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 family in New Orleans, Louisiana.

He also wrote histories of Louisiana and penned an exposé of U.S. Army general James Wilkinson, whom he outed as a Spanish spy in 1854.

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.

[5] 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).

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.

[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.

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.