Gayarré, Charles, 1805-1895

<p>Charles-Étienne Arthur Gayarré (January 9, 1805 – February 11, 1895) was an American historian, attorney, slaveowner and politician born to a Spanish and French Creole planter family in New Orleans, Louisiana. A Confederate sympathizer and a writer of plays, essays, and novels, Gayarré is chiefly remembered for his histories of Louisiana and his exposé of US Army general James Wilkinson as a Spanish spy.</p>

<p>The grandson of Étienne de Boré, New Orlean's first mayor who introduced cultivation of indigo and sugarcane to the area, Charles Gayarré 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.) His paternal grandfather, Don Esteban de Gayarre, arrived in the area with Spanish Governor Antonio de Ulloa after France ceded it to Spain, and had been comptroller of the province of Louisiana. His other maternal grandfather was the former colonial treasurer under the French and master of Destrehan Plantation, which was involved in a suppressed slave revolt when Charles was a boy. After studying at the College d'Orléans Gayarré began in 1826 legal studies in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.</p>

<p>On January 28, 1856, Gayarré married Sarah Anne (Shadie) Sullivan (1820-1914) in Lowndes County, Mississippi. In the 1860 census, he owned about a dozen slaves.</p>

<p>New Orleans native Charles Gayarré wrote the first complete history of Louisiana: a four-volume series entitled Louisiana History (1866). Originally written in French, his study focused on the region’s domination by France, Spain, and then the United States. Many of the components for this work came out of public lectures that Gayarré began giving in the 1840s. He also wrote and published other histories, political tracts, government reports, plays, novels, biographies, and articles in numerous journals, establishing himself as one of Louisiana’s literary pioneers.</p>

<p>Charles Étienne Arthur Gayarré was born in New Orleans on January 9, 1805. His French mother, Marie Boré, and Spanish father, Carlos Gayarré, were Creoles in the earliest sense of the term: native-born people of European descent. After his father’s death in 1813, Gayarré grew up on the large plantation of his maternal grandfather, Étienne De Boré, outside the city limits of New Orleans (the area is now Audubon Park). De Boré became the first mayor of New Orleans when Louisiana became a state in 1812. He also invented a significant sugar-refining technique. Gayarré inherited slaves from this grandfather and remained a slaveholder until emancipation; he believed in the inferiority of African Americans all his life. He was educated at the College of Orleans and admitted to the Pennsylvania bar in 1828 and the Louisiana bar in 1829.</p>

<p>Gayarré’s first publication, <i>Discours adressé à Législature, en réfutation du rapport de M. Livingston sur l’abolition de la peine de mort</i> (Address to the Legislature in Refutation of the Report of Mr. [Edward] Livingston on the Abolition of the Death Penalty), was issued in pamphlet form by New Orleans printer Benjamin Levy in 1826, and launched Gayarré’s literary career. <i>Essai historique sur la Louisiane</i>, published in 1830, was Gayarré’s first attempt to write Louisiana history; he followed this with <i>Histoire de la Louisiane</i> in 1846–47 and <i>Romance of the History of Louisiana</i> (1848). His publications established him as part of the literary fabric of Louisiana, yet there was a strong political undertone to his writings.</p>