Excerpt from Address of Charles Gayarre, to the People of the State, on the Late Frauds Perpetrated at the Election: Held on the 7th November, 1853, in the City of New Orleans

When it was announced that Mr. Dunbar was the nominee of the Convention, a few individuals remembered that he had come to New Orleans some twenty years ago, and had plodded so obscurely at the bar that he had found it to his interest to remove to the Parish of Rapides, as a smaller theatre where his aspirations would be less obstructed by competition. I have an indistinct recollec tion that, from that remote section of the State, he was, once or twice, sent to the Legislature, then sitting in New Orleans but the part which he acted in that body failed to awaken public atten tion, and it would require very active researches to discover, within the breadth and length of the first Congressional District, one solitary individual who could say, that to him the legislator had not remained as unknown as the lawyer. Such was the compass of the distinction acquired by Mr. Dunbar, when, on the 9th of July, 1852, he was appointed to fill a. Vacancy which had occurred on the Supreme Bench of the State by the death of Judge Preston of the Parish of Jefferson. The court was then composed of four members, and the three other incumbents were Judge Eustis and Judge Slidell of New Orleans, and Judge Rest of the Parish of St. Charles. Thus all these Judges were from New Orleans, or from its immediate vicinity. N 0 one who is acquainted with the power of sectional feelings and with the intensity of that jealousy which is said to exist between the lower and upper parishes of the State, will, for a single moment, suppose that Governor Walker, of the Parish of Rapides in the Red River District, could have selected the fourth judge again from the same favored territorial circumscription. It was evident that there was some other portion of the State entitled to be represented on the Bench, and Governor Walker acted with propriety, when in the person of Mr. Dunbar, he, on the 9th of July, 1852, selected, as the successor of Judge Preston, an individual who was looked upon as a denizen of the Parish of Rapides.

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