Right. Well take out all the pw::'s. They aren't necessary. You have CURLcode already. Just assign the of curl_easy_perform to result.

Code:
    int pw::exec()
    {
        // Set URL

        curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, &target);
        std::cout << "1\n"; //code crashes after this point

        // Attempt to retrieve the remote page
        result = curl_easy_perform(curl); // i believe it crashes here. I can't seem to access the curl object anyhow.
        std::cout << "2\n";  //code crashes before this point

        // Did we succeed?
        if (result == CURLE_OK)
        {
            std::cout << buffer;
        }
        else
        {
            std::cout << "Error: [" << result << "] - " << errorBuffer;
        }
    }
Also, you should cleanup in the destrutor.