James Mathewes Legare (26 November 1823-30 May 1859), poet inventor, painter, and fiction writer, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and died and is buried in Aiken in the same state. Eldest of three children of the agricultural editor John D. Legare and his wife, the former Mary Doughty Mathews, James graduated from the College of Charleston in 1842, then benefited from an extra year's schooling at Saint Mary's College in Baltimore, Maryland. While there, Legare found time to fabricate an elaborate spoof on his ancestral line in the form of a "genealogy" which he buried in an iron casket in a Charleston garden. When unearthed later, it caused a sufficient stir in the newspapers as far away as Boston as to suggest that the hoax may have influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe when she tagged her low-born villain in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) with the aristocratic Carolina surname, pronounced "luh-gree."

Legare's...