The Story
The Kentucky Tragedy, as it actually happened
1787–1821
Sharp’s rise
Solomon Porcius Sharp climbs from frontier obscurity to become one of Kentucky’s most formidable politicians — U.S. congressman by his mid-twenties, then attorney general of the Commonwealth, a leading light of the New Court relief faction.
c. 1806
The Cookes decline
The once-prosperous Cooke family arrives in Kentucky from Virginia and slides toward genteel poverty. Anna Cooke — literate, proud, unmarried — grows up on the fringes of Frankfort society, immersed in the sentimental and Gothic fiction of the day.
1820
The stillborn child
Anna, unmarried and nearing forty, delivers a stillborn child and names Solomon Sharp as the father. Sharp denies the charge. The scandal is whispered through the town — and never quite dies.
1821
Beauchamp smitten
Jereboam Orville Beauchamp, a law student sixteen years Anna’s junior and steeped in Byron and the Romantic cult of honor, begins courting her. By his later account, she sets one condition on marriage: Sharp’s death.
June 1824
The marriage
Anna and Jereboam wed and settle on a farm near Bloomfield. The grievance against Sharp — seducer in their telling — hardens into an obsession the couple nurse together.
Autumn 1825
The handbill
Sharp resigns as attorney general to run for the state House amid Kentucky’s ferocious Old Court–New Court struggle. During the vicious campaign, a handbill revives the old scandal — now with the incendiary claim that Anna’s child had been fathered by a family slave. The Beauchamps believe Sharp himself is the source.
Nov. 7, 1825
The murder
Two days before the legislature convenes, in the dark hours of the morning, Beauchamp knocks at Sharp’s Frankfort door, calls him by name, and drives a dagger into his chest. Sharp dies within minutes; the assassin slips away.
Nov. 1825
The arrest
Suspicion falls on Beauchamp almost immediately. Four days after the murder he is arrested at his home in Simpson County and returned to Frankfort, protesting his innocence.
May 1826
The trial
In a courtroom saturated with partisan politics, the Commonwealth builds a web of circumstantial evidence and turncoat testimony. After a thirteen-day trial, the jury needs barely an hour: guilty. Beauchamp is sentenced to hang.
June 1826
The Confession
Anna joins her husband in his basement cell. Together they compose his Confession — a self-justifying narrative of seduction avenged, borrowed from the plots of the Romantic fiction they both adored, and aimed squarely at posterity.
July 7, 1826
The tragedy
After a failed laudanum attempt days earlier, the couple stab themselves in the cell. Anna dies of her wound; Jereboam, weakened and bleeding, is carted to the gallows and hanged before a crowd of thousands — Kentucky’s first legal execution.
1826 and after
The myth
The Confession and Anna’s letters are published and devoured. Dozens of novels and plays follow — Poe’s Politian and Simms’s Beauchampe among them — fixing the Beauchamps’ invented romance in American memory for nearly two centuries.
