Jereboam O. Beauchamp

Jereboam O. Beauchamp

Jereboam Orville Beauchamp ( /dʒɛrəˈboʊ.əm ˈɔrvɪl ˈbiːtʃəm/; September 6, 1802 – July 7, 1826) was an American lawyer who murdered the Kentucky legislator Solomon P. Sharp; the crime is known as the Beauchamp–Sharp Tragedy. In 1821, Sharp had been accused of fathering the illegitimate stillborn child of a woman named Anna Cooke. Sharp denied paternity of the child, and public opinion favored him. In 1824, Beauchamp married Cooke. During Sharp's 1825 campaign for a seat in the Kentucky House of Representatives, Cooke's alleged illegitimate child was raised as an issue. His political opponents publicized his alleged defense that he could not have been the child's father because the child was mulatto, fathered by a slave. Whether Sharp said this has never been determined with certainty; believing it so, Beauchamp swore to avenge his wife's honor. In the early morning of November 7, 1825, Beauchamp tricked Sharp into answering the door at his home in Frankfort, and fatally stabbed him.

Beauchamp was convicted of the murder and sentenced to hang. The morning of the execution, he and his wife attempted a double suicide by stabbing themselves with a knife she had smuggled into prison. She was successful; he was not. Beauchamp was rushed to the gallows before he could bleed to death and was hanged on July 7, 1826. The bodies of Jereboam and Anna Beauchamp were arranged in an embrace and buried in a single coffin, as they had requested. The Beauchamp–Sharp Tragedy inspired fictional works such as Edgar Allan Poe's unfinished Politian and Robert Penn Warren's World Enough and Time.