Entry Type: Event - Starting with C

Closson, William (Lynching of)

In May 1869, a white man named William Closson was lynched in DeWitt (Arkansas County) after his first murder trial apparently ended in a hung jury. Sources on the event are limited. According to a reprinting in the Arkansas Gazette of an article published in DeWitt’s Sentinel on May 22, 1869, Closson had been indicted at the November 1868 term of the Arkansas County Circuit Court for having murdered William Word, who resided near Crockett’s Bluff (Arkansas County). Indeed, the Weekly Arkansas Gazette reprinted on May 12, 1868, an article from DeWitt’s Elector that gives more detail as to the affair. According to this, on Saturday, April 11, 1868, Word was leaving DeWitt and “starting in the direction of Crockett’s …

Coal Hill Convict Lease Investigation (1888)

In the spring of 1888, the coal mining operations in Johnson County, worked by convict leased labor, were the focus of an investigation by the state of Arkansas for reported cases of brutality. The investigation led to a reevaluation of the convict lease system and its eventual abolishment several years later. During the years immediately following the Civil War, Arkansas developed a growing prison population and acquired the financial problems associated with such growth. Governor Isaac Murphy proposed instituting the practice of leasing convicts to assist in solving this problem. In 1867, the state established the convict lease system. The company of Hodges, Peay and Ayliff contracted with the state at the rate of thirty-five cents a day to provide …

Colbert Raid

On April 17, 1783, British-sympathizing Native Americans and British nationals carried out an attack upon the Spanish garrison based at Arkansas Post on the Arkansas River. This attack was considered the only battle of the American Revolution to be fought in what is now Arkansas. In 1762, Spain took control of French Louisiana west of the Mississippi after King Louis XV ceded the area in anticipation of losing the ongoing French and Indian War. It was 1766 before Spanish troops arrived to take over Arkansas Post from the French garrison. The Spanish struggled to maintain order at the post, which was still mainly populated by French trappers, and to protect it from the English who were just across the Mississippi …

Cole, George (Lynching of)

On May 7, 1872, a man named George Cole was shot down by a group of men in Randolph County for having allegedly mistreated his wife, among other infractions. The murder has been included in many lists of lynchings in the state of Arkansas. The Arkansas Gazette, on May 25, 1872, reprinted correspondence from Pocahontas (Randolph County) describing the victim and details of his murder. According to this correspondent, Cole “was a turbulent man, being nearly always in a neighborhood feud, and usually kept a lot of lewd women about him. He was half Indian blood, had a dark skin, and was a bold, fearless man.” Cole reportedly lived six miles from the state line and was believed to have …

Confederate Flag Day

Confederate Flag Day is an annual Arkansas state holiday celebrated the Saturday before Easter, officially established in 1957. Efforts in the twenty-first century to remove the day as an official state holiday have proven to be unsuccessful. The holiday became official in the state with the passage of Act 124 of 1957. Signed into law on February 28, 1957, by Governor Orval Faubus, the enabling legislation simply denotes the Saturday before Easter as Confederate Flag Day. The brief text of the act does not include any information on how the holiday should be celebrated. The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) had promoted the holiday at their meetings, and representatives of the UDC were present when Faubus signed Act 124 …

Congress and Saladin, Collision of

The steam packet Saladin collided with the steamboat Congress on the evening of February 14, 1846, near Islands 86 and 87 in the Mississippi River at Kentucky Bend off Chicot County, sinking the Congress and killing as many as thirty passengers and crew. The Saladin, a sidewheel packet built in Louisville, Kentucky, by Thomas C. Coleman and John Coleman in 1846, was steaming toward New Orleans, Louisiana, as the steamboat Congress was heading upriver with a load of dry goods and both cabin and deck passengers. The Saladin, having stopped at the landing of the William H. Pope plantation, reentered the river channel at about 7:00 p.m. on the “cloudy and very dark” night. Spying the Saladin when it was …

Constitutional Conventions

A constitutional convention is a meeting of delegates to establish a document that serves as the framework for government. Arkansas has had eight conventions. Five conventions resulted in documents being adopted, and three conventions produced documents that were rejected by voters. Arkansas has had at least three failed convention calls. In October 1835, Arkansas’s Territorial Assembly met in Little Rock (Pulaski County) to take steps toward statehood. Legislation calling for a convention was introduced, and the issue of delegate apportionment was raised. An amendment was adopted that provided that convention representation be based on that of the legislature, whose makeup was based upon the number of white men. The legislation called for a convention consisting of fifty-two delegates to be …

Conway-Crittenden Duel

aka: Crittenden-Conway Duel
In 1827, Henry Wharton Conway and Robert Crittenden, both important figures in territorial Arkansas, fought a duel that had profound implications for the course of Arkansas history. Conway, a former naval officer and governmental employee originally from Tennessee, had relocated to Arkansas for a governmental post and eventually sought political office in Arkansas. Crittenden, originally from Kentucky, also served in the armed forces and later held political positions in Arkansas; he was originally a political supporter of Conway. Both were young, professional, and successful in their own right, but a conflict ensued between the two during an Arkansas election campaign, leading Crittenden to challenge Conway to a duel. Conway and Crittenden were friends and had worked together in an official …

Cooper v. Henslee

Cooper v. Henslee was a 1975 Arkansas Supreme Court free speech case that struck down the 1941 state law that made advocating communism illegal and that barred the employment of communists by any government agency or institution. The court said such laws violated the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protections of free speech, assembly, and association. The plaintiff was Dr. Grant Cooper—a young history professor in Little Rock (Pulaski County) whose father was a prominent physician, philanthropist, and former member of the Little Rock School Board. In the early 1970s, Cooper started telling his students at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock that a communist revolution would someday turn America from a plutocracy into a just society. A student newspaper …

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Pandemic

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) began sweeping the world beginning in late 2019. The virus created a large-scale public health crisis and caused some countries to quarantine entire regions—or, in the case of Italy, the entire nation. The pandemic also cratered the economies of many nations throughout the world. The virus was first detected in Arkansas in March 2020. COVID-19 is an infectious disease closely related to the original SARS virus (SARS-CoV), which produced a worldwide epidemic in 2002–2003; the virus that causes COVID-19 is, in fact, designated SARS-CoV-2. The name stems from the virus’s appearance in electron micrographs, exhibiting a crown (corona) shape. Symptoms of COVID-19 include cough and fever, and the disease spreads like influenza, through droplets in …

Corvett, George (Lynching of)

A white laborer named George Corvett was lynched on February 12, 1890, two miles west of Crawfordsville (Crittenden County) for having allegedly raped and murdered a young woman named Ada Goss. According to the Arkansas Gazette, Ada Goss was the daughter of H. C. Goss, “a highly respected citizen,” and the Goss and Corvett families were related by marriage, with George Corvett working for H. C. Goss. The 1880 federal census records an Ada Goss, then about five years old, living with her parents, H. C. and Laura Goss, and two siblings. Her father worked as a farmer. The census does not record anyone named George Corvett (or similarly named) living in the vicinity. On the night of February 11, …

Cosgrove, Charles (Execution of)

Charles Cosgrove was hanged in Little Rock (Pulaski County) on June 10, 1859, for murdering a man from Georgia and stealing his money. Charles Cosgrove was a native of Ireland who moved to Little Rock in the summer of 1858. In early February 1859, G. G. R. Lester of Georgia came to Arkansas “on an errand of mercy and kindness to one of his kindred.” Lester and Cosgrove were staying in the same boardinghouse. On February 19, 1859, the two men left the house around dusk and were seen walking together toward the Arkansas River. A witness soon “heard cries of murder,” and the next day authorities found pools of blood in a wooded area and signs that something large …

Cote Joyeuse and Talma, Collision of

The steamboats Cote Joyeuse and Talma collided near Big Cypress Bend (Chicot County) on the Mississippi River in the early morning hours of August 20, 1847, sinking the Cote Joyeuse and killing one of the vessel’s officers. The Cote Joyeuse was a 142-ton steamboat built at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1842 and owned by Captain Thomas T. Tunstall of Jacksonport (Jackson County). The ship advertised regular runs to Pocahontas (Randolph County), Powhatan (Lawrence County), Batesville (Independence County), Jacksonport, and Elizabeth (Jackson County) and could “take freight for all the bends below White River” while descending the Mississippi to New Orleans, Louisiana. Around 1:30 a.m. on August 20, 1847, the Cote Joyeuse collided with the Talma, a 306-ton sidewheel paddleboat built in …

Cotter Expulsion of 1906

In 1906, white residents of Cotter (Baxter County) expelled all of the town’s African-American population, save for a single family of three people. (The population had not been great.) Although the precipitating event was a fight between two black men, local newspapers had been predicting, and even advocating for, such an expulsion long before that fracas occurred. Afterward, Cotter remained a “sundown town.” The area that is now Baxter County had black residents before the Civil War. For example, Orrin L. Dodd, located in what is now Mountain Home (Baxter County), owned thirty slaves by the 1860 census. Too, there was a small free black population nearby in Marion County. In 1880, the first census conducted after Baxter County’s creation showed …

Cotton Pickers Strike of 1891

The Cotton Pickers Strike of 1891 was an ill-conceived attempt by a group of African-American sharecroppers in Lee County, perhaps loosely affiliated with the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Union (commonly called the Colored Famers’ Alliance), to increase the wages they received from local planters for picking cotton. By the time a white mob put down the strike, more than a dozen African Americans and one white man had been killed. The Colored Farmers’ Alliance was founded in Texas in 1886 as the black counterpart to the Farmers’ Alliance, an all-white organization that was part of the late nineteenth-century populist, agrarian reform movement. The Colored Farmers’ Alliance spread quickly throughout the South, claiming a membership of more than one million …

Cotton Plant, Affairs at

The Affairs at Cotton Plant are two separate events that took place on successive days near the town of Cotton Plant (Woodruff County) and the Cache River. DeValls Bluff (Prairie County) served as a major Union outpost in eastern Arkansas. Supplies were brought up the White River and transported from the town by rail to the northern shore of the Arkansas River across from Little Rock (Pulaski County). Protecting the area immediately surrounding DeValls Bluff remained an important Federal objective for much of the war. Numerous Union units operated in and around DeValls Bluff, including at the towns of Augusta (Woodruff County) and Clarendon (Monroe County). Control of these towns in eastern Arkansas allowed Federal troops to protect the vital …

Cotton, John (Lynching of)

On July 15, 1893, a seventeen-year-old African American named John Cotton was hanged near Cornerville (Lincoln County) for an alleged attack on the wife of John Tucker, a prominent area farmer. According to the Forrest City Times, on Thursday, July 13, Cotton tried to assault Tucker while he thought her husband was away. John Tucker, however, was in a field nearby, where he heard her screams, and ran to the house. Cotton escaped, and as news spread of the attempted attack, a mob gathered. Cotton managed to elude them, “running like a hunted beast through the fields and woods.” He could find no food and no hiding place, and by Saturday afternoon he was exhausted and collapsed. His pursuers caught …

Covington, Riley (Reported Lynching of)

In the summer of 1877, a number of newspapers reported that an African American man named Riley Covington had been lynched for murder in Osceola (Mississippi County). This information has been included on various inventories of lynching events, and his reported murder is even memorialized at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. However, Covington was not actually lynched but, instead, was tried, convicted of murder, and incarcerated. The June 26, 1877, edition of Illinois’s Cairo Bulletin gives the most detailed information on Covington’s alleged crimes and arrest. Covington first came under suspicion when, in November 1876, he befriended a Black cotton picker identified only as Shackleford near Osceola. The two disappeared, and several weeks later, Covington …

Coy, Edward (Lynching of)

On February 20, 1892, Edward Coy, a thirty-two-year-old African-American man, was burned at the stake in Texarkana (Miller County) before a crowd of approximately 1,000 people. Ida B. Wells, a journalist and prominent anti-lynching crusader, described Coy’s murder as one of the most shocking and repulsive in the history of lynching. Coy, described in press accounts as “mulatto,” was charged with a crime “from which the laws provide adequate punishment. Ed Coy was charged with assaulting Mrs. Henry [Julia] Jewell, a white woman. A mob pronounced him guilty, strapped him to a tree, chipped the flesh from his body, poured coal oil over him, and the woman in the case set fire to him.” According to the New York Times, …

Craighead and Lawrence Counties, Scout in

The Eleventh Missouri Cavalry Regiment (US) established its base at Jacksonport (Jackson County) on April 18, 1864, and began almost continuous scouting expeditions into the surrounding region in search of enemy troops and guerrillas. One such scout was conducted into Craighead and Lawrence counties in early May. Captain George W. Weber of Squadron M, Eleventh Missouri Cavalry, led a detachment of a lieutenant and fifty-two men out of Camp Sherman at Jacksonport on the morning of May 5, 1864, with orders to explore the area between Village Creek and the Cache River. Particular attention was to be paid to the area called the “Promised Land”—modern-day Egypt (Craighead County)—as the Federals sought to “gather all the information possible as to the …

Crawford County Executions of 1843

Two enslaved African American men named Frank and Dennis were hanged at Van Buren (Crawford County) on December 22, 1843, after being convicted of raping a white woman. The Arkansas Intelligencer newspaper reported that a grand jury convened in Van Buren on May 15, 1843, and indicted two men “for committing a rape on the person of Mrs. Susan Rose.” One of them, named Frank, was tried the next day, and the Intelligencer reported “the jury retired, and in a few minutes returned a verdict of guilty.” The other man, Dennis, was tried the next day and likewise found guilty, with the newspaper reporting “the evidence was the same in each case, and not one particle of evidence was in …

Crenshaw, George (Lynching of)

On September 2 or 3, 1885, an African American man named George Crenshaw was taken from jail and hanged by a mob near Lewisville (Lafayette County) for allegedly murdering a young salesman named Harry W. Paup. According to the September 1 edition of the Arkansas Gazette, at 10:00 p.m. on Friday, August 28 (another report says August 29), a young salesman and “highly respected young gentleman” named Harry W. Paup was walking through a cotton field near the home of an elderly black man named George Crenshaw. Crenshaw’s dogs began to bark and alerted Crenshaw, described as a “blood-thirsty old demon.” Crenshaw grabbed his gun, and though another man, Mike Ross, tried to stop him, ran to the field, spotted …

Crittenden County Executions of 1871

John Roseborough and Henry Harris, both African American men convicted of murder, were hanged at Marion (Crittenden County) on June 9, 1871; before the execution, they attempted to keep from going to the gallows by barricading themselves in a cell. No accounts appear to exist of their trials, but Roseborough was convicted of killing “old man” William Freeman, while Harris was sentenced to death for the murder of John B. Crockett. Both were to be executed on June 9, 1871. A Memphis, Tennessee, newspaper reported the day before the scheduled execution that the Crittenden County sheriff “has been selecting a guard of white men to surround the scaffold during the executions because he feared a rescue by the negroes, ten …