Solomon P. Sharp (1787–1825) was attorney general of Kentucky and a member of the United States Congress and the Kentucky General Assembly. His murder at the hands of Jereboam O. Beauchamp in 1825 is referred to as the Beauchamp–Sharp Tragedy or The Kentucky Tragedy. Sharp began his political career representing Warren County, Kentucky, in the Kentucky House of Representatives. He briefly served in the War of 1812, then returned to Kentucky and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1813. He was re-elected to a second term, though his support of a controversial bill regarding legislator salaries cost him his seat in 1816. Aligning himself with Kentucky's Debt Relief Party, he returned to the Kentucky House in 1817 but resigned his seat in 1821 to accept Governor John Adair's appointment to the post of Attorney General of Kentucky. In 1818, rumors surfaced that Sharp had fathered a stillborn illegitimate child with Anna Cooke. When the charges were repeated during Sharp's 1825 General Assembly campaign, he supposedly claimed that the child was a mulatto and could not have been his. Jereboam Beauchamp, who had married Cooke in 1824 and was incensed by this attack upon her honor, fatally stabbed Sharp in Sharp's home early on the morning of November 7, 1825. (more...)

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