania. He was elected to the US House of Representatives (1795), where he set up the House Committee on Finance (later the Ways and Means Committee), and became secretary of the Treasury (1801–13). He played an important part in the peace negotiations with Britain in 1814, and signed the Treaty of Ghent, later becoming minister at Paris (1815–23) and at London (1826–7). A student of Indian tribes, in 1842 he founded the American Ethnological Society of New York. |
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