Charles Gayarré

Who was Charles Gayarré?

Charles Étienne Arthur Gayarré was an American historian, attorney and politician born to a 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. 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 archives.

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.