Tarring and Feathering an Act of Humiliation and Intimidation

Tarring and Feathering an Act of Humiliation and Intimidation

Tarring and FeatheringAn Act of Humiliation and Intimidation

A man who has been badly tarred and feathered seeks medical help, date unknown. Tarring and feathering is a form of public torture and punishment used to enforce unofficial justice or revenge.
The victim would be stripped naked or stripped to the waist. Wood tar (sometimes hot) was then either poured or painted onto the person while they were immobilized. The victim then either had feathers thrown on them or was rolled around on a pile of feathers so that they stuck to the tar.
dragged him from his house, stripped him of his clothes, and poured hot tar over his body which scalded his skin. They then broke open pillows and covered him in feathers. They placed him on a cart and paraded him through the town of Boston. They passed the Old State House, the Old South Meeting House and the Liberty Tree. Along the way he was severely whipped and beaten with sticks and other objects. The crowd demanded he curse the royal governor and the king, which he refused. After being subjected to further beatings and whippings and threats of more bodily harm (including the threat of cutting off his ears), he ultimately gave in and cursed them. The crowd then forced him to drink tea until he vomited. He then was beaten more until he was finally dropped back at his home after the five hour ordeal. He survived the punishment but would carry the scars of that night for the rest of his life. When removing the tar from his body, the doctors noted that “flesh comes off his back in stakes.” The notorious event was immortalized in a cartoon by Philip Dawe in England entitled “The Bostonians Paying the Excise-Man, or, Tarring & Feathering”.
These violent means of punishing Loyalists and tax collectors was meant to intimidate opponents of their cause but increasingly came to be viewed as appalling forms of anarchy and mob tyranny. 

Many Bostonians recoiled in anger and fear at the brutality of John Malcom’s punishment, and the Sons of Liberty attempted to curtail such punishments in the future. After this, the patriots of Boston stopped tarring and feathering people even as other areas in Massachusetts and other colonies continued to do so over the next few years.
While the use of tar and feathers was popular amongst patriots in the lead up to the war, there is at least one instance of British soldiers using it on a patriot. In March of 1775, patriot Thomas Ditson was caught attempting to buy a musket from a British soldier in the 47th Regiment of Foot in Boston. Ditson was ordered by a British officer to be tarred and feathered for his offense. After taking his shirt off and tarring and feathering him, he was paraded through Boston along with British fifers and drummers who mockingly played “Yankee Doodle.”
There were dozens of tarring and feathering incidents in 1775 and 1776, but after 1776, there are very few recorded instances of it happening. One of the last recorded incidents also happened to be the only time it immediately preceded an execution. In Charleston, South Carolina in December of 1776, a “dissenting minister” named John Roberts was tarred and feathered by a large mob. Afterwards, the mob erected a gibbet and Roberts was hanged. They then torched the gibbet which, along with Roberts, were “consumed to ashes.”
As the war progressed, such protests and demonstrations died down. The use of tar and feathers had been used effectively by patriots as a powerful symbol both locally and abroad as to who held power in colonial communities. However, the wielding of such intimidating tactics made many American colonists and leaders uncomfortable. Many of the founders feared that such actions would lead to mob rule or “mobocracy.” These fears were given further justification when they witnessed the violence that grew out of the French Revolution shortly after the Revolutionary War.
Similar tactics of tarring and feathering were used by the British in Ireland in the Irish Rebellion of 1798 on suspected rebels in a brutal tactic known as “pitch-capping.” Here, hot tar would be placed on the top of a person’s head and then a cap was placed on top this.  After the tar cooled, the cap would be ripped off, tearing off portions of the person’s scalp.  The effect left the person with permanent scarring and a similar warning to those who would defy British rule.
After the Revolutionary War, the use of tarring and feathering as a form of mob justice continued to occur sporadically up through the 19th and 20th centuries in America. Among the more famous instances was the tarring and feathering of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints leader, Joseph Smith in 1832. African Americans, suffragists, and anti-war supporters were among those tarred and feathered over the centuries. Despite its continuous use, the cruel action is still mostly associated with the patriot fervor of the 1760s and 1770s colonial America. Effective as it was in the colonial era, to this day, the term tarring and feathering is still used as a shorthand of the frightening specter of the power of mob rule in American politics.
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