| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Kentucky Tragedy: A Story of Conflict and Change in Antebellum America. By Dickson D. Bruce Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. xii, 183 pp. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-3173-2.)

In November 1825, following a fiercely contested election, one of Kentucky's leading politicians, Solomon P. Sharp, was fatally stabbed in the doorway of his own home. After much political maneuvering and suborning of perjury on all sides, a young lawyer named Jereboam Beauchamp was tried, convicted, and hanged for the crime. Although some reviled the murder as a calculated political assassination, the posthumously published Confession of Jereboam O. Beauchamp (1826) claimed a far more honorable motive: he had acted to avenge Sharp's seduction, many years earlier, of Beauchamp's future wife. As if to punctuate that point, Ann Cooke Beauchamp, who had allegedly instigated the murder, committed suicide on the morning of her husband's execution. Deliciously blending political and sexual intrigue, "the Kentucky tragedy" (as the case came to be called) was widely reported in America's popular press and inspired a myriad of fictionalized retellings over the next several decades.

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