Gallatin was energetic in working with his friends to gain time and restore quietness. He presented with great force the folly of resistance and the ruinous consequences to the country of the continuance of the insurrection. He urged that the Government was bound to vindicate the laws and that it would surely send an overwhelming force against them. He placed the subject in a new light and showed the insurrection to be a much more serious affair than it had before appeared. After the Pennsylvania commissioners had reached Pittsburgh and met with those of the National Government and the committee appointed at the meeting at Parkinson’s Ferry, a conference of the committee of sixty was held at Redstone Old Fort, now Brownsville. This meeting was opened by a long, sensible and eloquent speech by Albert Gallatin in favor of law and order. Backed by Judge Hugh H. Brackenridge, Gallatin won the day, and the insurrection was happily ended before the army was called into action. Gallatin was censured for the part he had taken, but no man stood higher in the opinion, not only of President Washington, but of the Pennsylvania authorities. In the General Assembly December, 1794, in an able speech Gallatin admitted his “political sin” in the course he had taken in the insurrectionary movement. He was elected to Congress in 1795, and in a debate on Jay’s Treaty in 1796 he charged Washington and Jay with having pusillanimously surrendered the honor of their country. This, from the lips of a young foreigner, exasperated the Federalists. He was a leader of the Democrats and directed his attention particularly to financial matters. Gallatin remained in Congress until 1801, when President Thomas Jefferson appointed him Secretary of the Treasury, which office he held until 1813, and obtained the credit of being one of the best financiers of the age. The opponents of Jefferson’s Administration complained vehemently in 1808 that the country was threatened with direct taxation at a time when the sources of its wealth, by the orders and decrees of Great Britain and France, were drying up. Gallatin replied to these complaints, as Secretary of the Treasury, by reproducing a flattering but delusive suggestion contained in his annual report the preceding year. He suggested that as the United States was not likely to be involved in frequent wars, a revenue derived solely from duties on imports, even though liable to diminution during war, would yet amply suffice to pay off, during long intervals of peace, the expenses of such wars as might be undertaken. Should the United States become involved in war with both France and Great Britain, no internal taxes would be necessary to carry it on, nor any other financial expedient, beyond borrowing money and doubling the duties on import. The scheme, afterwards tried, bore bitter fruit.