The Kentucky Tragedy and Other Stories

By Jim Tsukagoshi

This collection of short stories begins with the Kentucky Tragedy, the state's first death penalty case… with a man who may have been wrongfully convicted. Another story covers a woman's rise from the sex industry to a businesswoman in a loving relationship. The remaining stories feature an interracial love triangle, an attempt at emotionally aware AI, and an embezzlement coverup that will keep readers guessing until the end.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667858982

Book preview

The Kentucky Tragedy

In Frankfort, Kentucky, a small leather-bound journal was among the books displayed at a book fair table. At first glance, I knew it was very old. I opened it. It was handwritten, with small letters. The ink was soft, written with a light hand. The faded, worn entries belonged to a woman named Arachne, with no family name. The entries were in intervals, starting in September 1814 and ending in March 1836.

I riffled the pages, and the entry for one day in July 1826 caught my eye.

In Bloomfield in Nelson County—a small town in central Kentucky—a coffin was buried at the Bloomfield Cemetery in the town. A man and his wife were interred in a single coffin in which both were placed with her head on his right arm and his left encircling her bosom.

This encounter with the journal entry aroused my interest in digging into a chain of events called the Kentucky Tragedy that had unfolded in this state capital almost two centuries earlier.

I visited the Old Bloomfield Cemetery and saw the epitaph written by the wife a month before the internment. The original large stone plate covering the burial spot was broken into a few pieces, and thus illegible. But the headstone set up subsequently had the whole epitaph on the face. The two hundred-word epitaph ended with the following four lines:

His wife distain’d a life forlorn,

Without her heart’s lov’d honor’d lord,

Then, reader, here their fortunes mourn,

Who for their love their life-blood pour’d.

The husband had been arrested as a suspect for the murder of a state election candidate who had recently resigned from the state attorney general’s post. The suspect was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by hanging. His wife bribed the jailer and spent the night with her husband in the cell a day before the execution was scheduled. They attempted to commit double suicide. The critically wounded wife was dying. The husband’s self-inflicted wounds had severely injured him, but he survived. When he visited his wife’s deathbed before his hanging, he kissed her lips and mourned, For you, I lived—for you I die.

He was quickly taken to the gallows in Frankfort. Five thousand people gathered and witnessed the hanging. He became the first man to be legally hanged in Kentucky. The news instantly hit every corner in the country. People called the whole incident The Kentucky Tragedy.

The tragedy ended when they were buried in the cemetery. That’s what the history books have been telling readers for generations. But the journal the author found at the book fair recorded otherwise.

The registry began with the scene in Baltimore in the fall of 1814.

1.

At the saloon of the Indian Queen Hotel in Baltimore, a man was sitting at a table with a glass of whiskey. The bar was packed with men celebrating the morning’s U.S. victory in the battle with the British troops. The man was in his mid-thirties. He had been kept captive on a British war vessel until the morning of that day and had returned to the hotel a while earlier.

One of the waitresses was a tall woman, in her late twenties, with large blue-green eyes, high cheekbones, and dark-colored hair tied on the back of her head. The man was quietly reciting a poem to himself with a glass in his hand. It caught the woman’s attention.

Oh say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave ...

Their blood has wash’d out their foul footsteps’ pollution ...

Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land...

Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,

And this be our motto: In God is our trust...

The waitress took a seat across from the man. She listened to the poem until the man finished. Bloody but heart-touching lines. The waitress asked him, I’ve never heard this poem. Whose is it, sir?

It’s mine, answered the man.

The woman pulled up the hem of her skirt and tore off a piece of cloth from her petticoat.

Would you write down your poem for me, sir? I will bring a pen and an ink fountain. She rushed to the office behind the bar counter and returned with a feather pen and a small ink fountain.

The man picked up the pen, dipped it in the fountain, and scribbled his poem on the cloth. Do you like poems, miss?

Poetry has always been my favorite, sir.

I’m Francis Scott Key. What is your name, miss?

People call me Arachne. She showed a black spider tattoo on her wrist to the man.

The man said, Arachne. A spider in a Greek myth.

That’s right. My real name is Alicia, Mr. Key.

The man finished writing down his poem on the cloth. He titled it Defence of Fort M’Henry.

Mr. Key, what inspired you to compose these lyrics?

Key told Alicia that he had set sail from Baltimore in early September 1814 aboard a British warship. His purpose for the sail was to secure an exchange of prisoners during the war. The War of 1812 was between the United States of America and the United Kingdom.

From the deck of the boat, Key saw the bombardment of Fort McHenry at the Baltimore Harbor by British ships. The fort was on the peninsula’s southern tip, sticking out to the bay. He saw a small storm flag of the United States of America was replaced with the thirty by forty-two feet larger flag on the dawn of September 14, signaling American victory over the British.

The flag was with fifteen stars and fifteen stripes, known as the Star-Spangled Banner. Key was inspired by the flag flying triumphantly above the fort after fierce bombardment by the enemy ships. He immediately composed the lyrics. Key continued to revise the poem during the day. He had come to the final version when sitting at the table in the bar.

The waitress looked at the cloth Key handed to her. She thought about it for a while. Then, she started setting it to the tune known as To Anacreon in Heaven. It was a famous British song composed for London’s amateur musicians’ social club. Alicia had often heard visitors hum it in Philadelphia, where she was from. The people in the bar immediately followed the tune and joined Alicia in singing the song together.

Before long, the music was heard everywhere in Baltimore, and within a few days, it was known on the entire East Coast. No one knew then that the song would be later renamed The Star-Spangled Banner and be proclaimed the national anthem a century later in 1931.

2.

The War of 1812 was a remnant of the American Revolutionary War, which was the result of the economic and trade disputes between the newly born America and her former ruler. Despite her defeat in the American Revolutionary War, the United Kingdom tied up with some tribes of Native Americans and continued to influence the politics and economy of the United States of America. The leftover French and Spanish powers also conspired with the United Kingdom to disrupt America’s domestic affairs.

The war started in June 1812 and ended in February 1815. The United States of America won the battles on Lake Erie and in the suburb of New Orleans. But the overall outcome of the war ended in a draw between the two countries. However, with no further obstructions of the United Kingdom and other foreign influences after the war, expansion to the West and the South was accelerated. In addition, the crippled agrarian output in Central Europe caused by the Napoleonic Wars offered new markets for American staple crops such as cotton, wheat, corn, and tobacco. This demand for staple crops from Europe brought an economic boom to the United States. As the prices of crops soared, a speculative agrarian land boom emerged in the South and West of the country, supported by the government’s liberal terms for public land sales. The farmland boom created the inflationary bubble from 1815 to 1818.

The Kentucky territory was first visited in the 1670s by British and French explorers. One hundred years later, Daniel Boone arrived in the region in 1769. The first settlement was established in 1774 at present-day Harrodsburg. The name of Kentucky is of native American origin and means land of tomorrow or meadowland. During the American Revolution, Native Americans sided with the British. Because of the United Kingdom’s defeat in the war, most of the critical conflicts between the settlers and the Native American tribes in the Midwest and the East of the Mississippi were settled. Settlers started crossing the Appalachian Mountains to present-day Kentucky and Tennessee. Kentucky, originally part of the Virginia colony, was admitted as the fifteenth state of the Union on June 1, 1792. The population grew from seventy-four thousand to over four hundred thousand in 1810. Many of the settlers were from Virginia.

Solomon Shapey was one of those early settlers from Virginia. He was eight years old when his family moved to Kentucky in 1795. The family settled in Russellville, Logan County. Shapey attended a Logan County academy. He read the law and was admitted to the bar in 1806. He opened a practice in Bowling Green in Warren County. Besides law practice, Shapey aggressively engaged in land acquisition. He took advantage of the government’s generous public land sales and acquired more than five thousand acres in Warren County in the early 1800s.

In 1809, Solomon Shapey was elected to represent Warren County in the Kentucky House of Representatives. He was reelected in 1810 and served on many committees. When the War of 1812 erupted, Solomon Shapey enlisted in the Kentucky militia. He was rapidly promoted to the rank of major and later to colonel.

Colonel Shapey was sitting across from Timothy Cope in the bar when Alicia hummed Key’s poem.

Timothy Cope was the son of an immigrant to Virginia from England. His ancestors in England were cloak and cape makers. Born in Richmond, Virginia, Timothy worked for a local law firm as a clerk and studied law. He married Maria when he set up his independent law practice. He became a successful lawyer in Richmond and, in later years, was elected as a state representative. Timothy had served for six terms when the War of 1812 broke out. He enlisted in the Virginia state militia. The Virginia and Kentucky militias fought side by side against the British troops in the battle of Baltimore, and one day Timothy Cope met Solomon Shapey at a joint session between the two militias’ leaders. Major Cope was in his fifties when he met Colonel Shapey.

Colonel, you own more than five thousand acres of farmland in Kentucky. It’s amazing. Please tell me your secret.

Major Cope, I am not the only one in my area who has been engaged in land speculation. Kentucky and Tennessee have been the regions where settlers from the East moved in to take advantage of cheap land. People had their land registered even before they settled down. The disputes over land ownership emerged everywhere. That’s why there are so many law firms in our area. After this war ends and the threats from the Native Americans disappear, I bet that more people will settle in the West and the South. The federal government will sell more public land. We will have a widespread land boom on a scale we have never seen before. Why don’t you invest some of your money in land purchases? You should be able to earn quick money.

Are public lands still available to buy in Kentucky?

Yes. But to make good money, you should look at the farmlands further west, west of the Mississippi. The land there is cheap, and its value will appreciate much faster than in Kentucky.

Like where, Colonel?

I keep my eye on the public lands in the Missouri territory. Missouri will be the starting base for future settlers who will cross the plains to reach the Far West like Oregon and California. We will see wagon trains lining up to the horizon soon.

Cope was impressed with Shapey’s insight. He regretted that he had never paid close attention to the west of the Appalachian Mountains. Cope had saved some cash at his bank, and he also thought that he would be able to borrow more money from the bank if he mortgaged his residence for a loan. His home was in an upper-class residential area in Richmond with reasonably decent values.

Do you know anyone in Missouri I can contact, Colonel?

I have some access to the people engaged in land sales there. I will write you the names you can contact.

I appreciate your help. My wife and I have one daughter and three sons. I’m already fifty-four years old. There aren’t any new opportunities left in Virginia.

Finishing their glasses of liquor, they stood up and shook hands. Then, they left the bar for each camp the militia had temporarily set up in a suburb of Baltimore. Solomon Shapey didn’t fail to notice that Timothy Cope locked eyes with the waitress with the black spider tattoo on her wrist and smiled at her before stepping out of the bar. The woman was gorgeous. Who is she? Shapey wondered.

3.

Ann Cope screamed, Mother! Why do we have to move out of this house? It’s been only a few weeks since Father passed away, and God rest his soul. Ann Cope was demanding an explanation from Maria Cope, her mother.

Ann, your father lost everything in his speculation. For God’s sake, he even mortgaged this house to borrow money. The bank will foreclose the house very soon.

Where are we moving?

To Kentucky, Ann.

Kentucky! Are you serious? Kentucky is west of the Appalachian Mountains. Ann sighed. Have you lost your mind, Mother? Thanks to your frequent interferences, I haven’t found a husband even here in Richmond. I’m thirty-three years old. I will be unmarried for good. She sighed again. There’s no way I’ll be able to find a husband in such a remote corner of the country.

Ann, you are still unmarried because you’ve been too picky. If you’d settled down with one of the men I introduced to you, you’d be happily married, and I’d have been a grandmother by now.... Maria Cope trailed off and mumbled.

How in the world did you come up with the idea of moving to Kentucky? Ann demanded. We have no relatives in that state.

I wrote to Colonel Solomon Shapey in Bowling Green, Kentucky, for his help. I met the colonel several times when he was a U.S. congressman and stayed in Washington DC seven or eight years ago.

What does Shapey do?

He is now a Kentucky state representative and is said to become the Kentucky attorney general next year. Colonel Shapey was a two-term U.S. congressman and a state representative for two terms before that. Colonel is one of the most influential politicians in Kentucky, I reckon. I’m sure that our association with such an influential man should bring us a bright future. Oh, I almost forgot. Colonel Shapey is of your age and still single. You could think of him as your future husband.

Father, God rest his soul, mentioned his name. He had told me just before he passed away that Shapey was the one who had solicited Father for land speculation. Why didn’t he lose money while our father lost everything, Mother?

Honey, your father made a stupid mistake, but he wasn’t the only one who suffered from the sudden plunge in land values. You should blame the Panic of 1819. Colonel Shapey had already owned a vast amount of land before the boom began after the War of 1812. He owns over ten thousand acres in the Bowling Green area. Ann, ten thousand acres! He is one of the few lucky investors who escaped from the Panic.

How does Shapey intend to help us?

Can you believe it? He wrote me back saying that he’ll kindly give away two hundred acres of his plantation to us. That should be enough to support our family.

The government offered public land at two dollars per acre to encourage Westward migration after the War of 1812. The purchase of public land with a minimum of one hundred and sixty acres required a down payment of one-fourth of the total cost and the balance in four annual payments—even those who had little cash assets aggressively borrowed money from banks to join the speculation boom. Banks also extended large amounts of credit to the speculators to expand their banking business. Soon, the public land debt ballooned. It grew from three million dollars in 1815 when the war ended to seventeen million in 1818. The U.S. Treasury accepted land payments in the form of banknotes issued by the Western and Southern state banks. These state banks often lacked sufficient specie reserves to back up their overextended credit. The treasury department, which on the one hand was facing pressure to reduce the war debt, was, at the same time, forced to accept depreciated banknotes to avoid private bank failures. By July 1818, the Second Bank of the United States, the then central bank of the United States of America, had liabilities exceeding twenty-two million dollars. The Second Bank of the United States had no choice but to cut back credit sharply. The branch offices of the central bank abruptly began to reject all state-chartered banknotes in August 1818. In turn, the state banks in the West and South started to call in their loans to cash-poor farmers and speculators on the heavily mortgaged lands they had financed. Most borrowers’ mortgages quickly fell into arrears. The land values dropped by fifty percent and even by seventy-five percent. Banks foreclosed the properties. In addition to that, when the news spread to the rest of the country, the prices of the commodities inflated when the after-war economic boom suddenly dropped. The value of cotton, for instance, dropped twenty-five percent in a single day. Thus, the Panic of 1819, the first widespread financial crisis in the United States of America, assaulted the country.

Timothy Cope was one of those speculators who lost their bets. Having invested all his cash and the money he had borrowed from his bank on his bet, Cope lost almost all his family assets. He was devastated by the loss. He resigned from the state representative and withdrew himself from public life. Before long, he suffered multiple heart attacks and died. Timothy Cope left precious little assets to his family.

4.

In the fall of 1820, Maria Cope, widow of the late Timothy Cope, her daughter Ann, and three sons left Richmond, Virginia, for Kentucky on two Conestoga covered-wagons drawn by teams of oxen, harnessed in pairs following the trail crossing the Appalachian Mountains. The leftover assets they mounted on the wagons didn’t amount to much: some furniture, clothes, kitchenware, and a large volume of the books Timothy Cope had collected as a lawyer. Many were law books and some classical literature. Two slaves, a male in his thirties and a female in her fifties, followed the wagons.

They frequently looked back. They knew there was almost no chance of seeing the East Coast civilization again in their lives. The expansion to the West had begun a decade earlier, but the land over the Appalachian Mountains was still considered a brutal world. Nevertheless, as an unyielding woman, Maria Cope harbored some expectations for a new life. On the other hand, Ann could not wipe out her regret of having spent her past years loafing the time away and remaining unmarried.

They headed west toward the Appalachian Mountains. The trail had recently been opened to travel to the west of the mountains. The Appalachian Mountains were not high. The highest peak was only a little over four thousand feet. But the ranges were covered with dense forests with tall trees. The trees were so closely packed that most trails crossing the numerous creeks and streams running at the bottom of the steep valleys and gorges received no sunlight. They saw stalactite caves here and there on limestone layers. They could see cascading ranges spreading toward the west like an ocean when they reached a plateau. Sunrise through the morning fog. Sunset under the pink sky. They traveled through a beautiful country. Once they crossed the mountains, they entered the gently rolled hilly slopes. They saw the pastures opened by the early settlers, where horses and cattle were roaming on thick green grass.

The plantation that Colonel Shapey had gifted Maria Cope was a two hundred-acre tract outside Bowling Green. It was a part of the land Shapey had acquired when he started his law practice. The plantation grew corn, and the crop should have been enough to support a five-member family. Maria was in her mid-fifties. She had never been engaged in manual labor. She could not count on her daughter and three sons to run the plantation because they had neither the experience nor the desire to do so. The sole enslaved man was the only labor power available for Maria Cope. She might have to hire a few farmhands for busy seasons. Colonel Shapey had promised Maria his assistance to secure labor power. The house was a two-story colonial style one, with a large living room, a library, a dining room on the first floor, and four bedrooms on the second floor. The kitchen, a storage room, and a garage for two carriages were attached to the back of the building. Two huts for the slaves were located next to a barn about thirty yards from the house. They bought three mules after they arrived. The mules were for plowing the field and drawing the carriages.

When the family settled at the plantation, Colonel Shapey, the then state representative, visited Maria and Ann to greet them. Shapey didn’t feel guilty that he had advised Timothy Cope to go with the tide of quick money-making schemes, bringing unfortunate outcomes to the Cope family. Timothy Cope had been foolish enough to throw all his eggs in a single basket for land speculation. He had been too much of an amateur player for such a risky, speculative game. Still, Shapey was sympathetic to the situations the Cope family had faced. He visited them whenever he returned to Bowling Green from Frankfort, the state capital. He held a hidden motive for frequent visits, which Maria and Ann had not known for a while.

Shapey was thirty-three years old, the same age as Ann, and was a bachelor. When he met Ann for the first time, Shapey was attracted to her beauty. She was not young as a single woman, but Ann carried the air of the elegant atmosphere of the East Coast upper-class establishment. Shapey wondered why such an attractive woman was unmarried. He noticed that her mother was headstrong, and surmised that she could be controlling her daughter’s fate. What if he courted Ann while avoiding Maria’s watchful eye?

5.

The 1819 Panic brought a serious political controversy to Kentucky. The Panic left many farmers and speculators in debt and unable to meet their financial obligations. Debt relief emerged as a political movement in Kentucky. These farmers and speculators supported the pro-relief candidates in the election, and the pro-relief faction won the majority vote in the General Assembly in 1820.

Before 1819, Solomon Shapey had supported internal improvements such as building railways and bridges, expansion to the West and the South, and aggressive credit pools provided by financial institutions for infrastructure improvements and public land purchases. He had also supported the creation of the Second Bank of the United States to provide financial support for internal improvements when he was a U.S. Representative. He had again endorsed creating forty-six banks in Kentucky as a Kentucky state legislator. Thus, Shapey had supported the creditors and aggressively backed up the inflationary bubble, precipitating the Panic.

The 1820 Kentucky General Assembly passed a replevin law to relieve the debtors in the crisis. The disgruntled creditors appealed to the Court of Appeals, citing that the law passed by the General Assembly was unconstitutional. The appeals court decided in favor of the creditors. The pro-debt-relief supporters attempted to remove the anti-relief justices, but they failed. Then, the pro-relief legislature abolished the court of appeals and replaced it with a new court. Thus, the Old Court–New Court controversy emerged in Kentucky. The eighth governor of Kentucky, John Adair, was pro-relief and appointed pro-relief justices in the new court, which upheld the replevin law.

Solomon Shapey should have sided with the anti-relief faction as a supporter of expansion and improvement. However, during this political turmoil, Shapey changed his position and supported the pro-debt-relief movement. Having done so, Solomon Shapey was now a pro-relief politician.

Governor Adair appointed Shapey as the state attorney general in 1821. Shapey was only thirty-four years old. Adair’s successor, Joseph Desha, reappointed Shapey as the attorney general.

6.

A man in his mid-fifties, well turned out, came into a tavern of an inn and stagecoach station at the town square of