From the outset Madison’s Cabinet was the least satisfactory that any President had known. More than once the Federalist cabinets had been convulsed by disagreements, but the Administration of Madison had hardly strength to support two sides of a dispute. Gallatin alone gave it character, but was himself in a sort of disgrace. The Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and the Secretary of the Navy, overshadowed in the Cabinet by Gallatin, stood in a position of inevitable hostility to his influence, although they represented neither ideas nor constituents. While Gallatin exacted economy, the army and navy required expenditures, and the two secretaries necessarily looked to Robert Smith as their friend. Toward Robert Smith Gallatin could feel only antipathy, which was certainly shared by Madison. “We had all been astonished at his appointment,” said Joel Barlow two years afterward;[8] “we all learned the history of that miserable intrigue by which it was effected.” Looking upon Robert Smith’s position as the result of a “miserable intrigue,” Gallatin could make no secret of his contempt. The social relations between them, which had once been intimate, wholly ceased. To embroil matters further, the defalcation of a navy agent at Leghorn revealed business relations between the Navy Department and Senator Samuel Smith’s mercantile firm which scandalized Gallatin and drew from him a sharp criticism. He told Samuel Smith that the transactions of the firm of Smith and Buchanan were the most extraordinary that had fallen within his knowledge since he had been in the Treasury, and had left very unfavorable impressions on his mind.[9] Smith was then struggling for a re-election to the Senate, and felt the hand of Gallatin as a chief obstacle in his way. The feud became almost mortal under these reciprocal injuries; but Samuel Smith gained all his objects, and for the time held Gallatin and Madison at his mercy. Had he been able to separate them, his influence would have had no bounds, except his want of ability.