Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

3-1977

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Richard B. Davis

Committee Members

Nathalia Wright, Allen Carrol, John Osborne

Abstract

On November 7, 1825, in Frankfort, Kentucky, Colonel Solomon P. Sharp, a distinguished Kentucky statesman, was murdered by Jereboam O. Beauchamp, who was hanged for Sharp's murder on July 7, 1826, a few hours after he had stabbed himself in the abdomen and had witnessed the suicide of his wife Ann. This event - the celebrated case in which a young Kentucky gentleman, to fulfill a vow of revenge imposed upon him by his wife as a condition of their marriage, assassinated the man who had been his wife's lover years before - became known internationally as the Kentucky Tragedy for over a century and a half has appeared as a major theme in American literature.

Occurring at a time when American authors were searching for events from their national history for treatment and at a time when Americans were eager for stories of chivalry and romance, the Kentucky Tragedy developed into one of the most popular literary themes in the nineteenth century. Among the important reasons for the popularity of the Tragedy in literature is that it was a factual account that satisfied and fulfilled the curiosity and expectations of Americans about the violent character of frontier life in the Southwest of the early 1800's. Although violence has always been common in America, the South has always seemed to many the very embodiment of that violence. As Charles R. Anderson, in "Violence and Order in the Novels of Robert Penn Warren," Hopkins Review, 6 (Winter 1953), 88-105, points out, "the witch-burning of New England, the bandit of the Wild West, the underworld of Chicago, all . . . fade before the succession of Southern images of violence that fascinate the popular mind: the lash of the slave-driver, the Bowie knife of the old Southwest, the dueling pistol of the hot-headed gentleman, the rebel yell of the fire-eater, the gasoline torch of the lyncher, the fiery cross of the Klansman." The "popular mind," fascinated with stories of the violence of the South, could not have been more satisfied than with the story of the Kentucky Tragedy, an incident fraught with murder, suicide, and hanging.

A wealth of incidents in frontier life, especially incidents of lawlessness and crime, appealed to the American public and provided American authors with native themes, J. B. Hubbell, in South and Southwest: Literary Essays and Reminiscences (Durham: Duke University Press, 1965), p. 277, quotes one southern historian who suggests that "what is distinctive in American, in contrast to general English literature, come out of our experience with the frontier." Of all the stories of the frontier the Kentucky Tragedy became the most popular. In fact, Professor Richard Beale Davis has pointed out, in "Thomas Holley Chivers and the Kentucky Tragedy," University of Texas Studies in Literature and Language, I, No. 2 (Summer 1959), 281-288, that the "Kentucky Tragedy stands as one of the three great historical events, matters, or themes which American writers have drawn upon in creating fiction, poetry, and drama. Only Pocahontas and Merry Mount rival it."

Since its occurrence in 1825 and 1826, the Kentucky Tragedy has been discussed by many Kentucky historians, and many theses have been written which deal with the Tragedy as a major theme in American literature. The facts as reported by some historians, however, have too often been biased, misleading, and erroneous, creating a distorted, confused picture of what actually happened and why. The earlier studies which have examined the use authors have made of the event are usually sketchy in the background information related to the case itself and have been necessarily limited in their appraisal of the literature based on the Tragedy.

This study, therefore, attempts to present an accurate, chronological history of the Kentucky Tragedy - taking into consideration the economic and political climate of the times - relying often on court and county records to verify or disprove information that has long been regarded as factual. Moreover, four works are examined which have often been used by writers as source material for their works based on the Tragedy to determine how reliable these works are as factual sources.

Finally, an examination of all extant works based on the Beauchamp-Sharp case by American authors is undertaken to determine how the Tragedy has been presented in fiction and nonfiction and to demonstrate the ubiquity of the story as a major theme in American literature from its first appearance as a play by an anonymous author in 1833 to Robert Penn Warren's novel World Enough and Time in 1950.

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