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The Kentucky Tragedy represents one of the best-known and most complicated episodes in antebellum American history. Inspiring literary works by such authors as Edgar Allan Poe, William Gilmore Simms, Julia Ward Howe, and, later, Robert Perm Warren, it involved the 1825 murder of Colonel Solomon Sharp, one of Kentucky's most prominent politicians, by Jereboam Beauchamp, a young lawyer. Expertly analyzed by such historians as J. Winston Coleman, J. W. Cooke, and David Brion Davis, the episode has been used to explore significant issues in the social life and culture of the early republic. As historians have often noted, however, the crime was also connected to important political conflicts and divisions in Kentucky at the time. A closer examination of those connections can do much to illuminate important questions about political transformations and changes during the period, questions with implications going beyond the immediate setting in which the crime occurred.1
The events leading to the Kentucky Tragedy began in 1821, when Sharp, running for political office, was accused of having, about two years before, seduced Ann (or "Anna") Cooke, who subsequently gave birth to a still-born baby. Shortly thereafter, she began a relationship with Beauchamp, a young man sixteen years her junior-he was eighteen; she, thirty-four. The two were married in 1824. On 7 November 1825, at about two in the morning, Beauchamp went to Sharp's home and stabbed Sharp to death. Beauchamp was arrested a few days later and, after a lengthy delay, put on trial for murder. Protesting his innocence, he was, nevertheless, convicted, and, on 26 May 1826, sentenced to die. He confessed shortly thereafter.
As Beauchamp's execution approached, his wife Ann remained constant, even deciding to join him in his cell. There, the two formulated a suicide pact. During the night before the scheduled execution, they took laudanum. However, the drug failed to work and the following morning, they stabbed themselves, each imposing a self-inflicted wound. Ann Beauchamp's proved fatal; Jereboam's did not. Shortly after noon on 7 July 1826, after being attended by physicians, he was taken from his cell in great pain and hanged. As the Beauchamps had wished, they were buried in each other's arms in a single grave.
In many ways, as historians have suggested, the Kentucky Tragedy...