The use of solvents to loosen the tar was also unpleasant in the extreme, especially when a substance like turpentine came in contact with burned skin. Application of the tar over the rival's clothing was rightly deemed a lesser punishment than placing it on bare skin.
Just a few instances of this practice were recorded in the s, but the passage of the Townshend Acts provoked a sharp increase in its usage. The most common materials used globally for tarring and feathering were, in fact, pine tar and feathers; however, when the eponymous ingredients were in short supply, Americans began to use other materials they had readily on hand. Some common substitutes in the s were syrup and cattails , which are both food products as opposed to building materials and stuffing.
John Malcolm, a British Loyalist and Comptroller for the Customs Service, bore the distinction of being publicly tarred and feathered not just once, but twice. The first incident occurred in Maine in and became an integral element in Malcolm's local reputation. The second tarring and feathering occurred in Boston in after Malcolm was stopped by a local man, George Hewes, for yelling at a young boy. Malcolm struck Hewes down with his cane, and a mob soon gathered outside his home, outraged.
Instead of caving to the mob, he egged them on, shouting, "You say I was tarred and feathered, and that it was not done in a proper manner, damn you let me see the man that dare do it better! His second punishment was so severe that his skin peeled off in chunks, which he saved in a box to show the King how much he had suffered. Religious leader Joseph Smith was dragged from his bed in the middle of the night on March 24, Community members were angry about his supposed plan to take land from them and place it under his own control.
Perhaps the most pressing reason for the midnight kidnapping was the accusation that he had been intimate with a young girl in the community. At different times mobs surrounded their houses or chased them across the countryside. But none of those men were ever tarred and feathered.
Nor were their high-level deputies, such as the collectors and inspectors. Nor were other royal appointees like governors, judges, sheriffs, or justices of the peace. Instead, pre-Revolutionary crowds reserved tar and feathers mainly for working-class Customs employees and other common men: tide-waiters and land-waiters, sailors on Customs ships, informers, and laborers who supported the Crown.
British colonists lived in a deferential society in which everyone expected gentlemen to receive gentler treatment than the mass of ordinary men. Men placed him in a cart beside a barrel of tar. We see this in the exchange that led up to the attack on John Malcolm in January And then Malcolm clubbed Hewes on the head. As the Revolutionary War drew closer, class deference crumbled a little. In September a crowd in East Haddam, Connecticut, tarred and otherwise abused the physician and mill owner Abner Beebe.
Liberty Poles were flagpoles displaying the British Union flag. In a contingent of soldiers stationed in New York pulled down such a flagpole outside a tavern popular with local Whigs, evidently angered by their claim to superior patriotism. The locals erected a taller pole. The two sides also brawled, of course. But those poles displayed flags, not tar and feathers. A tar barrel did appear beside a pole in Williamsburg, Virginia, in November American culture came to associate tar and feathers with the Revolutionary period, but that simply lent the violent punishment a patriotic cachet when crowds revived it during other conflicts.
And they did. In ante-bellum America, mobs tarred and feathered several people who spoke against slavery and threatened prominent abolitionists with the same treatment. When the U. Those riots spilled over into assaults on labor organizers, especially the anti-war Industrial Workers of the World, and on civil-rights activists.
In a branch of the K. Martin Luther King. Schutz, editors San Marino, Cal. Kinvin Roth and Hiller B. Zobel, editors Cambridge, Mass. Alfred F. Neil R. Interesting subject matter, these tales of tar and feathers.
The actions in Summer of seem to be almost coordinated. At least in the southern states. As the Committees of Safety and the Secret Committee took control of the civil governments in the South Carolina and Georgia, the Loyalist response was, quite naturally, to organize their own form of resistance. The Patriots stopped their actions quickly and firmly by providing examples of Tar and Feathers in Charleston, Savannah, and then Augusta. Chased a couple of other Loyalists back to England with threats of the same treatment.
These three occurrences were right around the end of July Do you know of any concerted plan throughout the colonies at that time to dress a few Tories in tar and feathers in each place just as an example?
However, the practice actually began far earlier in Europe, and was first documented in an proclamation from Richard the Lionheart for punishing any thieves discovered on his crusading sea vessels:. Unlike the petroleum-based tar that we now use for paving roads, the sticky stuff used for tarring and feathering unlucky truants for hundreds of years has usually been either pine tar derived from the wood of pine trees, as the name suggests or pitch, which traditionally was the name for resin and only later got attached to petroleum products.
Wood tar was first used for waterproofing wooden ships and structures in ancient Greece, and Northern Europeans began refining birch bark in the Neolithic.
For the most part, artificial sealants replaced natural wood tar and pitch in the 20th century, but petroleum sealants are very tough viscoelastic polymers in their own right and take a long time to change shape.
While pine tar and pitch have lower melting points than petroleum tar, being painted with their melted forms could still be very painful, leading to blistering burns and stripping the skin off when it came time to peel the tar away.
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