Empire's Eagles

February 1, 2021
Historical excavation of the members of Napoleon's inner circle who fled to America following the collapse of his regime. Former attorney and U.S. diplomat Crocker takes up the story in 1815, shortly after Waterloo. Fleeing the victorious British and Prussian armies, Napoleon reached the vicinity of Bordeaux. There, with the help of Consul William Lee, he hoped to escape to America, where he "envisioned a new, private life." Ultimately, he decided to surrender to the British, but many of his officers and other associates sailed to the U.S. Several members of that group, including Napoleon's brother Joseph, settled near Philadelphia. Crocker describes their careers and the fates of some of their longer-range projects: A wine- and olive-growing community in Alabama failed due to inhospitable climate, as did an attempt to colonize a stretch of Texas. A proposal to install Joseph as king of one of the Spanish colonies, possibly Mexico, drew strong opposition because it "would have upset the delicate relations between the United States and Spain and would have had profound reverberations in England and France as well." In the final chapters, Crocker looks at the career of P.S. Ney, a North Carolina schoolteacher who was believed by many who met him to be Marshal Ney, one of Napoleon's generals. The author arrays the evidence for and against the supposition, mainly in the form of reminiscences of Ney's former students 40 to 50 years afterward. The key issues are whether Marshal Ney's execution in France could have been faked; whether the descriptions of the two men are different enough that they could not be the same person; and whether there is any record of P.S. Ney's independent existence prior to his appearance in America. Crocker leans toward the conclusion that the two are different, but he concedes that there remains room for doubt. A lively, well-written exploration of a little-known chapter of American history peopled with fascinating characters.

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