Charles Gayarré

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Charles Gayarré
Secretary of State of Louisiana
In office
1845–1853
GovernorAlexandre Mouton
Isaac Johnson
Joseph M. Walker
Preceded byZenon Ledoux
Succeeded byAndrew Herron
Member of the Louisiana House of Representatives
In office
1856–1857
In office
1844–1846
In office
1830–1831
Personal details
Born(1805-01-09)January 9, 1805
New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.
DiedFebruary 11, 1895(1895-02-11) (aged 90)
New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.
Political partyJacksonian (1834–1844)
Democratic (1844–1895)
SpouseSarah Sullivan
EducationCollege d'Orléans
Signature

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. He was a Confederate sympathizer and white supremacist.[1][2]

Within his authorship of plays, essays, and novels, Gayarré wrote histories of Louisiana and an exposé of U.S. Army general James Wilkinson as a Spanish spy.[3]

Family life

The grandson of

slave revolt when Charles was a boy. After studying at the College d'Orléans Gayarré began in 1826 legal studies in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
.

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.[4] His only child was the son of Delphine Le Maitre, a slave in his household when Gayarré was twenty-one years old. The child was also named Charles Gayarré and was baptized in the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans.[5]

Career

In 1825, Gayarré published a pamphlet criticizing changes that Edward Livingston proposed in the Louisiana Criminal Code, particularly with respect to capital punishment (the fate of nearly 100 recaptured slaves during the 1811 German Coast revolt when he was a child).[3] He then traveled to Philadelphia for his legal studies, and was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar in 1829.

In 1830, upon returning to New Orleans, Gayarré was elected a member of the

Jackson Democrat to the United States Senate. However, he resigned, citing health reasons, before taking his seat. For the next eight years, Gayarré traveled in Europe and collected historical material from France and Spain.[6]
Some of the historical documents that he used were written by his ancestor, Esteban de Gayarré.

In 1844–1845 and in 1856–1857, he again served as a Democratic Party member of the state House of Representatives, and, from 1845 to 1853, was the appointed Secretary of State of Louisiana.[6] In 1853, he failed to win election to the U.S. Congress as an Independent, but he remained active in Louisiana politics as an ally of John Slidell in the "Regular Democratic" movement.

Gayarré became a member of the Louisiana Know Nothing Party from 1853 to 1855. He joined the party despite him being Catholic, and left the party because they were anti-Catholic.[7]

In 1854, following extensive research of the Spanish government archives in Madrid, Gayarré exposed U.S. Army general James Wilkinson as having been "Agent 13", a highly paid spy in the service of the Spanish Empire from 1787 until his death in 1825.

Gayarre lost his fortune of $400,000[8] by supporting the Confederacy during the Civil War.[citation needed] In 1863 Gayarré proposed that slaves be emancipated and armed, provided that France and England recognized the Confederacy (no foreign country recognized it).

After the war, Gayarré published his three-volume History of Louisiana (with an introduction by George Bancroft) and a biography of Philip II of Spain, but was never elected to any office. He became a reporter of decisions for the Louisiana Supreme Court, but he lived chiefly by his pen. He had a long-standing association with the Louisiana Historical Society, of which he was the unpaid President from 1860 to 1888,[9] thus working with former Confederate President Jefferson Davis after his release from federal custody.

Gayarré 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 volumes, 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, including Fernando de Lemos (1872).[6]

Death and legacy

Gayarre died in New Orleans on February 11, 1895, survived by his widow, and is buried at St. Louis Cemetery in New Orleans.

Works

In French:

  • Histoire de la Louisiane (1846)

In English:

References

  1. ISBN 978-0-8018-9878-5
    . Retrieved 18 January 2023.
  2. ISBN 978-0-375-75455-5
    . Retrieved 18 January 2023.
  3. ^
    Appleton's Cyclopedia
    vol.III p.619
  4. ^ 1860 U.S. Federal Census, slave schedules for St. Helena, Louisiana show Charles Gayarre as owning six slaves, and the same census results for New Orleans Ward 5 show him owning seven slaves, of whom five were children.
  5. ^ Phillips, V. Faye (22 December 2010). "Charles Gayarré". 64 Parishes. Retrieved 24 January 2023.
  6. ^ a b c  One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Gayarré, Charles Étienne Arthur". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 11 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 542.
  7. ^ Niehaus, Earl F. (1965). The Irish in New Orleans:1800-1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. pp. 86–89.
  8. ^ Bush, Robert (Fall 1974). "Charles Gayarre and Grace King: Letters of a Louisiana Friendship". Southern Literary Journal. 7 (1). Retrieved March 22, 2018.
  9. ^ "» LHS Presidents Louisiana Historical Society". louisianahistricalsociety.org. Retrieved Mar 16, 2023.

Further reading

  • Klugewicz, Stephen M. "'Unfit for the Age': Charles Gayarré, the Conservative as Satirist", The Imaginative Conservative, 2013.
  • Lang, Herbert H. "Charles Gayarre and the Philosophy of Progress," Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Vol. 3, No. 3, Summer, 1962.
  • Phillips, Faye. "To 'Build upon the Foundation': Charles Gayarré's Vision for the Louisiana State Library," Libraries & the Cultural Record, Volume 43, Number 1, 2008.
  • Phillips, Faye. "Writing Louisiana Colonial History in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Charles Gayarré, Benjamin Franklin French, and the Louisiana Historical Society," Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Vol. 49, No. 2, Spring, 2008.

External links

Political offices
Preceded by Secretary of State of Louisiana
1845–1853 		Succeeded by
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