Albert Gallatin, orphan, were raised by a relationship. It made brilliant studies of Letters and Philosophy in Geneva. In 1780 he emigrated in the United States. The beginnings on the continent were difficult. He taught French in Harvard and became the interpreter of a financier in Philadelphia thanks to which he met various personalities of the political world and financier.

Become American citizen, Gallatin engaged in a political career which will make it enter to the House of Representatives in 1794. It bound with Thomas Jefferson. Like him, it attached a great importance to individual freedom and was opposed to the Hamiltonian movement, favorable to the centralization of the power. It was rather in favor of a federal solution for the establishment of the Constitution of the United States, lately independent.

In 1801 Jefferson was elected with the presidency. He then named Gallatin with the load of Secretary of the Treasury, posts that he occupied during nearly twelve years. In 1803 Gallatin, the financial plan prepared which allowed the repurchase of Louisiana France by the United States. Under the presidency of Madison, it carried out several diplomatic missions, of which the negotiation with the English of the peace treaty of Ghent which was signed in 1814.

In 1827, Gallatin withdrew political life to continue a career in the banking environment which carried out it, in 1832, at the position of president of the National Bank. This scientist was also interested in the history of the continent and more particularly in the indigenous tribes. He was one of the founders of the university of New York (1829) In, 1842 he took part in the creation of American Ethnological Society of the same city. One can thus regard it as one of the precursors of American archeology.