Michel Ney - Possible Escape

Possible Escape

Immediately following Ney's execution, rumors concerning the nature of the Marshal's execution and its immediate aftermath began to surface. Among the facts that were presented by the Bourbon government to the public, such as those detailed in Parisian and Coalition military newspapers, several were purposely vague and unclear. Today there are still aspects of what is known about the execution that remain impossible to prove or disprove.

It is common among Napoleonic scholars and period experts to entertain a scenario where Marshal Ney had managed to escape to the United States. Proponents of this theory argue that Ney had Masonic ties, including to the Duke of Wellington, who helped him fake his execution and flee abroad. According to this account, the soldiers in the firing squad put blood packets over his heart and then shot blanks at the Marshal. He was then smuggled to the United States and continued his life as a school teacher.

In January 1816, a man calling himself Peter Stuart Ney arrived in the United States by way of Charleston, South Carolina and disappears from record. In 1821, Ney resurfaces as a school master in Brownsville, South Carolina before relocating to Mocksville, NC. Between 1822 and 1828, Ney would hold semi-permanent teaching positions in several Carolina communities, including Hillsborough, Salisbury and Third Creek. He eventually made his way north into Virginia, spending some time there as the school master of Abbeyville in Mecklenburg County, but Ney would ultimately return to the Mocksville-Third Creek area.

Peter Stewart Ney died November 15, 1846 in Mocksville, North Carolina, aged 77-years, reportedly after uttering the final words, "Bessières is dead; the Old Guard is dead; now, please, let me die." On his gravestone in Cleveland, North Carolina, at Third Creek Presbyterian Church on Third Creek Church Road, one will find the words "A native of France and soldier of the French Revolution under Napoleon Bonaparte".

The grave was exhumed in 1887 and a plaster cast made of the skull by a local doctor, though it was subsequently lost. In 1936, a letter sent to TIME magazine from a Charles W. Allison from Charlotte, North Carolina, claimed that the skull had been found in the doctor's family attic by his daughter. This skull, he reported, "shows evidence of having been scarred by bullets and swords".

In contrast to the relative plausibility of P.S. Ney's story, an early 19th-century folk-tale alleged that Michael Rudolph, a Continental Army officer in the American Revolutionary War, had made his way to France after his forced resignation in 1793 and eventually becoming Ney.