Charles Gayarré

Charles Gayarré
Personal details
Born (1805-02-11)February 11, 1805
New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.
Died January 9, 1895(1895-01-09) (aged 89)
New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.
Political party Democratic
Other political
affiliations		 Jacksonian

Charles Étienne Arthur Gayarré (January 9, 1805 – February 11, 1895) was an American historian, attorney and politician born to a Spanish and French Creole planter's family in New Orleans, Louisiana. A historian and a writer of plays, essays, and novels, to which he devoted his life after the age of 29, he is chiefly remembered for his histories of Louisiana.

The grandson of Étienne de Boré, he was born at the Boré plantation, which was then outside the city limits of New Orleans. (It has long been incorporated into the city as Audubon Park.) After studying at the College d' Orléans he began in 1826 to study law in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and three years later was admitted to the bar. In 1830 he was elected a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives; in 1831 was appointed deputy attorney general of his state; in 1833 he became presiding judge of the city court of New Orleans; and in 1834 he was elected as a Jackson Democrat to the United States Senate. On account of ill-health, however, he immediately resigned without taking his seat. For the next eight years, he traveled in Europe and collected historical material from the French and the Spanish. Some of the historical documents that he used were written by his ancestor, Esteban de Gayarré, a military officer who had arrived in Louisiana with Spanish Governor Antonio de Ulloa.

In 1844-1845 and in 1856-1857 he was elected again as a Democratic Party member of the state House of Representatives, and from 1845 to 1853 was appointed as Secretary of State of Louisiana. In 1853 he failed to be elected to the U.S. Congress, but remained active in Louisiana politics as an ally of John Slidell in the "Regular Democratic" movement. He supported the Confederacy during the Civil War, in which he lost a large fortune. In the postwar years, he lived chiefly by his pen. In 1863 he proposed that the slaves be emancipated and armed, provided that France and England recognized the Confederacy. He had a long-standing association with the Louisiana Historical Society, of which he was President from 1860 to 1888. He died in New Orleans on February 11, 1895.

He wrote Histoire de la Louisiane (1847); Romance of the History of Louisiana (1848); Louisiana: its Colonial History and Romance (1851), reprinted in A History of Louisiana; History of Louisiana: the Spanish Domination (1854); Philip II of Spain (1866); and A History of Louisiana (4 vols., 1866), the last collecting and adding to his earlier works in this field. The whole covered the history of Louisiana from its earliest discovery by Europeans to 1861. He wrote also several dramas and romances, the best of the latter being Fernando de Lemos (1872).

Works

In French:

In English:

Further reading

Political offices
Preceded by
Zenon Ledoux		 Secretary of State of Louisiana
1845–1853 		Succeeded by
Andrew S. Herron
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