Imposter: The Strange Case of the Life and Afterlife of Michel Ney, Field Marshal of France, and Peter Stuart Ney, Schoolmaster of the Carolinas

I. The Second Grave (and How He Got There)

Whoever he is, he lies in a graveyard behind an unimposing brick church, the Third Creek Presbyterian in rural Cleveland, North Carolina, an hour or so northeast of Charlotte. It’s a country of woods and farms, narrow blacktop roads that wind across creek valleys and then open into flat straightaways, like the two-lane road that runs along the border of the graveyard.

The wafer-thin headstone under which he is buried is capped by a sharp triangular crown, not the scalloped curve of the others nearby. This is significant, some claim—an architectural clue that marks the grave as different from those around it, a coded sign that the man who lies beneath it is much more than he seems. A small tattered French tri-color flag is planted in the ground near the grave. And to protect the grave from vandals, a brick and glass enclosure has been built over it. These days it is weather-worn, a bit shabby, as if no one has been here to tend it for a long while.

You can peer inside and read the caption, and if the glare is too harsh or the lettering on the stone too faint from the erosion of the last hundred and sixty-odd years, a plaque spells it out for you:

In memory of Peter Stuart Ney, a native of France and soldier of the French Revolution under Napoleon Bonaparte, who departed this life November 15, 1846, aged 77 years.

On his deathbed, his host and doctor asked the only question that mattered to those who had known him for many of the thirty-some years he had spent among them: Who are you really?

Peter Stuart Ney, forty-seven years old, showed up in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1816, a few months after another Ney, Marshal Michel Ney, was executed by firing squad in Paris.

We’ll get to that.

For three years Peter Ney lived in obscurity somewhere in the hinterlands of the Carolinas—though one tradition has him holed up in the country around Reading, Pennsylvania—and then around 1819 he arrived at Cheraw, South Carolina, a hundred miles inland from Charleston. There he befriended a local cotton planter named Colonel Benjamin Rogers, who offered him lodging at his plantation and apparently Peter Ney’s first position as schoolmaster. The profession earned him only about twenty dollars per month, plus room and board. Yet he always seemed to have plenty of money and to spread it around generously to his friends and pupils.

Ney became an itinerant schoolmaster, moving among communities in the cluster of counties northeast of Charlotte, living and socializing in small towns such as Mocksville, Statesville, Davidson, and Salisbury (Andrew Jackson’s old stomping ground). Some contemporaries reported that he spoke with a foreign accent—French, perhaps, accented by German. Oddly, a few others reported that his accent was Scottish (yes, we’ll get to that too).

Peter Ney was a large man for his time—five feet ten inches tall or so, heavily muscled in the shoulders, with a shock of red hair. He was famous for his horsemanship and ability with a sword. One anecdote has him inspecting the local militia and borrowing a sword from the commander. A good sword should be flexible enough to bend in two, he pronounces, bending the blade until it snaps. The outraged officer challenges him to a duel, and Ney, quick to anger, replies that if he can find a willow switch he will fight the officer and teach him some manners. And the officer, of course, slinks off, cowed by the great man’s commanding confidence.

On another occasion in Mocksville, goaded by his pupils, Ney does indeed take on a visiting—and much younger—French fencing master. He wields the sword expertly, dances gleeful rings around his opponent, really enjoys the bout, finally touches him on the cheek with the flat of his blade...