Tarring and Feathering, American Style

Tarring and feathering was an Old World practice dating back to the medieval period. It was brought to British North America by sailors in the mid-eighteenth century. By the late 1760s, it had become a “popular method of intimidating customs officials and castigating informants,” writes historian Benjamin H. Irvin. In the wake of the Townshend Revenue Act of 1766-1767, the practice spread from major ports like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia throughout the colonies as a revolutionary way of attempting to enforce conformity to the cause.

Irvin traces “the evolution and transmission of this folk practice throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, the American colonists’ path from resistance to revolution, and the division of a once peaceable people into belligerent patriot and loyalist camps.” His appendix lists known incidents of tarring and feather from 1766-1784, including attempts and threats to do so.

In tarring and feather, pine tar was poured, brushed or “bedawbed” on the victim, either on bare skin or, more mercifully, over clothes. The victims were then rolled or showered in feathers, then paraded around in the sticky, feathery mess. The tar was typically not heated, but it still “made for a painful experience,” especially when trying to get it off afterwards. Unlike in a lynching, the victims of these ritual humiliations were supposed to survive and be a model for others tempted to do the King’s duty or snitch on those who didn’t. 

The point was public exposure. Irvin gives an example of more than 2,000 Bostonians in 1770 who “thronged” to see the tarring and feathering of a man named Richards. John Hancock, no less, paid the “legal bills of at least one sailor whom Richards sued for trespass and assault.”

1770 also saw the repeal of the Townshend duties, which resulted in a marked decrease of tarring and feathering of customs agents. An effort to boycott British goods meant that people’s homes, stores, and other possessions—including, supposedly, a horse—began to be tarred and feathered. By 1774, Boston’s Sons of Liberty and other patriot groups thought the practice had become counterproductive and toned down its use, but by then it was thriving elsewhere in the colonies.

When armed conflict began in April, 1775, tarring and feathering became a tool for attacking loyalists or Tories. (From a fifth to a third of colonists remained loyal to Britain and George III; up to a third of the colonial population was neutral, indifferent, or wavering.) The continental Congress never explicitly condoned the practice, but neither did they condemn it. “Private correspondence of several delegates suggests that tar-and-feathers was the treatment” Congressmen preferred for those deemed a threat to the “liberties of America.” 

Irvin argues that tar-and-feathers became “a trademark” of the new Americans: “a means of distinguishing friend from foe and asserting one’s allegiance to the cause.”

 “As if to obscure the ancient origins of the ritual, contemporary writers, both patriots and loyalists, described it as a new invention.” One loyalist historian even credited its origins to the people of Massachusetts, though the first patriotic tarring and feathering in 1766 occurred in Norfolk, Virginia.

The practice continued into the nineteenth century, when it was seen as a nod to the history of American patriotism, an iconic act of the struggle for independence. Returning loyalists after the Revolution, revenue agents during the Whiskey Rebellion (1794), and allies of the British during the War of 1812 all felt the tar brush and the ghastly embrace of the feathers. 

So too did those who broke moral codes, like adulterers, gamblers, and prostitutes. Dissenters were also targeted: abolitionists before the Civil War, union activists in the early twentieth century, pacifists and at least one German-American during WWI. In 1971, two centuries after the practice had become “American,” a Michigan school principal was tarred and feathered by the KKK.

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