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Murder and Madness
 Topics in Kentucky History
James C. Klotter, Series Editor

Editorial Advisory Board

Thomas H. Appleton Jr., Eastern Kentucky University
James Duane Bolin, Murray State University
Tracy Campbell, University of Kentucky
Carol Crowe-Carraco, Western Kentucky University
Craig Friend, North Carolina State University
Elizabeth Perkins, Centre College
Christopher Phillips, University of Cincinnati
Christopher Waldrep, San Francisco State University
Mark Wetherington, Filson Historical Society
Margaret Ripley Wolfe, East Tennessee State University
George Wright, Prairie View A&M
Murder
&
Madness
The My th
of the
Kentucky Tragedy

Matthew G. Schoenbachler

The University Press of Kentucky

Copyright © 2009 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky,
Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College,
Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University,
Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University,
University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.
All rights reserved.

Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008
www.kentuckypress.com

13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schoenbachler, Matthew G., 1967–

Murder and madness : the myth of the Kentucky tragedy / Matthew G.
Schoenbachler.
p. cm. — (Topics in Kentucky history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8131-2566-4 (hbk. : alk. paper)
1. Murder—Kentucky—Case studies. 2. Sharp, Solomon P., 1780–1825.
3. Beauchamp, Jereboam O., 1802–1826. 4. Beauchamp, Ann, 1786–1826.
5. Kentucky—Civilization—19th century. I. Title.
HV6533.K4S36 2009
364.152’3092—dc22 2009031487

This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting

the requirements of the American National Standard
for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Member of the Association of

American University Presses
For Dana, Adam, Benjamin, and Sarah
   . . . He knew
How to make madness beautiful, and cast
O’er erring deeds and thoughts, a heavenly hue
Of words, like sunbeams, dazzling as they past
The eyes, which o’er them shed tears feelingly and fast.
—Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,
canto 3, stanza 77
 Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. The Architect of His Own Fortunes:
Solomon Porcius Sharp 13
2. The Diminutive Fury: Anna Cooke 43
3. Romance and Delusion: Jereboam Beauchamp 71
4. Politics 101
5. Murder 125
6. The Politics of Murder 137
7. The Trial 157
8. Prison and Execution 175
9. Memory and the Invention of a Tragedy 209
10. The Kentucky Tragedy 233
Coda 283
Notes 287
Index 361

Illustrations follow page 156

 Acknowledgments
Years ago I told Nancy Flachskam, the director of interlibrary loans at Ken-
tucky Wesleyan College, that she would be the first I would thank when my
book was published. It isn’t much, but it’s the least I can do for someone who
hunted down hundreds of books, articles, reels of microfilm, sheets of micro-
fiche, and other assorted and obsolete microprints. Her counterpart at the
University of North Alabama, Sue Nazworth, has likewise been of invaluable
assistance. My research assistants, Estill Frodge, Erica Hines, and Beth Keis-
ter, dutifully if not always cheerfully read bleached-out microfilm, tracked
down citations, tabulated information from tax lists, and performed other
assorted and mundane tasks. I honestly appreciate their diligence and pray
they now are not completely disenchanted with historical research. The assis-
tance of Ken Williams of the Kentucky Historical Society was above the call
of duty. Nancy Baird and Jonathan D. Jeffrey at Western Kentucky Univer-
sity were immensely helpful and immensely gracious as well, as were Gayla
Coates and Dorothy Steers at the Simpson County Archives. Jane Minder
and Jim Prichard at the Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives,
both of whom I befriended years ago as an intern there, likewise consider-
ably facilitated my research. The staffs at the Kentucky Historical Society,
the Filson Historical Society, and the Library of Congress—especially Bruce
Kirby—were as patient as they were helpful. I especially appreciate the help
and friendship of B. J. Gooch of Transylvania University’s Special Collec-
tions. I am grateful to Kentucky Wesleyan College, which provided research
assistance despite its own limited resources, and to the University of North
Alabama for a number of research grants at timely junctures.
As well, I thank those who have unselfishly shared their expertise with
a complete stranger: Peter X. Accardo, Catherine Claire Geoghegan, Rodney
Hessinger, Sylvia D. Hoffert, and James O. Horton. The people at the Uni-
versity Press of Kentucky—Anne Dean Watkins, Jim Klotter, and Stephen
Wrinn—have been a joy to work with, while Anna Laura Bennett’s meticu-

xi
 xii   Acknowledgments

lous reading improved the manuscript immensely. Thanks also to those who
aided my fruitless search to track down the Matthew Jouett portraits of Solo-
mon and Leander Sharp: Julie Thies of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville;
former educators at the Holland Hall Preparatory School in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
Bettye Jewell, Mary Yeakey, Eleanor Carmack, and Nelda Lane, all of whom
must have made the establishment a special place to learn; and, finally, Sharp
family descendants Mary Grace Harvey, Eliza Dennis, and Sean Arnold.
Over the years Craig Thompson Friend—through his friendship, his
scholarship, and his unselfish advice and patience—has taught me more than
he realizes. Lorri Glover, without whose companionship and spirit I don’t
think I would have ever made it through graduate school, is a continuing
inspiration. This book would not have existed without Larry Nelson, who
opened my eyes to the wonders of the past, and Theda Perdue, who expended
a tremendous amount of energy trying to turn me into a decent historian.
The late Lance Banning introduced me to the landscape of early America
and, by his intellectual rigor and integrity, provided an unparalleled example
of a conscientious scholar.
“Whiles I spend almost all the day abroad amongst others, and the resi-
due at home among mine own,” Thomas More wrote in his Utopia, “I leave to
myself, I mean to my book, no time. For when I come home, I must common
with my wife, chat with my children, and talk with my servants. All the which
things I reckon and account among business, for as much as they must of
necessity be done, and done must they needs be unless a man will be stranger
in his own house.” Alas, I have no servants, nor have I ever thought of time
spent with my family as a “necessity” or as “business,” but I do catch More’s
drift. My desire not to become a stranger in my own house has postponed
the publication of this work considerably, and I am proud of that. To Dana,
Sarah, Benjamin, and Adam, I dedicate this book.
 Introduction
This is not an ordinary case, when its history shall be known. And have
not all its features marked it extraordinary, as the deed was horrid and
unparalleled?
—Jereboam O. Beauchamp to Governor Joseph Desha, June 5, 1826

The Governor heard the whole of it without uttering a word; and after
it was closed, merely observed, that he wished he could know the whole
truth in relation to the murder and its cause.
—Frankfort (KY) Argus of Western America, July 12, 1826

November 6, 1825, outside Frankfort, Kentucky. It had been weeks since the
last rain, and the woods burned along the road to Frankfort. In the still air
of the late afternoon, the smoke hung thick, and it stung the young man’s
eyes and made his head throb. To ease the pain, he tied around his fore-
head a dampened handkerchief, worn so low he had to raise his head to see
in front of him. Perhaps he thought it would hide his features; perhaps in
his youthful conceit he imagined it made him resemble the intrepid French
mariners of whom he had read. His name was Jereboam Orville Beauchamp,
and he was on his way to see Solomon Porcius Sharp, the former congress-
man and state attorney general. Sharp, the heir apparent to the leadership of
his party, had just been elected to his sixth term as a Kentucky representative,
and it was widely assumed he would be chosen speaker of the house the next
morning.1
But Sharp did not live so long, for Jereboam Beauchamp called him
from his bed that night and stabbed him to death. Although the young
man escaped the scene, he was soon apprehended and his trial scheduled
six months from then. In the meantime, a political firestorm broke out, as
Sharp’s allies claimed the murder was in fact a political assassination and
that Beauchamp had not acted alone. During the two-week trial held in May


    Murder and Madness

1826, Beauchamp’s lawyers maintained his innocence and may well have
even won acquittal had their client not foolishly attempted to suborn a wit-
ness. Found guilty, the twenty-three-year-old Beauchamp was sentenced to
hang six weeks later. While he was awaiting execution, his wife and cocon-
spirator, Anna Cooke Beauchamp, joined him in his dungeon where they
composed a confession, which not only admitted that Jereboam had killed
Solomon Sharp but claimed he had done so because Sharp had seduced and
abandoned Anna years earlier. Shortly before Jereboam’s execution, he and
Anna stabbed themselves. Her suicide attempt succeeded; his did not, and
the dying man lived long enough to be taken to the gallows and hanged. Jere-
boam and Anna were buried together in a single coffin, over which a tomb-
stone inscription tells a sentimental story of seduction, honor, and revenge.
This is what was almost instantly labeled the “Kentucky Tragedy”—the
phrase was first used within weeks of the deaths of the Beauchamps—and the
bizarre, sordid, and titillating episode would inspire generations of novels and
plays and a handful of short histories. Yet of all of the writing prompted by the
incident—fiction and nonfiction alike—no one has improved on Robert Penn
Warren’s characterization nearly sixty years ago: It was “so confused and comic
and pretentious and sad, and it seems very strange to us.” Warren mused,

After the pride, passion, agony, and bemused aspiration, what is left
is in our hands. Here are the scraps of newspaper, more than a cen-
tury old, splotched and yellowed and huddled together in a library,
like November leaves abandoned by the wind, damp and leached
out, back of the stables or in a fence corner of a vacant lot. Here
are the diaries, the documents, and the letters, yellow too, bound
in neat bundles with tape so stiffened and tired that it parts almost
unresisting at your touch. Here are the records of what happened
in that courtroom, all the words taken down. Here is the manu-
script he himself wrote, day after day, as he waited in his cell, tell-
ing his story. . . . We have what is left, the lies and half-lies and the
truths and half-truths. We do not know that we have the Truth. But
we must have it. Puzzling over what is left, we are like the scientist
fumbling with a tooth and thigh bone to reconstruct for a museum
some great, stupid beast extinct with the ice age.2

So what, after all, is left? Certainly a compelling narrative. As plotlines go, the
story has it all: violence, death, sex—even drugs. And so the first and most
 Introduction   

elemental aim of this study is a plausible reconstruction of what happened,

an aspiration that seemed far easier at the outset of the project than it ever did
again. Basic questions of when and where and who did what (to say nothing of
why) often became maddeningly difficult to answer. And although some very
good work has been done on the Kentucky Tragedy, one is struck by the sheer
amount of imprecision and outright falsehood that has stubbornly clung to
the episode; Warren, like most others who have engaged the story, was struck
by the hurricane of “lies and half-lies and the truths and half-truths.” The pri-
mary source material is hopelessly contradictory, for the murder and the trial
became utterly politicized in the hothouse of Kentucky’s so-called relief war
of the early and mid-1820s. Like the viewer of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon,
we are forced, finally, to recognize that a definitive account is doomed to
failure. As certainty recedes, the temptation is to declare that the truth is that
there is no truth. But whether due to a lack of postmodern sophistication or a
lack of patience with such an intellectual cop-out, we must try to get as close
as possible to plausible reconstruction. As Warren understood, “We do not
know that we have the Truth. But we must have it.” No matter how refined
our theoretical assumptions, no matter how loathe we may be to admit it, the
impulse, the instinct, remains, What happened?3
Most of what we do know about the Kentucky Tragedy comes from three
remarkable documents: the published proceedings of Beauchamp’s murder
trial, Beauchamp’s confession, and a vindication of Solomon Sharp written
by his devoted brother, Dr. Leander Sharp. The transcripts of the trial—one
version printed in Amos Kendall’s Argus of Western America, the other pub-
lished in pamphlet form shortly after the verdict was returned—substantially
agree with one another and provide exceptional and credible information
on the crime and its aftermath. But the other two sources—The Confession
of Jereboam O. Beauchamp and Vindication of the Character of the Late Col.
Solomon P. Sharp—are far more problematic. The Confession, a story writ-
ten in a Frankfort dungeon as Beauchamp awaited execution, is easily the
more famous of the two and was republished as recently as 1966. It is the
wellspring of the myth of the Kentucky Tragedy, primarily because it hews
so closely to the dominant literary trends of the romantic era and continues
to appeal to our desire for the sensational. The Vindication, conversely, pres-
ents a painstaking defense of Sharp’s life and character that contests almost
every assertion the Beauchamps made. The pamphlet, although published by
Amos Kendall in 1827, was never distributed, and knowledge of its very exis-
tence was long lost when, in 1877, twenty-five copies fell out of a partition
    Murder and Madness

during the remodeling of the Sharp mansion, long after the Confession had
dictated the memory of the episode.4
Commentators and scholars have often regarded the Vindication and
the Confession as equally valid—or perhaps equally flawed—sources. Far too
many, trying to reconcile the two discrepant accounts, have fallen back on a
“he said; she said” explanation; as one historian opines, “Obviously, neither
the Confession nor the Vindication can be taken at face value.” Yet this truism
of all historical research—that no document is completely reliable—does not
suggest that all sources are equally dependable. And in the case of the Ken-
tucky Tragedy, we have one document that is essentially a gambit to avoid
death written by two people possessed of a near pathological habit of decep-
tion, and another document that, although certainly not impartial and writ-
ten in a red haze of contempt and grief, amasses hundreds of depositions and
sworn statements, many of which were, as the incident’s first serious histo-
rian pointed out, attested to by “prominent citizens and reliable witnesses,
who would not and, indeed, could not afford to perjure themselves by mak-
ing false statements.” Yet contemporaries and later scholars alike have given
precedence to the Confession; the best collection of documents relating to
the events—Loren Kallsen’s Kentucky Tragedy, published in 1963—reprints
the Confession in full while excising more than half of the Vindication and
including The Letters of Ann Cook, a self-evident forgery that perpetuates the
Beauchamps’ mythology. For almost two centuries, the Confession and The
Letters of Ann Cook have been accepted as genuine, while the more reliable
Vindication has been overlooked, downplayed, or bowdlerized.5

To construct a plausible account of this story—intrinsically fascinating as it

may be—is not enough, for the question remains: So what? Richard Wight-
man Fox, in analyzing another sordid, dramatic, and complex episode—the
Henry Ward Beecher sex scandal of the 1870s—came to the insight that the
narratives constructed “were not simply raw material from which the facts
were to be extracted; they were the facts.” People at or near the center of this
postbellum uproar created a multitude of stories, all of which, Fox saw, told
something about “their lives, their relationships, their culture.” The insight
is well taken; narratives attempt to assign meaning to a swirling and kalei-
doscopic reality whose significance is not as self-evident as we sometimes
assume. And yet it is precisely those stories that are of so much use to the
historian, for they will always bear the unmistakable imprint of their times
and provide insight into their eras.6
 Introduction   

Americans had essentially two accounts of the Beauchamp-Sharp epi-

sode from which to choose: one by the Beauchamps and the other by the
family, friends, and political allies of Sharp. The former was embodied in
the Confession—which, although attributed to Jereboam Beauchamp, was
almost certainly the work of both him and Anna—and in the inscription they
composed to adorn their tombstone. Jereboam and Anna’s tale was almost
instantly dubbed the “Kentucky Tragedy,” and it is essentially the story that
has come down to us today: The Mephistophelian Solomon Sharp seduced
and abandoned the virtuous Anna Cooke; after the child they conceived was
born dead, Anna withdrew from society. Such is how Jereboam Beauchamp
finds her. Told of her humiliation, our young hero pledges to avenge Anna’s
dishonor and eventually kills the cowardly reprobate. Convicted on the basis
of perjured testimony and political machination, Jereboam is sentenced to
die. Awaiting execution, he proudly admits to the murder and proclaims that
his death will “teach a certain class of heroes, who make their glory to consist
in triumphs over the virtue and the happiness of worthy unfortunate females,
to pause sometimes in their mad career.”7
Sharp’s defenders immediately contested this maudlin tale. Although the
fullest expression of the counternarrative—the Vindication—was not made
public for half a century, the basic account was readily available via reports in
the region’s newspapers and periodicals, which were then reprinted through-
out the nation. This was a story of political assassination, of how Sharp’s
enemies had goaded a naive yet hot-blooded and reckless young man into
murdering a good and eminent statesman. As Dr. Sharp summarized, Beau-
champ’s “private feelings were excited by the falsehoods of political partizans,
invented and communicated to him for the purpose of producing the ruin or
the death of my brother.”8
Of these two stories, it was precisely the far less plausible version—the
one that contained numerous and demonstrable falsehoods, the one bereft
of corroborating testimony and known (at least locally) to be a transparent
attempt to escape execution—that was seized on by commentators across the
nation immediately after the events, by later moralists with a penchant for
sensationalism, and especially by novelists and playwrights who, for the bal-
ance of the antebellum era, churned out fictionalizations they claimed—and
let it be said, believed—to be true. To understand why this unlikely story had
such power, we must come to terms with a conceptual category that histori-
ans have been remarkably disinclined to engage: romanticism.
The very term “romanticism” invites ambiguity; generations ago, Arthur
    Murder and Madness

O. Lovejoy declared it a “linguistically extraordinary word” devoid of any

commonly understood meaning and therefore “useless as a verbal symbol.”
Ever since, historians seem to have tacitly agreed; outside discussions of the
transcendentalist movement and the Hudson River school of painters, the
concept does not commonly appear among the work of early Americanists.
It is a significant omission, for as Lovejoy appended, “there emphatically was
something which—for lack of any other brief name—may still be called a
Romantic period.” And, as Jacques Barzun has added, we cannot ignore or
expunge the concept of romanticism, for the term “is there, embedded in his-
tory and in a billion books and minds.”9
Certainly the romantic movement mattered in early America. As Henry
F. May has noted, “Romanticism dominated America more completely than
it did any European country except perhaps Germany.” Henry Clay observed
in 1826, “We live in an age of romance.” Yet two recent and magisterial over-
views of early America by Sean Wilentz and Daniel Walker Howe—both of
which summarize and build on the scholarship of a generation—barely men-
tion the romantic movement. If we contrast the importance of the Enlighten-
ment to our understanding of eighteenth-century America with our chronic
disregard for the romantic movement’s influence on the nineteenth century,
the oversight is even more peculiar and egregious. In fact, romanticism—
the “counter-Enlightenment”—actually may have been more important in
its time than the Enlightenment was in the eighteenth century: “Because
Romanticism pervaded every aspect of American culture, from low to high,
from politics and religion to literature,” May continues, “it achieved a domi-
nance that the Enlightenment, for all its great figures and lofty doctrines, had
never attained.”10
But what was romanticism? Although often reduced to the triumph of
emotion over reason, romanticism, in the broadest sense, can more accu-
rately been seen as the triumph of will over rationality, the emergence of a
zeitgeist that emphasized individual resolve at the expense of Enlightenment
ideals of order, stability, and tradition. At the heart of the movement lay a
conviction that true freedom is undermined by externally imposed goals and
values; only when the individual has the ability to choose between good and
evil—and not when that choice is co-opted by church or state or society—can
one create an authentic value system. Morality, in other words, is “moulded
by the will”—not discovered but actually created. This desire to formulate
self-generated moral codes logically if not inevitably transformed into a sec-
ularized antinomianism—the idea that “genius creates its own rules.”11
 Introduction   

To fully chart romanticism’s influence on early America is clearly beyond

the limits of this study—and very likely beyond the bounds of any single
study—for the romantic movement was remarkably multifaceted. And yet
another insight of Lovejoy’s—that “one may perhaps speak of not a, but sev-
eral Romantic movements”—is crucial in making the concept more man-
ageable, more comprehensible, for the romanticism of intellectuals in New
England was certainly not like the romanticism of slavery’s defenders in the
Cotton South, and neither was like the romanticism of a very peculiar pair in
Kentucky in the 1820s.12
If the complex and plural romantic movement is broken down into
smaller components, clearly two variants were determinative in the Ken-
tucky Tragedy—variations that might best be labeled the “pathetic” and the
“demonic,” both of which were inextricably bound with particular forms of
romantic literature that encouraged an effacement of the boundary between
fact and fiction. The former variation, the pathetic, was a feminine-encoded
segment of romanticism that idealized young women as unruly yet virtu-
ous—independent yet vulnerable to the villainous schemes of black-hearted
seducers. This cultural script permeated American society, thanks largely to
the ubiquitous and phenomenally popular novels of the era—most famously
Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster’s The
Coquette, but there were many, many such tales in circulation—all of which
claimed to be founded on actual events. The latter variation, the demonic,
was at the extreme of the romantic movement and posited an equally influ-
ential, albeit male, cultural stereotype—a headstrong, passionate, willful,
and death-obsessed protagonist whose origin was so closely associated with
one literary star that he was known as the Byronic hero. Made famous in
Byron’s epic poems Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818) and Don Juan
(1819–1824), as well as his shorter works like The Giaour (1813), The Corsair
(1814), Lara (1814), and Manfred (1817), this archetype personified demonic
romanticism and set free the radical yet latent moral antinomianism imbed-
ded within the movement. Made fashionable and alluring by verse, demonic
romanticism expressed the growing alienation of young Americans in the
rapidly changing world of the early nineteenth century.13
As we will see, these literary creations existed within a dialectical rela-
tionship with the social forces of the early-nineteenth-century transatlantic
world. Fictional icons were neither fashioned nor received in a cultural vac-
uum—they were a means by which creators and audiences alike attempted
to make sense of rapid transformations of their day. In turn, these heroes
    Murder and Madness

and heroines proved enormously attractive to young Americans, and for at

least some readers whose emotional investment in these tales was consider-
able, they seem to have served not only as models of behavior but as agents
of socialization.
By all accounts, Anna and Jereboam Beauchamp—immersed as they
were in the Byronic verse epics that were just then reaching their height of
popularity and the increasingly shopworn sentimental novels—were among
this group peculiarly influenced by the pathetic and demonic ideals of their
day. Although they claimed, when it suited their purposes, to be exemplars of
southern honor and decency, a closer look at their actual behavior suggests
that they identified far more with romantic antiheroes than with the dominant
social prescriptions of the South. Jereboam, for his part, reveled in adopting
the persona of a brooding young man who believed himself superior to the
common run of humanity, a consummate rebel who had generated his own
moral code. Anna, meanwhile, like the beautiful, doomed heroines of count-
less seduction tales, had little use for the “appropriate” considerations of her
gender—in particular, marriage and piety. Far from the betrayed, youthful
ingenue depicted in the Confession and elsewhere, she was, in fact, an “unruly
woman” on the precipice of middle age who had spent her adult life defying
the conventions of her day. (However, for all the couple’s rebelliousness, there
was, as we will see, one social barrier—race—that they could not bring them-
selves to transgress.)
Alternately, the couple’s intimate familiarity with this literature gave
them the tools to craft a tale they hoped would save Jereboam from the hang-
man. Understanding that the public wanted a melodramatic story of femi-
nine virtue assailed, masculine honor inflamed, and the daring revenge of a
young rebel, they concocted a story designed to save Jereboam from execu-
tion. It is a testament to the Beauchamps’ ingenuity that two such cultural
insurgents could cast themselves as the hero and heroine of a morality tale of
innocence betrayed and righteous justice exacted. The skill with which Anna
and Jereboam tapped into and manipulated the moral touchstones of the
culture—and the very fact that they did so—is astounding. Yet, having fully
internalized the unrestrained extremes of romanticism, they believed it pos-
sible to create their own truth. And because they had so well judged the tem-
per of their times, they were, to some extent, correct. America embraced the
Beauchamps’ story and all but ignored the protests of those near the events
who knew better. In time, their story was repeated until it became accepted
as fact. Thereafter, the Kentucky Tragedy moved seamlessly into a second
 Introduction   

life in the young nation’s fiction, as a generation of playwrights and novelists

rehashed the tale for thirty-five years. Gleefully taking the Beauchamps at
their word, these authors transformed the episode into the era’s most popular
melodrama and engraved the Beauchamps’ narrative on the nation’s collec-
tive memory. And so a generation of dramatists—including Edgar Allan Poe
and William Gilmore Simms, along with a host of lesser lights—recycled an
episode shaped by literary cliché into further literary cliché.14
What is so remarkable about this story is that the Beauchamps were able,
at least partially, to distance themselves from their culture—to see it as out-
siders might. Like intuitive anthropologists, they understood that many of
the beliefs and expectations of their world were socially constructed and thus
capable of manipulation or subversion. This process is most clearly seen in
the Confession itself, in which the pair recreated themselves as the literary
archetypes of seduction victim and Byronic hero. A similar but distinct pro-
cess was their putative embrace of honor—their attempt to justify the mur-
der itself as an honorable defense of wronged womanhood. Here Anna and
Jereboam’s self-conscious, even cynical, manipulation of their image is most
apparent. Jereboam, in particular, had no use for any social imperative that
gave primacy to the community at the expense of the individual. As contem-
poraries were quick to point out, no man of honor kills an unarmed oppo-
nent in his own house in the dead of night and then embarks on a campaign
of deception, denying all the while that he committed the murder or even
had any animosity toward his victim. And precisely at the moment he was
claiming to be avenging the seduction of a pure, “injured female,” Jereboam
himself had a warrant for bastardy hanging over his head. Jereboam was less
“dishonorable,” at least as his contemporaries would have defined the term,
than “a-honorable,” for the demonic species of romanticism was manifestly
incompatible with the welter of values subsumed under the term “honor,”
most clearly the injunction that an honorable person exhibit an overweening
concern with the public’s evaluation of himself or herself. The Beauchamps,
despite so much that has been written about them, did not exemplify the
dominant tendencies in southern society—they defied them.15
In more particular instances, the Beauchamps betrayed an audacious
certainty that they could mold perceptions and beliefs to suit their purposes.
Jereboam, while in jail awaiting trial, authored an extensive script with
which a key witness named John F. Lowe—a law officer—was to perjure him-
self. Anna was then to direct Lowe, coaching him until the false testimony
appeared to be his own. The entire effort, once detected, went far toward
 10   Murder and Madness

securing Jereboam’s conviction, but here the relevant point is his and Anna’s
attempt to script reality, to make the word incarnate.
Jereboam Beauchamp displayed this penchant for manipulation until the
day he died. His suicide attempt the morning of his execution was a means
of depriving the audience of a drama he did not author. Yet, unable to avoid
his star turn, he scripted his own part. As the death caravan passed through
the streets of Frankfort to the gallows, Beauchamp waved to the young
women who leaned out of their windows and wept for a man they believed
to be unjustly dying for defending his wife’s honor. Arriving at the execution
grounds, Beauchamp refused to submit to well-understood protocol—he
ignored the preachers, he never expressed remorse, he refused to address
the crowd, and, finally, he requested a lively tune be played just before he
was hanged. Disorderly, self-assertive, and completely aware of what he was
doing, Jereboam Beauchamp subverted his own execution.

Although care needs to be taken when drawing generalizations from the

actions of these two peculiar individuals, Anna and Jereboam’s belief that they
could transcend and manipulate basic components of their culture implies
that we may overestimate the power of social structure to dictate behavior.
And thus the episode is suggestive in another, still broader sense.
Joyce Appleby has written of the mid-twentieth century’s “discovery
of structure,” the way in which historians of the past sixty years have been
explicitly or implicitly guided by such concepts as structure, process, pattern,
system, and organization. The sources of such structuralism are extensive:
the histories of the Braudel-era Annales School and the Cambridge Group
for the History of Population and Social Structure, the analyses of language
systems by Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, the sociology of Talcott
Parsons, and the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz. The abstractions
developed by such scholars suggest not only “permanence, uniformity, and
continuity” through time but limitation, constraint, and checks on individ-
ual volition. In the postwar era, such concepts revolutionized scholarly dis-
course, and ever since, they have served to connect scholars as disparate as
mid-twentieth-century historians of ideas, the “new social historians” of the
1970s and 1980s, and the students of early American republicanism. And
despite the postmodern, poststructuralist patina of more recent years, these
assumptions still undergird a great deal of the history being produced.
Yet historians’ adoption of both the models and language of social sci-
ence does raise problems, one being that structuralism can inhibit the ability
 Introduction   11

to explain individual or aberrant behavior. At its crudest, structuralism so

ensnares and immobilizes past peoples in webs of social relations that there
is little room for individual volition or contingency, even while it overstates
the power of societal prescriptions, boundaries, and dictates.16
Microhistory—the study of small-scale events, “faintly exotic but some-
how emblematic”—has clearly begun to demonstrate that large-scale mod-
els can obscure as much as they reveal.17 Moreover, just as the recent vogue
of the counterfactual What if? question has emphasized temporal contin-
gency—that events did not have to unfold the way they did—perhaps it is
time to explore behavioral contingency in a more systematic fashion.18 The
structural categories that guide us through the past—southern honor, west-
ern violence, American acquisitiveness, evangelical discipline, to name but a
few—are indispensable, yet too rigid an adherence to such frameworks does
not prepare us to understand the individuality and unpredictability of past
humanity—the singularity of those who can no longer protest our labeling
them as prototypes of this or that social tendency. Microhistory forces on us
conclusions that macrohistorical, structuralist models would not have pre-
dicted but that may bring us toward a fuller understanding of the past.
To conceive of the past as a dialectic of structure and behavior, of imper-
ative and independence, advances our understanding considerably. As Gor-
don Wood has advocated, a central responsibility of the scholar is to examine
the ways in which “people make their social and intellectual history but are at
the same time bound by what they have made.” Such histories better illumi-
nate the relationship between individual volition and social demand. Struc-
tures—whether demographic or social or political or linguistic—although
powerful, were not invincible, and resistance and even rebellion were always
distinct possibilities.19
Microhistories can help us fruitfully examine this dialectic by “explor-
ing and connecting a wide range of data sources,” in the words of Richard
D. Brown, “so as to produce a contextual, three-dimensional, analytic nar-
rative in which actual people as well as abstract forces shape events.” And
thus I have attempted to construct an analytical narrative that seeks to make
sustained connections between the particular story at hand and general cur-
rents of early America mapped by other historians: western expansion, early
American reading practices and the rise of the novel, crime and punish-
ment, honor, and transformations in family norms, sexuality, gender roles,
and politics. In addition to these, I underscore another explanatory scheme,
romanticism, which helps us understand not only the Beauchamps’ bizarre
 12   Murder and Madness

behavior but the alacrity with which America embraced their tale. Such
an approach, by allowing a fine-grained examination of the intersection of
social imperatives and individual autonomy, can help answer many of the
trenchant criticisms of the microhistorical turn—that it inclines “toward the
blatantly antiquarian in its relish for the small particulars of the past”; that
it makes the past look “more inscrutable than ever”; that it runs the risk of
being “dismissed as selective and unrepresentative”; that the entire genre, as
Wood puts it, amounts to no more than “little trees in search of a forest.”20
Although social structures certainly did exist in the antebellum era and
were not so weak as to be casually defied, the Beauchamps’ behavior sug-
gests that such social dictates were not as impervious or imperious as we
have assumed. Culture directs and inhibits, as does language, but it does not
follow that everyone—then or now—was equally directed and inhibited by
social structure. It is here, at the intersection of singularity and typicality,
that a clearer conception of the early nineteenth century might be found.
And thus this history tries to highlight the ideas that people, then as now, did
not necessarily feel bound by social prescriptions and felt capable of crossing
what seemed to them to be arbitrary boundaries.
In many ways, the so-called Kentucky Tragedy was supremely atypi-
cal, and the Beauchamps were as aberrant, deviant, and bizarre individu-
als as early America ever produced. The mythology they created bore little
resemblance to actual events: Anna was never seduced, and Jereboam was
no defender of honor or female purity. But they had a better story than the
truth and they knew what the people wanted to hear, and that is how the
Beauchamps, although they both paid with their lives, got away with murder
in the end. They won a postmortem victory by successfully fashioning events
according to the dominant cultural scripts of the early republic for which
they themselves had no use. By successfully negotiating structure and aber-
ration, they confected a story that overwhelmed reality. And yet back there
among the ruins of time lay a reality that the Beauchamps’ fantasies could not
efface, remains that may yet tell us a great deal about early America.21
 chapter 1

The Architect of
His Own Fortunes
Solomon Porcius Sharp

We wither from our youth, we gasp away—

Sick—sick; unfound the boon, unslaked the thirst,
Though to the last, in verge of our decay,
Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first—
But all too late,—so are we doubly curst.
Love, fame, ambition, avarice—’tis the same—
Each idle, and all ill, and none the worst—
For all are meteors with a different name,
And death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.
—Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,
canto 4, stanza 124

Across almost two centuries, to look on the level, self-assured visage of Solo-
mon Porcius Sharp, captured by Matthew Jouett sometime in the early 1820s,
is to know that he took great pride in his accomplishments. Sharp’s short
life was, among other things, an object lesson in the opportunities of young
America, a self-willed demonstration of the ability of ambitious white men
through discipline or luck or both to rise from abject poverty to prominence
and stature. As one early Kentucky historian wrote, “It was the fortune of this
able man to illustrate, by his own career, the noble tendency of our republi-

13
 14   Murder and Madness

can institutions, and to teach to his youthful countrymen the important les-
son that each may, and must be, the architect of his own fortunes, and there
is no station to which the humblest may not aspire.”1
For the day and age, Solomon Sharp’s means of ascent were not unusual—
a combination of vivid personality, legal acumen, and enough military expe-
rience to justify a title in the state militia. More remarkable was the rapidity
of Sharp’s rise: at twenty-two, he was already serving the first of five terms in
the Kentucky General Assembly; a few weeks shy of his twenty-fifth birth-
day, he was elected a U.S. congressman; at thirty-four, he became Kentucky’s
attorney general. He married into one of the state’s leading families and all
the while built a highly respected law practice that made him a very wealthy
man. Even allowing for the standard hyperbole of nineteenth-century
biographies, Solomon Sharp had indeed “compressed into his brief life of
thirty‑eight years more . . . activity and . . . accomplished work than ordinar-
ily is compassed by the ‘three‑score and ten’ allotment of man.”2
If the arc of Sharp’s career comports well with the myths of American
mobility, it is difficult to recover the personality of the man himself. No col-
lection of his papers exists, little of his private correspondence survives,
and we have only a handful of his public pronouncements. Moreover, most
descriptions of Sharp were written by partisans after his murder had politi-
cized his memory. This is what we do know.
He was born on August 22, 1787, in Washington County, Virginia, the
fifth child of Thomas Sharp, a “plain, unpretending old Revolutionary sol-
dier” who had seen action at King’s Mountain, and Jean Maxwell Sharp, a
native of Scotland who had married Thomas in 1775. Although reputedly
descended from John Sharp, Lord Archbishop of the diocese of York under
the later Stuart dynasty, the line of the family that had made its way to the
Kentucky frontier was of infinitely more modest means, and Thomas, like
many other westerners of his day, struggled merely to secure clear title to
enough land to support his growing family.3
It was this desire for a freehold that pulled the Sharps over the moun-
tains and led them through homes in four states in nine years. What Jean
Sharp thought of the family’s rootlessness we do not know. If she was like the
thousands of other ordinary women of the day and age who were given little
say in the matter, she may well have resented Thomas’s wanderlust. Certainly
more than one traveler to the West remarked on women’s discontent; as one
put it, “Amongst the poorer class throughout this country, the women appear
to be less satisfied than the men.” Not the least of their objections was being
 The Architect of His Own Fortunes   15

ripped from their networks of family and community back east. One emi-
grant recalled of his decision to leave Virginia in 1784,

As I was walking one evening among my little corn on a poor spot,

having nine children, I made up my mind to move to [Kentucky], as
I had an idea for years. I knew it would be a killing stroke to my wife
when she heard of my determination, for she was so attached to the
church and neighbors that she could not give them up. . . . When I
returned to the house I met her between the two houses after sun-
set; I told her what I had concluded on, when she burst into tears
and begged me to decline, but it was in vain.

In mid-1795, the year the Sharp family finally found purchase in Logan
County, Kentucky, Jean Maxwell Sharp died. Solomon was eight years old.4
Logan County was in the heart of western Kentucky’s Green River area—
a region sometimes referred to as the Southside. It was not a land to make
one rich, but it was, as one resident put it, well suited for “a man who has
but a small property and a large family who he wishes to procure lands for.”
Thomas Sharp was one of thousands who, fitting this description, poured
into the region in the waning years of the eighteenth century, causing people
in older regions of the state to marvel at the “prodigious spirit for remov-
ing to Green River.” It was made possible by a 1795 state law that opened
for general settlement almost 6 million acres of land at thirty cents an acre
previously reserved for Virginia veterans. Southside delegates to the General
Assembly—known as the Green River Band and led by Felix Grundy and the
erstwhile Yankee Matthew Lyon—soon pushed the gates open wider still by
allowing settlers to purchase Green River lands on credit, make payments in
installments, and postpone repayment for up to twelve years.5
But early Kentucky, despite persistent myths to the contrary, was no land
of rugged equality. In central Kentucky’s Bluegrass region—the first settled
and most densely populated portion of the state—wealthy planters and mer-
chants lived beside the farming and laboring majority, most of whom rented
the land they lived on. In the Green River area, landholdings were more equi-
tably distributed. There, in the West’s west, two-hundred-acre farms were the
norm, and Logan County boasted the state’s highest rate of landholding. Still,
only five in nine Logan County households owned land.6
The Sharps, for the first two years of the family’s residence in western
 16   Murder and Madness

Kentucky, were among the 40-odd percent of Green River households that
were landless. Very likely, their restless search for competency had para-
doxically and cruelly exhausted their resources. Such was not uncommon;
upon arriving in Kentucky, one settler remembered that when his family
reached their Henry County farm in May 1797, “our money was gone. Our
only chance to raise bread was to clear the forest in the wilderness.” Another
recalled that “the first residence of our family was in a covered pen or shed,
built for sheep adjoining the cabin of its owner.” Yet even if they were pen-
niless, hope remained for the early settlers of western Kentucky, for not only
was land available, but so was the prospect of assistance. In particular, the
initial necessity of providing shelter and the annual ritual of the harvest
demanded community effort, as very often did sickness, childbirth, disabil-
ity, and old age. Harry Toulmin, an English immigrant to early Kentucky, was
struck by the process of community building on the frontier. After cutting
the timber, a settler “gives notice to his neighbors, who assemble and raise
the building for him. He provides meat and bread for them, and sometimes
a little whiskey. . . . He must have assistance in rolling his logs, but he repays
it by helping those who help him.” It was a hard world and, by no choice or
fault of its own, an insular world. Chilton Allan remembered, “All other colo-
nies were within reach of succour & supplies. Kentucky was in the midst of
an interminable wilderness. 5,000 Indians between the Ohio and the Lakes,
regarded it as their hunting ground. They could get no aid from Virginia. . . .
Kentucky actually took its root in its inherent resources, before it received
any essential supply from abroad. Its first meat was killed in its forests. Its
first grain was raised from its soil. Its first wealth was in its own lands. And
its first commerce, the exportation of its own produce.”7
Assuaging the isolation and the indignity of landlessness was the fact
that many tenants realistically expected to soon secure title to a small farm.
And within a few years, Thomas Sharp bought 200 acres on the Muddy River
a few miles northeast of the young town of Russellville, the county seat of
Logan County. There he built a log house. By 1797 he claimed 100 acres of
what Kentucky tax assessors deemed “second rate” land, and he was able to
purchase a slave and six horses. By the turn of the century, his landholdings
had increased by another 345 acres, enough to situate the family about mid-
way up the socioeconomic scale of the county.8

Kentucky was born in war and did not know peace for twenty years. Not
since the initial European colonization of North America in the early sev-
 The Architect of His Own Fortunes   17

enteenth century had a people moved so far into a hostile country and sev-
ered ties so completely with the world they had known. As late as 1795, the
Reverend David Barrow remarked that Kentucky “does evidently abound
without any connection with any other part of the universe.” For the first gen-
eration of Kentuckians, the struggle to defend themselves against the ever-
present threat of Indian attack overshadowed all other concerns. Barricaded
in frontier “stations,” the trans-Appalachian emigrants managed, just barely,
to hold their ground against the onslaughts of outraged natives. As one immi-
grant’s guide later put it, “If any part of the inhabited earth could be said to
have been peopled in ‘tears and blood,’ that was, emphatically, Kentucky.” Not
until “Mad” Anthony Wayne’s 1794 invasion of the Northwest Territory, his
victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, and the subsequent Treaty of Green-
ville did the bloody Indian wars subside in Kentucky. Only then, as Kentuck-
ians always maintained, did the Revolutionary War end in Kentucky. Well
after, the memory of the struggle was kept alive; as late as 1835, according to
Michel Chevalier, “the story of this long struggle between the whites and the
Red man is still repeated in the barrooms of the West.”9
Habits born in the crucible of early Kentucky died hard. The decades of
warfare—to say nothing of the traditional belligerence associated with the
“highlander” culture of the English isles from which so many of the pioneers
were descended—had inured the Kentuckians to brutality, and the state’s
well-earned reputation for violence would persist for generations to come.
Although the Green River area was settled at the tail end of the Indian wars,
many Southside residents, including Sharp’s father, were veterans of such
conflicts and intimately acquainted with the horrific interracial violence of
the late eighteenth century.10
The Methodist itinerant preacher Peter Cartwright—whose family had
migrated to the area at almost the same time as Sharp’s—painted a bleak por-
trait of this turbulent society in his memoirs: “Logan County, when my father
moved to it [in 1793], was called ‘Rogues’ Harbor,’” a place where “murder-
ers, horse thieves, highway robbers, and counterfeiters fled until they com-
bined and actually formed a majority.” Random violence plagued the area,
as gunfights broke out in the streets of Russellville, and murder was com-
monplace: “The honest and civil part of the citizens would prosecute these
wretched banditti, but they would swear each other clear; and they really put
all law at defiance, and carried on such desperate violence and outrage that
the honest part of the citizens seemed to be driven to the necessity of unit-
ing and combining together, and taking the law into their own hands, under
 18   Murder and Madness

the name of Regulators. This was a desperate state of things.” Although, as

Cartwright attested, “horse-thieves and murderers were driven away, and
civilization advanced considerably,” the chronic violence continued, and it
went well beyond the rough-and-tumble disorder common to backwoods
settlements—fights in which drunken men maimed one another.11 Western
Kentucky was the scene of a number of atrocities that did not spare white,
black, or Indian, young or old, male or female. In 1803 in Eddyville, a town
in western Kentucky settled by the aging Jeffersonian stalwart Matthew Lyon,
a couple of local thugs with no apparent motive or provocation beat to death
a Chickasaw named Jimmy after he passed out in a tavern.12 One of the more
notorious and grisly murders in the early republic took place in Livingston
County, about seventy-five miles northwest of Logan County. There, Lil-
burne Lewis, nephew of Thomas Jefferson, tortured and decapitated a slave
for the heinous crime of breaking a water pitcher. More harrowing still were
the murderous rampages of the brothers Harpe: Micaja and Wiley. These two
psychopaths, known respectively as Big Harpe and Little Harpe, cut a swath
through western Kentucky in the late 1790s, murdering “every defenceless
being who fell in their way without distinction of age, sex, or colour.” Big
Harpe himself claimed to have murdered his own infant child whose crying
he found bothersome. Finally apprehended, the madman was decapitated by
the husband of one of his victims, and his head was placed in the fork of a
tree at a junction known to this day as Harpe’s Head crossing.13
At times bordering on social anarchy, the Southside appalled observers
farther east. In 1796, John Breckinridge, a rising lawyer in central Kentucky
who would soon become Jefferson’s attorney general, denounced the region
as “filled with nothing but hunters, horse thieves, and savages,” a place where
“wretchedness, poverty and sickness will always reign.” In 1810, Virginian
Thomas Joynes hurled what Kentuckians surely deemed to be one of the
more cutting assessments of the region’s inhabitants: “In their manners and
ways of living,” the Southside residents “approximate nearer to the aborigines
of the country than any I have ever seen.”14
Yet such a bleak picture, as the Reverend Cartwright took care to point
out, was “but a partial view of frontier life.” In particular, it underestimated
the settlers’ determination to bring order to the social chaos, to find some
balm to sooth the violence and isolation of early Kentucky. The primary
means of doing so was religion, in particular an evangelical strain of Chris-
tianity in which tens of thousands of Kentuckians found solace. In fact, the
origins of the Great Revival—if not of the Second Great Awakening itself—
 The Architect of His Own Fortunes   19

can be traced to the Logan County of Sharp’s adolescence. It was an unlikely

setting, if later accounts of Kentucky’s earliest evangelists are to be believed.
In 1796 the Reverend John Rankin described Logan County as a place where
no one “seemed to have any light or knowledge of living religion, or any
desire for it.” Yet in the midsummer of 1800, it was among these “nothingar-
ians” and “anythingarians” that John and William McGee ignited a revival
in the Red River Presbyterian church of James McGready. The enthusiasm
quickly spread to McGready’s two other congregations, one of which was sit-
uated in the Sharps’ neighborhood along the Muddy River. There, in August
1800, people converged from “distant parts of the two states.” One celebrant
remembered,

The meeting house, it was found, hours before preaching time, could
not seat the third part of those already gathered. And still they came,
by dozens, fifties, and hundreds. A temporary pulpit, therefore was
quickly erected under the foliage of a contiguous grove of thick and
broad-spreading trees, seats were made of large timber felled, and
laid upon the ground. Here the thousands seated themselves and
the worship commenced. Soon the presence of the all-pervading
power of the Most High was felt by all. Some crying for mercy, some
in ecstasies of joy and praise, strewed the ground.

The excitement was all-consuming and the uproar unprecedented, and it

surely drew thirteen-year-old Solomon Sharp to see what all the commotion
was about. Coming of age at the turn of the century, Sharp was of a genera-
tion that one observer described as “virtually unchurched.” Yet the revivals
converted a great number of young people, and indeed, their involvement
goes some way toward explaining the Great Revival’s more bizarre behavior.
McGready himself testified that “it was truly affecting to see little boys and
girls, of nine, ten, and twelve years of age, and some younger, lying prostrate
on the ground, weeping, praying, and crying out for mercy.”15
We have no direct evidence to tell us what Solomon thought of these
religious festivals. But in marked contrast to Cartwright and dozens of other
evangelical ministers who later chronicled their conversions on the Ken-
tucky frontier, young Sharp does not seem to have been influenced in any
significant way by the Great Revival. Moreover, there is no evidence that any
member of the Sharp household was particularly pious or even attended
church. Sharp himself had a lifelong reluctance to publicly discuss matters
 20   Murder and Madness

of religion, and even after his marriage to a devout young woman, he did not
regularly attend services and had to deflect charges of deism. Sharp’s later
voting record as a legislator reveals a pronounced secularism: he supported
the renewal of a lottery (which then-governor Gabriel Slaughter, a devout
Baptist, vetoed on the grounds that it might “relax the morality and honest
industry of the country”) and voted against a bill that would have permitted
“ministers of the Gospel” to be exempt from toll charges on any turnpike in
the state. Sharp’s lack of piety may be partly explained by the absence of Jean
Sharp, for the evangelical upsurge received disproportionate support from
women, who predominated at Kentucky’s early camp meetings. Whatever
the reasons, the “ecstasies” of the awakening seem to have left little impres-
sion on young Solomon.16
He would not have been alone. Despite the furor it generated, the Great
Revival was by no means uncontroversial in early Kentucky. Traditional-
ists—latter-day “Old Lights”—were repulsed by the outlandish behavior of
the “fallen”—those who cried out, collapsed in ecstasy, and, at their most
extreme, indulged in jerking and barking exercises. Others were appalled by
the illiteracy of the ministers—“without-method Methodists” who spouted
“happy compounds of illiterateness and fanaticism.”17
Yet the criticism of the revivals was not solely doctrinal squabbling.
In fact, by some estimates, a majority of southerners thought the evangeli-
cal style bizarre well into the nineteenth century. Most of these people who
looked askance at the revivals were simply a part of the unchurched majority
unwilling to heed the evangelicals’ call to renounce the fleeting pleasures of
this world. But, somewhat surprising on the rough and untutored Kentucky
frontier, there also existed a number of people whose rejection of the revival’s
emotionalism signaled an allegiance to a rationalistic cosmology—in par-
ticular, deism. Around the turn of the century, Kentucky newspapers often
published articles recommending skepticism, most of them titled “Natural
Reason” or “A Friend to Reason,” echoing Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason—
which, to the profound horror of the backcountry preachers, had been serial-
ized in Kentucky’s leading newspaper, Lexington’s Kentucky Gazette.18
Not surprisingly, deism was associated with the well educated of the
West, the “honorable and intelligent men” who had been exposed to the
skepticism of the Enlightenment. It was they who were “generally immune to
the appeal of the revival,” while the common folk were much more likely to
participate in the revivals and indulge in the “exercises.” In 1802, Frenchman
F. A. Michaux wrote that, in Lexington, “the better-informed people differ
 The Architect of His Own Fortunes   21

from the opinion of the multitude with respect to this species of extacy.” In
1805, Pennsylvanian Josiah Espy discerned a gulf between “the great body
of the well-informed and wealthy” Kentuckians who “were immersed in
infidelity and dissipation,” and the “more illiterate” who “were downright
fanatics and zealots in religion.” The Reverend James Gallaher, looking back
years after the evangelical style had become ascendant, remembered, “Ah!
It was reputable, it was literary, it was scientific, to scowl at the gospel, and
pour forth ‘great swelling words’ against all that was sacred.” Somewhat more
surprising was that deism appealed to some younger residents of the West.
The Reverend Robert Stuart recalled that in early Kentucky “the writings of
Infidels . . . [were] extensively circulated,” their deist principles “imbibed by
the youth particularly,” who “became scoffers at religion and blasphemers
against God.”19
The Sharps were certainly not of Kentucky’s elite, but it is fairly clear
that Thomas Sharp wanted his children to be. Without the means to give his
sons and daughters material support of any significance, Thomas apparently
instilled in them an uncommon ambition to rise above their origins. Such
is suggested not only by Thomas’s wanderlust but more clearly in the sub-
sequent careers of his children. All five sons became professionals, and all
achieved distinction in their chosen fields: two became accomplished phy-
sicians, two more renowned lawyers, and another a prosperous merchant.
Three—Solomon, Leander, and Fidelio—were elected to the Kentucky Gen-
eral Assembly. Of the three daughters, moreover, at least two married “much
respected citizens” and presided over affluent and refined households.20
In this respect, Solomon Sharp’s father was very similar to the parent of
another remarkable man who rose from the social and geographical periph-
ery of early Kentucky to achieve eminence. Daniel Drake, a prominent phy-
sician and educator whose fame would in time spread throughout the West,
was born two years before Solomon and was raised outside the town of May’s
Lick, in northern Kentucky. In his memoirs—an exceptional account of grow-
ing up on the late-eighteenth-century frontier—Drake related the ambitions
of his father, Isaac: “His poverty he regretted; his ignorance he deplored. His
natural instincts were to knowledge, refinement, and honorable influence in
the affairs of the world. . . . He had formed a conception of something more
elevated.”21
By dreaming of something “more elevated,” by pushing their children
to excel, Thomas Sharp and Isaac Drake culturally distanced themselves
from their neighbors. Travelers to the Green River district routinely, almost
 22   Murder and Madness

inevitably, described Southsiders as lazy degenerates who rarely worked after

securing enough to eat. Virginian Thomas Joynes insisted that “the inhabit-
ants in this part of the country generally live in miserable log huts, and are
extremely poor. This poverty arises principally from their indolence, which
is extreme. From the fertility of the land, very little labor is required to raise
an abundant supply of corn, and hogs require very little attention, so that
the men are not generally employed in labor more than one-fourth their
time; the balance they employ in hunting and drinking whiskey.” Soon after
moving to western Kentucky from Virginia, Colonel Charles Lewis, Thomas
Jefferson’s brother-in-law, was not impressed with his new neighbors: “The
males of every discription here don’t work more than one fourth of their
time.” Another traveler to the state reported, “Too many, instead of resting
on one day in seven, work only on one day in six.” This love of ease was later
both celebrated and immortalized in the phenomenally popular “Hunters of
Kentucky,” an account of the American victory at the Battle of New Orleans:

A bank was rais’d to hide our breast

Not that we thought of dying
But that we always like to rest
Unless the game is flying.22

And therefore it was precisely because young Solomon “ate no idle bread,
spent no leisure hours,” that he and his brothers were unusual. Yet, as Drake
explained, there was a price for such ambition in an agrarian, insular world;
it was not exactly frowned on, but it did raise eyebrows. In Drake’s case, once
it became known that he would leave the neighborhood to study medicine,
the novelty of the young man’s course “excited a considerable sensation. It
was decided that I was to be a gentleman, and lead a life of ease and gentility.
. . . Some of them cautioned me against getting proud.” Intellectual refine-
ment of any degree was simply not a priority among many early westerners.
As Abraham Lincoln would remember of the society directly across the Ohio
River in Indiana, a region settled largely by western Kentuckians, “There was
absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education.”23
But Thomas Sharp thought otherwise, and he provided as best as he could
for his children’s schooling. Unfortunately, that was not much. The deficien-
cies of Solomon’s education—acquired during his intermittent attendance at
one of Logan County’s fledgling academies—would later be painfully evi-
dent, even by the relaxed standards of the trans-Appalachian West. One of
 The Architect of His Own Fortunes   23

his eulogists later wrote, “He always felt the want of literary acquisitions and
was for a time jeered by envious rivals for his provincial pronunciation and
grammatical inaccuracies.” One of Solomon’s few surviving letters—an 1813
missive to Henry Clay concerning military affairs during the War of 1812—
clearly betrays his truncated education: “Great hopes are entertained that the
increas of our gallent Navy, and the liberal encouragement of the recruiting
Servise by increas of Wages and bounty.” (Sharp went on to relate the “con-
ciderable intrust” that Kentuckians had shown in the appointment of cabi-
net officials.) Years later, when Sharp was Kentucky’s attorney general, his
enemies taunted him for being unable to “employ the English language with
sufficient accuracy” and “too ignorant to understand the constitution.”24
Yet, if never exactly erudite, Sharp did acquire the rudiments of an educa-
tion and soon gravitated toward the profession of choice for ambitious young
men: law. We do not know with whom he read law—or indeed if he did study
law with a practicing attorney. He may very well have followed the path of
his older brother, Fidelio, a respected lawyer in Christian County, Kentucky,
who never served an apprenticeship with a licensed attorney, instead acquir-
ing his legal knowledge through “his books, which were obtained singly as
necessity required, and read, often by the light of the midnight fire.” Yet any
preparation at all would have separated Sharp from most of his peers; Micah
Taul, with whom Sharp later served in Congress, was admitted to the Ken-
tucky bar despite that he “had never read a Law Book.” Any man in the state,
wrote Roland Trevor, “with a single year’s study, would be an overmatch for
half who practice.”25
With such lax standards, Kentucky in the early nineteenth century was
crawling with lawyers—self-taught and conventionally trained alike. The first
full-time attorney, John Brown, entered Kentucky in 1783; not ten years later,
one community of fewer than one hundred white families reported thirty-
nine practicing lawyers. The glut was caused primarily by the extraordinary,
almost absurd, confusion over land titles. Haphazard surveys and massive,
disorderly immigration had given rise to a “shingling” effect, whereby innu-
merable land claims overlapped. By the early 1780s, the state, as one histo-
rian aptly summarized, was the scene of “an appalling legal circus,” a tangle
of land suits that would not be sorted out until the middle of the next cen-
tury. One immigrant’s directory warned that a newcomer, when “purchasing
a farm of a farmer, is nearly certain of having included in the bargain three of
four actions at law, to determine whose property it really is.”26
Even with this bounty of litigation, competition among the lawyers was
 24   Murder and Madness

fierce, and from the crucible emerged an extraordinarily talented group,

among them Henry Clay, John Pope, George Bibb, Jesse Bledsoe, John Rowan,
and Felix Grundy. One young and ambitious lawyer, James Buchanan, learned
firsthand just how competitive the frontier bar was. In 1812, the future presi-
dent—then a twenty-one-year-old with dreams of making a name for him-
self in the West—left Pennsylvania for Kentucky. He settled in Elizabethtown
with high hopes, but in less than a year, he was back in his home state. As
he later told Kentucky congressman Ben Hardin, “I went to Kentucky . . .
expecting to be a great man there, but every lawyer I met at the bar was my
equal, and more than half of them my superiors, so I gave it up.”27
Sharp ran headlong into this very same predicament. When he began
his career in 1806, Russellville, the seat of Logan County, was already teem-
ing with talented attorneys—including future U.S. senator and governor of
Illinois Ninian Edwards; George M. Bibb, state legislator and soon-to-be
chief justice of the Kentucky court of appeals; and no fewer than four future
governors of the state: Charles and James T. Morehead, John Breathitt, and
John J. Crittenden. With so crowded and talented a field, Solomon wisely
decided to try his luck twenty-five miles to the northeast, in Bowling Green,
in neighboring Warren County. There, he established a partnership with
Samuel Caldwell, another native of Logan County who for years had served
as county clerk. Seventeen years older than Sharp, Caldwell was a man of
distinction in the Green River area, having earned renown in the Indian wars
and compiled a record of public service that included an unsuccessful run
for lieutenant governor in 1808 and service as a presidential elector in 1813,
1817, and 1821.28
Caldwell had known Sharp ever since he was a child and was doubtlessly
impressed with Sharp’s work ethic. Painfully aware of his educational short-
comings, Sharp compensated with an assiduous attention to detail. While
some other lawyers “studied Hoyle, more than they did Blackstone,” Sharp
devoted himself with “unwearied application” to his profession. Several emi-
nent colleagues later testified that “he was remarkable for the extent and
accuracy of his various information. His ardor for information was almost
quenchless.”29
The effort paid off. Before long Sharp built a reputation as one of the best
lawyers in the Green River district, a man whose “great wealth and talents”
were virtually undisputed. Congressman Ben Hardin, a man whose ruthless
assessments of others later earned him the nickname “Old Kitchen Knife,”
thought Sharp “one of the ablest and most eloquent men ever born and raised
 The Architect of His Own Fortunes   25

in Kentucky.” In 1812, a neighbor of Sharp’s, Joseph Underwood, predicted

that Sharp’s fellow lawyers in Warren County would unanimously support
his bid for reelection to the state legislature, not only because of “personal
attachment” but because they wanted Sharp out of the county for at least a few
months of the year so they would not have to compete with him for clients.
Although he was not a great orator, Sharp possessed a “fine voice” and won
over juries with a “style of speech [that] was of the conversational order—
plain and concise.” By the time he was thirty years old, Sharp’s reputation “for
ability and integrity was as wide as the state,” and within a more few more
years, several young men were reading law with him. In 1824, when eighty
small landholders in the northern Kentucky county of Campbell were served
with writs of ejectment from the seventh federal circuit court in Frankfort,
the group sent two representatives to the capital with instructions to “get the
best lawyer.” After a meticulous search, they chose Sharp.30
“Success,” Amos Kendall later eulogized, “followed him wherever he
turned.” Then as now, a successful lawyer was a wealthy lawyer. Tax lists of
1807 credit the twenty-year-old Sharp with but a horse. Only two years later,
Sharp owned 3,600 acres of land in three counties; in two more years, he
had title to seven slaves. By the time of his death fourteen years later, his net
worth of over seventy thousand dollars made him one of the richest men in
the state.31
Although driven, Sharp was not brash and, at least in his personal deal-
ings, rarely indulged in the belligerent swagger for which Kentuckians were
notorious. After his death, it was the consensus of his acquaintances that
he “possessed an elevated, a serene and almost imperturbable equanimity”;
one editor affirmed that “his temper was not rash, nor violent. His mode of
speaking was persuasive and mild.” He was, by all accounts, “unassuming,”
“unpretending,” “amiable.” Such manners, it was said, “always preserved him
from personal altercation.”32
And yet, for all his personal modesty and amiability, Sharp did not lack
enemies. He had, it was said, “too great an avidity for money.” Some of the
criticism resulted from the fact that he was good at what good lawyers do:
“He defended a false position with as much zeal as one which was true, a bad
cause with the same apparent sincerity, with which he advocated a good one,
the injurer with as much correctness as the injured.” Yet, even in relation to
other lawyers, Sharp could be exceptionally aggressive in the courtroom. “I
had heard a great many men damn Sharp for screwing witnesses too hard,”
one man later testified. Even his adoring brother Leander admitted that Solo-
 26   Murder and Madness

mon could be “determined and inflexible.” Such behavior earned Sharp “a

great many violent enemies” in the Green River district, one of whom—a
“respectable man” of Warren County—publicly swore that if he met Sharp
“on the road he would shoot him.”33
One such implacable enemy was Abner D. Hamilton, the father of a man
who was put to death as a result in no small measure of Sharp’s efforts. In
March 1818, John C. Hamilton, the scion of a wealthy and powerful fam-
ily in Barren County, was accused of the murder of his friend and traveling
companion, Dr. Alexander Sanderson, a wealthy planter from Natchez, Mis-
sissippi. Judge Christopher Tompkins presided. Hamilton was defended by
John Rowan, himself a renowned lawyer and one of the most powerful poli-
ticians in the state. Sharp, as one of the commonwealth’s attorneys charged
with prosecuting the case, “showed [Hamilton] no mercy” and relentlessly
helped secure a conviction. On May 17, 1818, Hamilton was executed. Seven
years later, the elder Hamilton’s intense hatred of Sharp was still well known
enough to start rumors that it was he who murdered Sharp. Hamilton felt
obliged to buy space in Frankfort newspapers to publicly deny any involve-
ment in Sharp’s assassination.34
Such a combination of ambition, personality, and native intelligence rec-
ommended Sharp to his Warren County neighbors, and in 1809 they elected
him to the first of three successive terms in Kentucky’s General Assembly.
Not surprisingly, Sharp was a Jeffersonian Republican, like virtually every
other politician in early Kentucky. More unexpected was that no one ever
challenged Sharp’s election, for at twenty-one years of age in August 1809, he
was well short of the minimum age to serve in the state legislature.35
The assembly that young Sharp entered had earned a lively reputation
and was never known for its decorum. One English visitor to Frankfort was
appalled by the sight of the assembly hall floor “inundated with saliva and
tobacco juice” and by the sound of “the whole house simultaneously hawk-
ing at the close of every sentence.” The speaker of the house, meanwhile, “sat
in an easy & graceful posture in a raised armchair, an arm over one arm of
the chair, & a leg over the other, while the debates were going on.” In the
early years of the century, the state assembly was not only unseemly but ener-
vated. After the 1810–1811 General Assembly, one spectator complained that
“nothing worthy of an intelligent community has been done in the last ses-
sion of your assembly.”36
Several themes of Sharp’s career and personality are evident in his early
political career. He assiduously attended his duties as a legislator, missing
 The Architect of His Own Fortunes   27

no more than a handful of votes in three years. He took great interest in

legislation affecting the legal profession, introducing, for example, bills for
reforming the mode of summoning juries and the timing of circuit courts.
The concerns of his Green River constituents were faithfully attended to:
Sharp fought against the immediate repayment of the Green River debt—
millions of dollars Southsiders owed to the state government—and objected
to the proposed removal of the branch of the Bank of Kentucky from Rus-
sellville. Although a slave owner himself, Sharp was unenthusiastic about the
attempts to strengthen Kentucky’s slave code, voting against a draconian stat-
ute titled “An Act for the More Effectual Prevention of Crimes, Conspiracies,
and Insurrections of Slaves, Free Negroes, and Mulattoes, and for Their Bet-
ter Government.” And, consistent with his later stance during the relief war
of the 1820s, Sharp backed measures designed to help Kentuckians in debt.
He opposed, for example, the repeal of an 1809 relief bill passed to abate the
effects of the embargo, and he consistently supported a series of occupying
claimant laws that protected the property of Kentuckians who had lost their
homesteads in legal disputes.
But Sharp’s most noteworthy accomplishment in this period was the anti-
dueling legislation he and Ben Hardin guided through the General Assem-
bly in 1811. The bill required that all state officers and attorneys at law take
an oath that they had not issued, accepted, or delivered a challenge to fight
a duel (after a given date) and would not do so in the future. Dueling was,
according to the preamble of Sharp and Hardin’s act, an “inhuman” practice,
“contrary to the precepts of morality, religion, and civil obligation.” Several
years later, when the law was challenged, Sharp elaborated on the rationale of
the legislation: it was an “experiment,” he said, designed to provide the “force
of example” to the rest of the state’s citizens, and to suggest that the practice
of dueling, although “unfortunately so ingrafted into our habits and man-
ners,” was premised on “notions of honor and equality, entirely artificial and
fallacious.”37
Yet towering over any quotidian business of the state legislature were
the steadily worsening relations between the young republic and the British
Empire. Not only were westerners convinced that the British were behind the
strengthening resistance movement among the Indians in the Northwest, but
their touchy sense of honor that Sharp regretted made Britain’s actions on the
high seas utterly unacceptable. As the assembly made explicit, “Unless Great
Britain shall retrace her steps,” there were only two choices: “unqualified base
submission, or war.” Almost to a person, Kentuckians avidly supported, even
 28   Murder and Madness

craved, war with Britain. The Kentucky Gazette reported that “Kentucky seems
ready to precipitate itself en masse upon the British and their infernal allies
the Indians.” Francis Wright added that “the women [of Kentucky] shared
the patriotism of the men, vying with each other in repressing their tears and
actually buckling on the swords and cartridges and arming the hands of their
sons and husbands.” An early historian of Kentucky who was but a child dur-
ing the war, Lewis Collins remembered hearing the news of General William
Hull’s surrender of Detroit “discussed by a company of married ladies, who
unanimously pronounced Hull a traitor, and with great vehemence declared
that he ought to be gibbeted, or crucified—ordinary hanging being far too
mild a punishment for so monstrous a traitor.” The prospective conflict pro-
vided an irresistible chance to strike against both of the westerners’ ancient
enemies; as one Kentuckian, born in 1802, recalled, “Hatred of George III, of
British red-coats, and of American aborigines, were the first emotions of my
young and patriotic heart.”38
Sharp’s “young and patriotic heart” also fluttered at the opportunity of
war with Great Britain and the Northwest Indians. Though personally mild
mannered and averse to personal confrontation, Sharp always evinced a pro-
nounced militarism in his public temperament. Indeed, it would be difficult
to overstate his admiration for military virtues. While in the state assem-
bly, Sharp voted against allowing conscientious objectors to forgo militia
training. Moreover, he constantly and vociferously advocated war with Brit-
ain, and his elevation to the rank of colonel in the state militia was always a
source of great pride. As one nineteenth-century biographer wrote, Sharp
“had a great fondness for military life, its spirit, its activity, and its discipline
strongly appealing to his nature.”39
In these matters, Sharp was typically, quintessentially, western. As Elias
Pym Fordham observed in 1818, Kentuckians’ “military enthusiasm scarcely
knows any limit.” The roots of such militarism are not difficult to locate. The
habit was first ingrained during the earliest days of settlement, when the only
leaders who commanded respect were those most capable of surviving and,
more to the point, those who could help others survive—fighters like Dan-
iel Boone and Benjamin Logan. Out in the marchlands of western civiliza-
tion, necessity trumped custom, and authority divorced from martial ability
was less than worthless; it was dangerous. By the early nineteenth century,
most of Kentucky’s leaders had either fought in the Indian wars or could well
remember the ravages of a time when bravery and ruthlessness were virtues.
Felix Grundy recalled that, in his youth, “death was in almost every bush, and
 The Architect of His Own Fortunes   29

every thicket concealed an ambuscade. If I am asked to trace my memory

back and name the first indelible impression it received, it would be the sight
of my eldest brother, bleeding and dying under the wounds inflicted by the
tomahawk and scalping knife. Another and another went the same way. . . .
Those of us who are here are but the remnant—the wreck—of large families
lost in effecting the early settlement of the west.” Chilton Allan, born the year
before Grundy, speculated that such ever-present danger during the settling of
Kentucky gave rise to a “fool-brave . . . spirit which imbued every member, in
every class, of all ages and conditions of society.” A generation reared on the
epic tales of frontier Kentucky’s Indian wars yet too young to have participated
themselves hungered for war, eager to prove their own worth and valor.40
A few weeks after America’s declaration of war against Great Britain in
the summer of 1812, Sharp was elected to the Thirteenth Congress as a repre-
sentative from Kentucky’s Sixth Congressional District despite that, elected a
few weeks shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, he technically was not old enough
to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. Before he could take his seat,
however, Sharp enlisted as a private in Lieutenant Colonel Young Ewing’s
regiment of the Kentucky Mounted Volunteer Militia, a 2,500-man force under
the command of Major General Samuel Hopkins, a fifty-nine-year-old veteran
who had served on Washington’s staff during the Revolutionary War. But Sharp
was no ordinary cavalryman, and everyone knew it—he had just been elected
to Congress along with Hopkins himself. Ewing, moreover, had been a col-
league of Sharp’s in the Kentucky General Assembly. And so it was to no one’s
surprise that twelve days after his enlistment on September 18, Sharp’s fellow
soldiers elected him major; he joined Ewing’s staff the next day.
The expedition itself, however, was a farce from the beginning. After
Hull’s surrender of Detroit and the fall of Chicago, Governor Isaac Shelby
and his advisers feared that the federal authorities would not or could not act
“with sufficient promptitude and efficacy” to protect the state from Indian
attack. So Shelby immediately dispatched the Kentucky Mounted Volunteer
Militia with orders to attack Kickapoo and Peoria villages in Indiana and
Illinois, which had allied with Tecumseh. Yet without authorization from the
War Department, Kentucky officials had little hope of obtaining adequate
supplies for the troops and were thus forced to call on Kentucky women to
knit “warm linsey clothes, socks, blankets, [and] linen shirts” for the “patri-
otic sons of Kentucky.” Problems were compounded by the fact that the sol-
diers had signed on for only thirty days, giving the commanders hopelessly
little time to organize their units, train the soldiers, and complete the mis-
 30   Murder and Madness

sion. In such conditions, the rage militaire of the day was a very thin reed
on which to base the undertaking. Many soldiers opted out of their com-
mitment before they even arrived at the rendezvous point at Fort Harrison,
the ramshackle garrison one hundred miles north of Vincennes in the Indi-
ana Territory. Sickness claimed many of those who did show up: “Ther is
upwards of one hundred men lying in the osptlle [hospital] at this place,” one
soldier wrote home.41
Although the soldiers did manage to break camp, the expedition could
not even find the Kickapoo and Peoria villages. After five days of wander-
ing around the Northwest and a prairie fire that almost engulfed the camp,
the five hundred dispirited men who remained informed Hopkins they were
going home. It was an inglorious, if not ridiculous, campaign; by Hopkins’s
own admission, the army had returned “without hardly obtaining the sight of
an enemy.” But Sharp’s forty-two-day tour of duty was enough to secure him
a colonelcy in the Kentucky militia—and, in a region obsessed with all things
martial, such would prove a considerable boon to the political career he was
carefully nurturing.42
After a few months’ rest in Kentucky, Sharp left for Washington and took
his seat in the House of Representatives in May 1813. By then, America had
muddled its way through ten months of war with Britain, and Sharp, like most
Republicans, was mortified by the general ineptitude of his country’s effort. It
was scarcely surprising, therefore, that Sharp, long an admirer of Henry Clay,
quickly aligned himself with the Speaker and his fellow war hawks. Sharp in
fact stayed in the same boardinghouse as John C. Calhoun for the second and
third sessions of the Thirtieth Congress. Calhoun in particular was deeply
impressed with Sharp; he later wrote, “I have known him long and intimately.
He has few superiors of his age in any part of our country.”43
Sharp, as a first-term congressman, gave no evidence that he was intim-
idated by a truly impressive array of colleagues. Working alongside estab-
lished luminaries such as Nathaniel Macon and Timothy Pickering, as well as
all three members of the era’s “Great Triumvirate”—Daniel Webster, Henry
Clay, and John C. Calhoun—Sharp proved himself bold and eloquent in
debate and well versed on the issues at hand. His first major speech, in June
1813, a passionate denunciation of Federalist obstruction of the war effort,
demonstrated a detailed knowledge of the political and diplomatic intrigues
that led to war. In the course of his speech, Sharp—at twenty-five very likely
the youngest elected official in the nation’s capital—had the temerity to lay
the blame for the war squarely at the feet of his Federalist colleagues. Had
 The Architect of His Own Fortunes   31

they not “induced Great Britain to believe we were too divided in our coun-
cils to prosecute a war in defence of our rights, she would not have con-
tinued her aggressions on our commerce, and we should have had no war.”
Sharp also upbraided the Federalists for their opposition to the war: “He who
opposes the adoption of injudicious measures, is a patriot—those measures
once adopted, to oppose their execution is rebellion.” New York Federalist
Zebulon Shipherd’s denunciation of the war, Sharp railed, amounted to “trea-
son against humanity.” After the Battle of New Orleans, Sharp delighted in
baiting the Federalists, comparing the loyalty of the Louisianans during Jack-
son’s campaign with the “treason” of the Hartford conventionists.44
In another early speech, Sharp announced that “national honor”
demanded a rigorous prosecution of the war with Britain, a “most potent and
perfidious enemy.” Of course, such warmongering was expected in a western
politician—it was tantamount to political suicide to do anything else, as a
U.S. senator from Kentucky, John Pope, was at that moment discovering. But
clearly, Sharp was comfortable in the role, as he roundly condemned critics
of the war as “proper objects of detestation” and even advocated a preemp-
tive war with Spain, which, he hoped, would not only secure Latin American
independence but “afford a school for our Navy.” Sharp would intermittently
give expression to his youthful zeal and militaristic temperament by reciting
verse on the floor of Congress:

Fresh leaves of martial laurel

Shall shade the soldier’s grave
Who dies with arm uplifted
His country’s rights to save!

In early 1815, when the news of Jackson’s victory at New Orleans reached
Washington, an enraptured Sharp again extolled the splendors of patriotic
death:

If humanity shows to the God of the world

A sight for his fatherly eye
It is when a people, with banner unfurl’d
resolve for their freedom to die.45

Sharp brought to the Capitol the same audacity and aggressiveness he

had honed in the courtroom. After only a few months in Washington, he
 32   Murder and Madness

introduced a resolution asking Richard Rush, the attorney general of the

United States, to prosecute Vermont governor Martin Chittenden for trea-
son. Chittenden, a Federalist, had ordered home a militia brigade that his
predecessor had sent to New York to assist in the invasion of Canada. Chit-
tenden insisted that the troops were needed at home to defend Vermont and
that, in any event, they were improperly serving under the command of regu-
lar army officers. An indignant Sharp insisted that Chittenden’s edict was an
invitation for the Vermont troops to desert their stations and thus amounted
to deliberate subversion of the war effort. Although neither Congress nor the
attorney general took any action, Sharp’s motion was printed and widely dis-
tributed. And while Republicans hailed young Sharp for his spirited attack,
the Federalists accused Sharp of indulging in “party crimination beyond the
ordinary field of debate.”46
Faced with the sectional obstructionism of the Federalists and the embar-
rassing inability of the United States to adequately prosecute the war, Sharp,
like many of his fellow Republicans, began to reconsider the localistic and
minimalist tenets of their Jeffersonian faith. The increased military spending,
federal support for transportation improvements, a tariff, and a new national
bank all had their origins in a fear of weakness. Believing themselves faced
with the option of an impotent republic or a virile nation, American leaders
almost invariably, and with remarkable swiftness and relatively little com-
punction, rethought received republican wisdom and chose the latter. How
else but with a strong central government could the country be adequately
defended? Only a powerful nation, Sharp insisted, would “induce the citi-
zens freely to march from one extreme to another to meet the enemy.” The
“grandeur,” the “honor” of the nation, he asserted, “could only be attained by
an amalgamation of national feeling,” while “local state feeling . . . will be the
bane of the prosperity of the nation.” Should any doubt exist, Sharp spelled
it out for his constituents: “We ought to encourage national feeling, not sec-
tional views.”47
In 1814 this sort of thing still played well in western Kentucky, and Sharp
was easily reelected to his seat in Congress, although, strictly speaking, that
seat did not exist anymore, for the British had burned the Capitol that sum-
mer. (As fellow Kentucky congressman Micah Taul explained, “The Capitol
was at that time in ruins, & Congress sat in a house prepared for the purpose
about 150 or 200 yards East of the Capitol.”) This was the Fourteenth Con-
gress, and this was the advent of National Republicanism.48
Though elected in the darkest days of the war, with the British on the
 The Architect of His Own Fortunes   33

verge of destroying Washington, the Fourteenth Congress did not convene

until December 4, 1815, almost a full year after the signing of the Treaty
of Ghent. This group possessed a “vigor”—to use Henry Adams’s suggestive
term—that set it apart from “the imbecility of many previous Congresses.” It
was indeed an impressive group: in addition to Clay, Calhoun, and Webster,
also present were William Pinkney, John Randolph, William Lowndes, Rich-
ard M. Johnson, and Timothy Pickering—a collection of men that neither
lacked ambition nor doubted their own abilities.49
The agenda of this Fourteenth Congress, given a presidential mandate
by Madison’s seventh annual message, was very much shaped by the war and
its humiliations. All of the components of the nationalistic program—a new
national bank, federal support for the construction of roads and canals, a pro-
tective tariff, the continuation of wartime taxes, and especially the buildup of
the army and navy—were justified by a determination to never again repeat
the indignities of the late war. It was an enterprise at once designed to con-
quer space, defend borders, and bind together a nation. Sharp explained to
his constituents the crucial relation of economic and military power—that
such was the expense of war that “the contest among civilized nations is now
more frequently decided by gold than by iron.” It necessarily followed, there-
fore, that “the encouragement and promotion of agriculture, of commerce,
and of manufactures, not only secures to a people the comforts and enjoy-
ments of life, but also affords them the means of acquiring renown in arms . . .
and as money is the sinews of war, the finances of a Government is its most
important and difficult branch of administration.” And thus Sharp and his
colleagues in the Fourteenth Congress braided together patriotism, national
defense, and economic development into a cable of national improvement.50
Yet as the immediate concerns of war gave way to issues of domes-
tic development, Sharp discovered the limits of his nascent nationalism.
Although he gave his assent to all the major initiatives of the Fourteenth
Congress, Sharp was ambivalent about this new course he was helping to
chart. The tariff, for example, he believed to be necessary only as an expe-
dient, one that would give to the young industries that had taken root dur-
ing the war the “protecting and fostering hand of Government to give them
permanency and prosperity.” And though he approved of any measure that
promised to help the nation defend itself, Sharp was leery of a standing army,
contending that he would not want one more soldier in the army than was
necessary to man existing garrisons, adding that “a liberal establishment of
military schools” might be a much better means “to support the military
 34   Murder and Madness

character.” Sharp, moreover, worried that Congress was getting too far ahead
of the opinions of its constituents. “The idea of a perfect commonwealth,” he
wrote, “is found to consist in an entire unity of interest between the Govern-
ment and the people. When that unity does not exist, the people are always
betrayed by their rulers, whose interest is to oppress them.” The Jeffersonian
tradition of minimalist government and fear of power that Sharp and his fel-
low citizens were reared on, it seems, was not easily discarded.51
The contradictory pulls of defense and republicanism, of strength and
virtue, of expedience and principle, were best encapsulated in Sharp’s ambiv-
alence over the rechartering of the Bank of the United States. Beginning in
his first term in the Kentucky General Assembly, Sharp served on several
committees charged with overseeing banking institutions, and the experi-
ence bred in him a chronic suspicion of banks. The “only instinct” of “mon-
eyed institutions,” he advanced, “is gain,” regardless of the cost to community
or country. Thus in 1811, Sharp, along with a majority of his peers in the state
assembly, instructed the Kentucky congressional delegation to vote against
recharter of the First Bank of the United States.52
Five years later, however, Sharp had reconsidered. “It is the part of wis-
dom in those who administer its Government to accommodate their mea-
sures to its new situation,” Sharp explained—perhaps a bit defensively—to
his constituency in 1816. The problem, as he saw it, was the mismanaged,
irresponsible, and almost impossibly prolific state banks that had suspended
specie payments and thereby had inundated the country with unredeem-
able notes that were circulating, as Sharp put it, “in dishonor and deprecia-
tion.” The resulting inflation, Sharp argued, amounted to a private tax on the
public. He was, moreover, infuriated by the hypocrisy of bank officials. By
refusing to redeem their notes in specie, the banks in effect were breaking a
contract with note holders. Yet those same directors “will post the name of
one of their customers as dishonored if he does not meet his contract to a
day.” All the while, the banks were perfectly capable of resuming payments:
“They retain in their vaults the greater part of the specie of the country.” In
sum, the state banks and their behavior were an affront to “the morality of
the country.”53
And thus by 1816, politicians, searching for a solution to the problem
of state banking, found it in a new national bank that would regulate the
abuses of local banks. Sharp, in other words—like many of his fellow legisla-
tors—voted for the national bank not out of an enthusiasm for entrepreneur-
ship but as a remedy almost homeopathic in its logic: one bank, in effect, was
 The Architect of His Own Fortunes   35

the cure for an epidemic of banks. A national institution that would be held
in check by Congress and that would in turn keep state banks honest was a
“tried and understood” means of introducing “a general resumption of specie
payments and circulation.” Moreover, this new national bank would stabilize
the finances of the government, “infuse health into the circulating medium
of the country, and enable the treasury to refuse all paper in payment of rev-
enue that is not redeemed in specie.”54
As it turned out, however, the most controversial undertaking of the
Fourteenth Congress had nothing to do with the nationalist legislative pro-
gram. What outraged the American people—and what prematurely ended
Sharp’s congressional career—was the compensation bill, a proposal to pay
congressmen an annual salary of fifteen hundred dollars rather than the six
dollars per diem they had been receiving. The legislation was the brainchild
of Sharp’s fellow representative from Kentucky, Richard M. Johnson. Like
the rest of the state’s delegation (with the sole exception of Joseph Desha,
future governor of Kentucky), Sharp voted for the measure, even going on
record publicly thanking Johnson for “bringing forward the proposition.”
The House, oblivious of the furor they were unleashing, passed the compen-
sation bill on March 8, 1816, by a vote of eighty-one to sixty-seven.55
The bill’s advocates had grossly misjudged the public temper. As they
returned home from the first session, they found themselves almost uni-
versally denounced as corrupt and self-serving. The outcry was particu-
larly intense in Kentucky, where the General Assembly passed a resolution
denouncing the compensation bill as “intrinsically and justly obnoxious” and
demanded its repeal. No Kentucky representative was more pointedly and
publicly attacked than Sharp, who was the target of a series of “Public Good”
essays printed in the Russellville Weekly Messenger. Written by James T. More-
head, a nineteen-year-old law student of John J. Crittenden and future gov-
ernor of Kentucky, the articles accused Sharp of “legislating for himself ”
and “displaying an indifference to the promotion of [Kentuckians’] interests,
equaled only by his attention to his own.” Upon his return home in May
1816, Sharp attempted to defend his vote in front of a large crowd during the
Warren County court day. Morehead would have none of it: “All your labor,
all your ingenuity, all your arguments of previous preparation,” he taunted
Sharp, “could not effectuate your design of convincing the public mind of the
rectitude of your conduct. . . . Your speech of justification has more clearly
shewn the obliquity of your policy.”56
With all of the congressional seats up for grabs that summer, even the
 36   Murder and Madness

stars of western politics, Richard M. Johnson and Henry Clay, looked vul-
nerable at the polls for the first time in their public careers. And in the end, of
those who voted for the compensation bill, only Clay and Johnson survived the
debacle. Two of Kentucky’s delegation declined to run again—one of whom,
Ben Hardin, flatly refused to canvass the state, “begging pardon for what I
do not consider to have been incorrect.” Those who ran for reelection were
unseated by decisive margins, including Sharp, who lost badly to Revolution-
ary War veteran David Walker. It was the first defeat of his political career.57
Yet the compensation bill debacle did not deter Sharp from once again
seeking and securing elective office. In 1817, almost immediately upon
returning from the second session of the Fourteenth Congress, he set his
sights on reelection to the Kentucky General Assembly. Once home, Sharp
found Kentucky convulsed over whether the death of the sitting governor,
George Madison, required a new election, or if the lieutenant governor,
Gabriel Slaughter, should be allowed to finish out Madison’s term.
Despite failing health, Madison—celebrated Indian fighter, veteran of
the War of 1812, and brother of Bishop James Madison—had been induced
to run for the governor’s seat in 1816. Such was his popularity that, upon
the announcement of his intention to run, the other candidate immediately
dropped out of the race. A few weeks after his pro forma election, however,
Madison died, and Lieutenant Governor Slaughter assumed the governor-
ship. There was, for the moment, no call for a new election; the relevant por-
tion of Kentucky’s 1799 constitution—article 3, section 18—was ambiguous,
stating that in the case of the death of a sitting governor, “the Lieutenant-
Governor shall exercise all the power and authority appertaining to the office
of Governor, until another be duly qualified.” What exactly constituted due
qualification—or how or when it could be achieved—was not specified.
In all probability, Slaughter’s claim to the governorship would have gone
uncontested but for his decision to replace the secretary of state appointed
by Madison—Charles S. Todd, son-in-law of Kentucky founding father Isaac
Shelby—with John Pope, “a man whose every political act, for the last five
years” according to one newspaper, “has been a libel upon the character of
his country, and treason against the opinions and feelings” of the people. In
particular, Pope’s support of the recharter of the Bank of the United States
in 1811 and his opposition to the War of 1812—both positions contrary to
those of the mass of Kentuckians—earned him “unqualified detestation”
across the state. Newspaper editor Amos Kendall, upon hearing the news of
Pope’s appointment, “was thunderstruck. I considered Pope the leader of the
 The Architect of His Own Fortunes   37

Federalists, and instantly foresaw a struggle between the parties which must
end in the exaltation of the Federalists, or in the prostration of themselves
and their leader.” The appointment indeed displayed “uncommon stupidity”
and amounted to, as one newspaper correspondent put it, “political suicide”
on the part of Slaughter.58
He should have known better. Slaughter was a veteran of Kentucky poli-
tics, having served in the state assembly as both a representative and a senator
for over a decade. In 1808 he was elected to his first term as lieutenant gover-
nor (defeating, among other candidates, Solomon Sharp’s law partner, Sam-
uel Caldwell). In 1812 he ran for governor but was trounced by Isaac Shelby,
Kentucky’s first governor, who had returned to politics amid the developing
crisis with Great Britain. After earning a measure of glory as a commander in
the Battle of New Orleans, Slaughter in 1816 again ran for, and won, the office
of lieutenant governor. By then, Slaughter was forty-nine years old and was,
for a man who had spent most of his adult life in the fluid society of frontier
Kentucky, curiously out of step with the popular temper. He distrusted the
press and even had the temerity to personally ask the Frankfort newspapers
not to report on the new election controversy. Moreover, Slaughter’s explana-
tions of America’s political system, although accurate enough, were perhaps
too candid for westerners. In his annual message of 1817, Slaughter declared
that “ours is not a simple democracy” but a representative government bound
by checks and balances. Such was absolutely necessary, he believed, for “if
every sudden impulse of any community was to be carried into full effect,
there would be in such a state, neither confidence, nor safety.”59
The General Assembly convened in December 1816 and took up the
issue of the legitimacy of Slaughter’s governorship but concluded that the
constitution did not authorize a new election. The question, however, far
from receding, became virtually the only issue in the following summer’s
state elections. After furious campaigning on the part of new election can-
didates and amid continual and bitter denunciations of Slaughter and his
“prime minister” Pope, a “prodigious majority” of the winning candidates
committed themselves to supporting a new election, including such luminar-
ies as John J. Crittenden, William T. Barry, George M. Bibb, Joseph C. Breck-
inridge, Jesse Bledsoe, and, interestingly enough, Charles S. Todd. Aligned
with them in this, the Twenty-sixth General Assembly, was former congress-
man Solomon Sharp. And even amid such an impressive array of once and
future talent, the abilities of young Sharp stood out. One correspondent to
the Kentucky Gazette singled out Sharp for bringing “into our legislature a
Another random document with
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 Tuuli on tuima, ankarat aallot,
Ruuhet on rannalla pienoiset;
Ruuhet on aivan pienoiset,
Kultaseni sormet on hienoiset.

Oi, älä lähde aaltojen valtaan!

Aallot ne sun pian pettäisi.
Ei mua murhe heittäisi,
Ennen kuin mun multakin peittäisi.
KULTASENI

(Kansan-laulu)

Minun kultan' kaunis on, sen

suu kun auran kukka;
Silmat on sen siniset
keltanen sen tukka.

Älä sure sorja neitto,

vaikka toisen orja;
Kohta kuluu kuusi vuotta (1),
kyllä sinun korjaan.

(1) Tästä näkyy, että Suomalaisen orjalla oli sama oikeus kun
hebrealaisenkin. Hän sai kuuden palvelus-vuoden perästä lähteä pois
seitsemäntenä, vapaana lunastamata 2 Mos. 21:2.
KULTAANSA SUREWA

(Kansan-laulu)

Itkettää ja surettaa ja
huoleks' tahtoo tulla,
Kuin on muilla kultasensa
eikä ole mulla.

Kultani on kaukana ja
kaukana se kukkuu;
Yksin täytyy maata mennä,
yksin täytyy nukkuu.

Kultani on kaukana, niin

kauas taisi mennä,
Ettei sinne pienet linnut
ijässänsä lennä.

Oi, jos pieni lintunenkin

sanoman nyt toisi,
Suru menis mielestäni,
sydän hyvin voisi.
 Lennä, lennä lintu raukka,
puhu kuullakseni! –
Kävitköstä kullan maalla,
näitkö kultaseni?

Sano, kuinka kullan maalla

aamu armas koitti;
Ilossako elettiin, vai
suruko he voitti.

Mitä näit sä muutakin, ja

näitköstä senkin,
Jos ne oli terveena ja
kulta liiatenkin.

Tule kulta tälle maalle,

tule poika kulta,
Ett'ei rientäis turhaan tämä
ikä nuori multa.
TURWATON

(Kansan-laulu) (1)

Onneton olin minä ollessani,

Onneton tähän kylään tullessani;

Onnettomaksi olen minä luotu,

Ei ole minulle ilo-päivää suotu.

Ei ole turvaa siellä eikä täällä,

Enenpää kuin linnulla lentonsa päällä.

Maalima minua nyt paljokin vaivaa,

Kuoppia teilleni eteeni kaivaa.

Ystäväni myöskin on ynsiäksi tullut,

Kuin hän on maailmalta juttuja kuullut.

Kuuleppas kultani, vielä sana yksi:

Kuinkahan näin tulin minä hyljätyksi?

Kuka sinun öksytti rakkauden tiellä?

Tule, tule kertakin luokseni vielä!
 Muistakkos muinen kun marjassa käytiin,
Ahosilla istuttiin ja leikkiä lyötiin?

Päivä se paisti, ja pienet kukat loisti;

Kukatkin ne ketosilla iloamme toisti.

Linnut ne laulelivat metsien päällä;

Meistä he lauloivat siellä ja täällä.

Ei ole ajat enää, niinkun olit ennen,

Entiset ajat ovat olleet ja menneet.

Entinen oma kulta ei enää hoida;

Niin se mun heitti kun pienen linnun-pojan.

Toivoni raukesi, meni juuri tyhjään,

Ei ole mulla nyt ilo-päivää yhtään.

Enkä mä itselleni näin luullu käyvän;

Ikäväni kestää nyt kuolema-päivään.

Olen niinkun kyyhkynen vierahalla maalla,

Lentävä lintunen taivahan alla.

Olen niinkuin oksalla varpunen pieni,

En tiedä kuhun otan matkan ja tieni.

Nuoruus-ikä rientää ja aikani kulkee;

Jopa noista vaivoista väsymyskin tulee.

Päiväni päätyy ja elämäni katkee,

Multa se murheeni peittää ja kätkee.

[On enemmiten yhtäläinen kuin Kantelettaressakin.]

SUOSIO

Suosio on soma
Onnen siemen oma,
Josta kasvu kaunis ilmestyy;
Sillä suloisella
Levon laitumella
Kaikki meille hyvin menestyy.

Sydän siivollinen,
Rinta riemullinen
Sulattaavat mielen suosioon;
Mutta viha, vaino,
Kateuskin kaino
Jouduttavat järjen turmioon.

Karhu kontiolla
Woipi vielä olla
Luonto kauhiampi lausuttaa,
Kuin on kulkevalla
Wainon vallan alla,
Joka pahan sisun paisuttaa.
 Tunnoton ja tuima,
Päästä hullu, huima
Siis on suotta nurja sovintoon;
Sillä kukin kurja,
Hirmun henki, hurja
Waipunut on itse vahinkoon.

J. Juteini
LEIWOSELLE

Ilon ääni ihanainen

Intohoni ilmestyi,
Kuin tuo lintu laulavainen
Laksohimme lähestyi.

Katsos! kuinka korkialla

Lentelee ja laulelee;
Lempeällä laulamalla
Korkehinta kiittelee.

Koska ensin äänes kuulin,

Wielä varsin nuorena,
Wäinämöisen soitoks' luulin,
Kevähänä kauniina.

Älä väsy veisaamasta!

Korvani sua kaipaavat;
Älä lakkaa laulamasta!
Silmäni sua seuraavat.

Laula, laula lintuseni,

Lennä ylös pilvihin
Kantamahan kiitokseni
Luojan tykö taivaisiin.

Terve sieltä tultuasi

Lohduttamaan luontooni!
Sieltä alas astuissasi
Ilahuttaan intooni!
KIILTO-MATO

Kiilto-mato kukkasissa
Loisti hiljasuudesaan
Yli kedon, tienohissa,
Tietämätön loistostaan.

Sulosesti tätä tähti

Katsoi korkeudestaan.
Kätköstänsä kärme lähti
Myrkkyänsä valamaan.

Sääli madon surkeutta!

Miks’ hän syyttä surmattiin?
Syyttä! sanoi kärme, mutta
Miksikäs hän loisti niin?
LÄHTEELLÄ

Ruotsinkielisestä: "Jag sitter källa vid din rand" (1).

Sua, lähe kaunis, katselen

Likellä vettesi,
Kuin pilven varjot vaeltavat
Kuvastimessasi (2).

Kah tuoll’ on pilvi loistava,

Ihana, kaunoinen;
Jo lähti pois pakenemaan —
Hyvästi varjonen!

Taas tuossa toinen kullallaan

Kuvoaa taivahan;
Se ei pitemp’ – iällinen
Jo lähti matkahan.

Kah vielä muuan (3) hirviä

Hias kulullehen;
Woi siirtyisitkö sievemmin
Jälestä toisien!
 Wain näitä katsellessani
Mä muistan mieltäni,
Kuin monta kullan loistoa
Jo siirtyi siltäki.

Kuin pilvet paksut, synkiät,

Sitäi’ pimittivät,
Yhtäkkiähän nousivat,
Hitaasti lähtivät.

Waan jospa kuinkin kulkivat,

Ne eivät outoja:
Ne tyhjiä kuvaamia
Ja pilven varjoja.

Ne mieli raukan kuitenki

Moneksi muuttavat;
Woi koskastapa varjojen
Walehet loppuvat!

E. Lönnrot

(1) Wähän toisellainen on tämä laulu "Maamiehen Ystävässä"

N:o 15, v. 1844.
(2) Peilissäsi.
(3) Muutama, joku, eräs.
JOUTSEN

Ruotsinkielisestä: "Från molnens purpurstänka rand" (1).

Kesäisen illan kullasta

Tuo joutsen tultuaan,
Joen lahelle laskihen,
Ja loihen (2) laulamaan.

Suloa Suomen lauloi hän,

Kesiä pohjolan,
Kuin halkiöisin aurinko
Walaisee maailman.

Kuin varjopuien suojassa

On hetket herttaiset,
Ja aallot uia armahat,
Ja rannat rauhaiset.

Ja kuin suloista siellä on

Syleillä kultoa,
Ja kuinka vilppi, viekkaus,
Siell’ uppo (3) outoja.
 Näin souti salmi salmelle
Se joutsen joikuen (4),
Ja kultansa kohattua
Syleili lausuen:

”Wähänpä tuosta, kuinka jo

Ikäni määrän sain –
Olen uinut pohjan aalloilla,
Syleillyt kultoain”.

E. Lönnrot

(1) Toisellainen on tämän laulun käännös "Oulun Wiikko-

Sanomissa"
N:o 5, v. 1834, ja toisellainen "Maamiehen Ystävässä" N:o 33,
v. 1844.
(2) Loi itsensä, rupesi.
(3) Peräti, varsin.
(4) Yksiäänisesti laulaen.
MIES

Mies on maassa oivallinen,

Waivoissakin voimallinen,
Koska konna värisee,
Waaroissaansa vapisee.

Mies on viisas vahingossa,

Tuskan alla, turmioissa;
Onni häntä hyödyttää,
Joka pahan pyörryttää.

Mies ei mieli hoiperella,

Eikä huoli huikennella,
Mutta missä tarvitaan,
Siellä miestä mainitaan.

Tammesta on miehen tahto,

Waan ei höllä, niin kuin vahto,
Walmis töitä täyttämään,
Oikein onnen käyttämään.

Tutkittaissa tuntoansa,
Taikka muuta menoansa,
Miehen tavat tunnetaan,
Joilla arvo ansaitaan.

Miehen jalon, järjellisen,

Retkillänsä rehellisen,
Tie on tietty kunniaan
Avun kautta armiaan.

J. Juteini
TALON-POJAN LAULU

Nuotti: "Ecce novum gaudium" etc.

Talon-poika, taitava
Elon etsinnöissä,
Aina olen alkava
Päivät pellon töissä;
Näissä voiman näytän,
Kaikki hyvin käytän,
Aina työni täytän,
Urhollisena.

Ei omalla pellolla
Aura paljo paina,
Mies on itse ilolla
Ahkera siell’ aina.
Waimo, kuva valon,
Ompi turva talon,
Äiti joukon jalon
Toimellisena.
 Tämä sääty suuri on,
Suuri Suomen kansa,
Eikä ole osaton
Perhe pellollansa;
Itse täytän aitan,
Leivän paksun laitan,
Toisellekkin taitan
Riemullisena.

Juhla jalo johdattaa

Kestin keskellemme,
Olu-kannu kuljettaa
Riemun rinnoillemme.
Työ on alku elon,
Itse lähde ilon,
Juotavankin jalon
Herkullisena.

Tavara on tallella
Tämän säädyn tiellä;
Siis on syytä suojella
Wapautta vielä;
Sydämellä, suulla
Esivaltaa kuulla,
Hyvää muista luulla,
Alinomati.

J. Juteini
NUOREN-MIEHEN LAULU

(Ruotsinkielisen johdosta.)

Jos vaikka kaikki järjestänsä

Kerskaisi naima-säädystänsä,
Niin nuoren-miehen elosta,
Sen riemuista ja ilosta,
Nyt laualan ihastuksissani,
Sen aina pitäin muistossani,
Ett' nuoren-miehen paras on.

Kun mies on nuori, naimatonna,

Niin saa hän olla murheetonna
Ja elää huvituksissa,
Waan nainut huokauksissa,
Kateen ja häijyn vaimon kanssa
Hän aina pitää muistossansa,
Ett' nuoren-miehen paras on.

On kyllä naima-sääty kanssa

Myös hohtavainen muodoltansa
Ja loistavasta arvossa,
Waan kiitettävä harvossa;
Sentähden aina mielelläni,
Naimata elän yksistäni,
Ett' nuoren-miehen paras on.

Käyn riemun kukkasella tiellä,

Ja löydän hauskuudeita siellä,
Kestit ja monet ystävät,
Kun ilossa mun pitäävät;
On lysti siellä ollessani,
En pelkää kotoo tullessani;
Siis nuoren-miehen paras on.

Loviisallensa Heikki suuttui,

Ja riemu oitis murheeks' muuttui,
Loviisa Heikin kuitenkin
Sai mieheksensä sittekkin;
Nyt Heikki raukka katuu vasta,
Ja eikä lakkaa muistamasta,
Ett' nuoren-miehen paras on.

En kuule pauhinaa en toraa,

Ei lapset korvissani poraa,
Ei yöni ole levoton,
Ja päiväni ei iloton;
Noh, kuinka minä sitte naisin,
Ja niin sen varsin unohtaisin,
Ett' nuoren-miehen paras on.

Saan olla vapaa itsekseni,

Ja liehakoita lystikseni:
Syön päivällistä Hannalla,
Ja vietän ehtoon Annalla,
Sitt' Liisan kanssa kestiin kuljen
Ja muistooni sen ijäks' suljen,
Ett' nuoren-miehen paras on.

Jos päivieni päähän asti,

Näin yksin elän taitavasti,
En tunne koto-ristiä,
Waan riemua ja lystiä;
Siis laulan ihastuksissani,
Ryypyn ja suuta ottaissani,
Ett' nuoren-miehen paras on.

J. F. Granlund

[Ensikerran painettu 1834.]

KEWÄ

Nuotti: "Storm och böljor tystna ren" etc.

Touvon aika lähenee,

Kylmät hallat vähenee,
Päivä kirkkahasti
Paistaa, ihanasti
Korkialta
Taivahalta,
Siintävältä, loistavalta.
Wirta vilpas vieriää,
Järven lainne kieriää
Hiljaksellen rantaan,
Pois katoopi santaan.
Koivut, haavat
Lehden saavat,
Tuomet, raidat kukostaavat.
Pensaat ja puut,
Niityt ja haat,
Laksot ja muut
Ruohoset maat
Kaunistuuvat ihanaksi.
Saaret, mantereet,
Luodot, tantereet
Muuttui taas jo tuttavaksi.
Kaikkityyni tuo,
Kukkula ja suo,
Hauskuutensa tullessaan.

Pienet linnut visertää,

Pyyt ne puissa viheltää,
Teiret kukertaavat.
Kumppaninsa saavat
Pikkusetkin
Lintusetkin,
Itse pienet perhosetkin.
Suorsat ruovistohon ui,
Kyttä maahan kumartui,
Rastas lauloi puussa.
Äijä lahden suussa
Ruuhessansa,
Werkostansa
Päästeleepi saallistansa.
Tuohen ja muun
Astian tuo
Ympäri puun
Lapset ja juo
Mahlajaansa naureskellen;
Sitte menemään
Leikittelemään
Luikaten ja lauleskellen.
Kiekot kieppumaan,
Pallot paukkumaan
Mailoillansa kukin lyö.

Paimen-torvi paikon soi,

Äijä laitumelta toi
Toukopellollensa
Pari-hevosensa.
Lapset kanssa
Lampaissansa
Soitteleevat huilujansa.
Nuori kansa tuomistoon,
Maahan istui, ruohostoon,
Naiset kukkasista,
Kaiken muotoisista,
Wäänsit vaulat,
Suuret paulat
Kaunistamaan päät ja kaulat.
Niin kevät tuo
Riemuja vaan,
Uudeksi luo
Luonnon ja maan
Hauskuudeksi sydämmelle.
Laihot toukokuun,
Kasvut maan ja puun
Muistuttaavat ihmiselle
Uutta elantoo,
Uutta olentoo,
Uutta eloo elämään.

J. F. Granlund
[Ensikerran painettu 1845.]
KEWÄ-LAULU

Jo päivä (1) ilman lämmittää,

Jo taas nyt virkos maa,
Ja taas nyt virkos maa,
Jo järvistämme lähti jää,
Ja kasvut hengen saa,
Ja aallot vahvat, vahto-päät,
Ja hopiaiset hohto-jäät,
Ne kirmailivat kilvassa,
Kuin pilvet myrsky-ilmassa.

Nyt niityt, pellot vihottaa

Ja virvotusta juo,
Ja tanner puita lihottaa
Ja kukkasia luo,
Ja päivä kulta-virrallaan
On saanut ruohot kasvamaan,
Ja perho kulta-siivillään
On tullut niihin lentämään.

Nyt linnun laulut herättää

Jo päivän nousemaan,
Ja ilo laulun elättää
Ja saa sen kaikumaan;
Ja sydän lyö ja ihastuu,
Ja riemua on täynnä suu,
Ja toivo nostaa siipiään
Jo kesän helmaan lentämään.

J. F. Granlund

(1) Aurinko.

[Ensikerran painettu 1863 Tähti sanomaan n:o 6.]

KESÄN WIIMEINEN KUKKA

(Moore'n mukaan)

Nyt kesän viime kukka

Kukoistaa yksin vaan;
Siskoistaan ruusu-rukka
Jäi myrskyn maailmaan.
Ei kukkaa ruusun-laista
Syys-laaksoss’ ollenkaan,
Mi voisi kaunokaista
Kuvastaa ruskoaan.

En suojatta ma sallis'
Sun, kukka, kuihtuvan,
Waan siskojes luo, kallis,
Sun soisin nukkuvan.
Ma lehtes hiljaa heitän
Haudalle siskojen
Ja sunkin sinne peitän
Wienoisten vierehen.
 Niin itse seuraan sitten,
Kun mennyt multakin
On joukko ystävitten,
Se mulle rakkahin.
Kun kuolon kello soipi
Jo veikon viimeisen,
Ken jäädä yksin voipi,
Maailman murheesen!

Tuokko