Jefferson's Treasure

"'A real Treasure,' wrote James Madison to his friend Jefferson early in his acquaintance with the proud Genevan, then an even-tempered congressman, who would go on to manage the national economy during their two presidencies. As treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin pointed the modest young republic to a debt-free condition, and founding era history remains incomplete without him. His admiring biographer Henry Adams knew that in 1879. But until Gregory May’s expansive new life of Gallatin, no scholar had ever fully plumbed the depths of his mind and fleshed out his personality, nor conveyed his politics in such lively prose. At last, he emerges from the shadow of presidents.” 

  ~Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, coauthors of MADISON AND JEFFERSON

“ Gregory May’s masterful new biography restores Albert Gallatin to his rightful place in the history of the new republic.”
  ~PETER S. ONUF, University of Virginia, coauthor (with Annette Gordon-Reed) of “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination

“Jefferson's Treasure provides a masterful portrait of one of America’s least likely founding players, Swiss-born Albert Gallatin, America’s longest-serving Treasury Secretary who balanced the Jeffersonian crusade for debt reduction and small budgets with the needs of the emerging American nation.  Gregory May's compelling account employs Gallatin’s financial wizardry, statesmanship, and deep humanity as a powerful lens for viewing the nation’s formative decades.”  ~David O. Stewart, author of MADISON’S GIFT: Five Partnerships that Built America, and SUMMER OF 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution

“A worthy rival to Alexander Hamilton, Gallatin is now overdue for his own Broadway musical.”

  ~ALAN TAYLOR, author of American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804