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. Within his authorship of plays, essays, and novels, Gayarré wrote histories of Louisiana and an exposé of US Army general James Wilkinson as a Spanish spy. Family life 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. 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. 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. 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). 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 Louisiana House of Representatives, and the leadership asked him to draft an address complimenting the French legislators during the Revolution of 1830. In 1831, after admission to the Louisiana bar, Gayarré became his state's Deputy Attorney General. In 1833 he became presiding judge of the city court of New Orleans. In 1834 he was elected as a Jackson Democrat to the United States Senate. However, he resigned citing health