Caroline (Lynching of)

On Sunday, June 9, 1839, Caroline, a Black woman enslaved by Minerva Buchanan Crawford and Andrew Alexander Crawford, was hanged in Cane Hill Township in Washington County. The previous Friday, Andrew had found Minerva’s lifeless body and their uninjured baby. Caroline was “taken up the next day, had a trial, confessed the crime, was found guilty and on the following day, Sunday, hung.” (The so-called trial was pretext. There was no formal examination of evidence, no judge, no jury, no court or other lawful tribunal, and no Washington County court records.) Other violence in Washington County and Cherokee Nation that year overshadowed the deaths of Minerva and her accused murderer. The speed with which Caroline was tried, convicted, and hanged, combined with the fact that no real legal proceeding was held, makes her killing a lynching rather than a lawful execution.

Settled by Cumberland Presbyterians, by 1839, Cane Hill Township was a well-to-do farming community. In 1840, a total of 197 Cane Hill Township residents (twenty percent) were enslaved, including twenty-one in the Crawford-Buchanan families. Caroline likely came with her enslavers from Lincoln County, Tennessee. She did domestic and agricultural labor. One account claimed she was fifteen. Another account said a son survived her. The Crawford house was probably on the north side of today’s 100 block of west Cleveland Street in Prairie Grove (Washington County), an easy walk to the home of Andrew’s sister Ellen and her husband, the Reverend John “Uncle Buck” Buchanan, and the “White Church.” Other family members lived nearby. Their farm was a half mile away, possibly near the intersection of present-day Apple Hill Road and U.S. Highway 62, southwest of Prairie Grove.

Caroline allegedly murdered Minerva on Friday morning before heading to the farm. In response to Minerva’s beating her, Caroline attacked Minerva with an axe, nearly decapitating her. Minerva’s body was “shockingly mangled, having her head broke in…, and then threw in the fire and almost burnt up.” When she reached the farm, Minerva reported having seen a tramp in the neighborhood. Andrew returned home for lunch and found Minerva’s body and their infant son Robert nearby. Caroline was taken to the nearby church, where “a committee of citizens” convicted her the next day.

For the hanging the following day, the gallows may have been a pole set between two dogwood trees about fifteen feet apart or a large oak branch (sources diverge on the tree or trees used). An ox-drawn cart was the scaffold. If the dogwood account is accurate, her hanging may have been intended as a slow strangulation. After someone, perhaps Uncle Buck (according to Alfred W. Arrington), denied her request for water, the cart began to move, and she “jumped just as far as she could” with an “unearthly scream” or a call for her mother. This lynching was probably attended largely by locals, including six-year-old J. P. Carnahan. Caroline was buried where she died.

Minerva’s and Caroline’s deaths attracted considerably less attention in the news than other deaths in 1839. The Wallaces’ January killing of Nelson Ore; the June 15 murder of five members of Cane Hill’s Wright family; the June 22 assassinations of Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot; and the Wallaces’ September 1839 and August 1840 attacks on John Curry, Lorenzo D. Pollock, and Thomas Wagnon all generated more newspaper coverage, memoirs, and letters, although Stuart Case probably included Minerva’s death in his August 4 letter mentioning “the many murders which have lately taken place.” The committee investigating the Wright murders included two of Andrew Crawford’s brothers and four Buchanan relatives.

The deaths left traces in family stories. In 1935, Ellen Earle Richardson recalled that baby Robert was raised by “Uncle Buck” and Ellen Buchanan after Minerva “was murdered by a Negro woman.” Twenty years later, Richardson claimed that Caroline had murdered other enslavers. In 1957, Susan Carnahan Cruse wrote up the account of her grandfather J. P. Carnahan, who had witnessed the hanging as a child.

Robert’s descendants asserted that Caroline had a son who was raised by the Crawfords and became a lawyer. In the 1840 federal census, two enslaved boys under age ten were listed in the household of Andrew’s sister-in-law Susan Crawford. In February 1863, four enslaved men (including these two) enlisted as undercooks in the First Arkansas Light Artillery (US). One became a presiding elder in the Methodist Church’s segregated Little Rock Conference. One of them could have been Caroline’s son, although their white neighbor remembered them as brothers. Another person listed as enslaved by a Buchanan family reportedly became a lawyer in Kansas.

For additional information:
Arrington, Alfred W. The Desperadoes of the South-West, Containing an Account of the Cane-Hill Murders. New York: W. H. Graham, 1847. http://archive.org/details/GR_95 (accessed March 20, 2026).

Carnahan, Alfred E. The Pyeatts and the Carnahans of Old Cane Hill. Edited by Susan Carnahan Cruse. Washington County Historical Society, Bulletin Series 8. Fayetteville, AR: Washington County Historical Society, 1954.

Case, Stuart Walter. “A Young Man Looks at Fayetteville in the 1830s.” Flashback 26 (August 1976): 1–26.

Cruse, Mrs. Maurice (Susan A.). “The Crawford and Carnahan Graveyards.” Flashback 7 (July 1957): 31.

Fletcher, Patricia A., Jack E. Fletcher, and Lee Whiteley. Cherokee Trail Diaries. vol. 1. Fletcher Family Foundation, 1999.

History of Benton, Washington, Carroll, Madison, Crawford, Franklin, and Sebastian Counties, Arkansas: From the Earliest Time to the Present. Higginson Book Company, 1889.

Lester, Woodie Daniel. The History of the Negro and Methodism in Arkansas and Oklahoma: The Little Rock-Southwest Conference, 1838–1972. Little Rock: Little Rock Annual Conference, The United Methodist Church, 1979.

Neal, James P. “The Memoirs of Col. James P. Neal.” Flashback 5 (August 1955): 15–18.

Reyes, Sid (Crawford). “R. F. Crawford, the Myth and the Man #52ancestorsin52weeks (Week 1-First).” The Archivist’s Daughter blog, January 20, 2019. https://offshoot.home.blog/2019/01/19/r-f-crawford-the-myth-and-the-man-52ancestorsin52weeks-week-1-first/ (accessed March 20, 2026).

Richardson, Ellen Earle. Early Settlers of Cane Hill. Washington County Historical Society, Bulletin Series 9. Fayetteville, AR: Washington County Historical Society, 1955.

“Society in Arkansas.” Dearborn County Democrat (Aurora, IN), August 29, 1839.

Walker, Sue H. “The Women Pioneers of Northwest Arkansas (5 of 6).” Arkansas Gazette Magazine, April 21, 1935, pp. 5, 13.