Tar and Feathers in Revolutionary America – Part Two of Two (Part One appeared in MT Eagle week of 7/24/25.)

A Time honored practice with humiliating and sometimes lethal results was a favored form of punishment in the American Colonies.

Submitted by Louis Myers

Benjamin H. Irvin Brandeis University

In this resolve, however, Bostonians were alone. After 1773, mobs throughout the colonies continued to treat offenders to the "new-fashioned discipline." And, within this period, the meaning of tar and feathers continued to evolve. The punishment that had once been reserved for trade war culprits was increasingly applied to Tories and their sympathizers. In Georgia, New Jersey, and Connecticut, villagers were quick to feather any perceived "enemy to the rights of America." Tar and feathers were also put to use by the various local committees that formed throughout the colonies. In Charleston, the Secret Committee ordered the first South Carolina tarring and featherings for two men charged with disrespect towards the General Committee. Women also took part in this patriotic ritual. In the fall of 1777, for instance, the participants in a quilting bee seized a youth who dared to speak against the Continental Congress. For want of tar and feathers, these women applied molasses and "the downy tops of the flags that grew in the meadow."

As the focus of tar and feathers shifted from informers to loyalists, the practice became more violent. In 1775, a physician named Abner Beebe was blistered by the hot tar poured upon him. The mob then "carried [him] to an Hog Sty & rubbed [him] over with Hogs [sic] Dung. They threw the Hog's Dung in his Face, & rammed some of it down his Throat."

In 1776, a Charleston mob committed an even grizzlier execution. According to the local paper:

John Roberts, a dissenting minister, was seized on suspicion of being an enemy to the rights of America, when he was tarred and feathered; after which, the populace, whose fury could not be appeased, erected a gibbet on which they hanged him, and afterwards made a bonfire, in which Roberts, together with the gibbet, was consumed to ashes.

Over time, the increasing violence of the colonial crowds gave rise to a great deal of ambivalence towards tarring and feathering among patriot organizers. Colonial leaders recognized the injustice of persecuting individuals who had committed no crime against the colonies. For this reason, many leaders began urging the American people to put aside the practice of tarring and feathering. Even Thomas Paine argued that tarring and feathering ought to be abandoned.

Yet others resisted Paine's proposal. As late as 1779, a Providence correspondent asked the American people to "[d]etermine whether the application of tar and feathers be not more absolutely necessary at this day, than at any time heretofore!"

Notwithstanding this debate, tarring and feathering continued throughout the war and even after it ended. "In the Jersies," wrote Peter Oliver, "they naturalize [returning loyalists] by tarring and feathering; and it costs them more in scrubbing and cleaning than an admission is worth, so that you know the fate of trading your natale solum."

Though the Revolution ended with the Treaty of Paris, Americans still felt the need to confirm themselves in their own patriotism and to subject those who had opposed them to a painful rite of reintegration.

Notes

Captain William Smith to J. Morgan, Apr. 3, 1766, in William and Mary Quarterly, 1st Ser., XXI (1913), p. 167.
The practice might even date as far back as antiquity. For more on its history, see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor (New York, 1982), pp. 441-43; Frederick Mackenzie, The Diary of Frederick Mackenzie, I (Cambridge, 1930), p. 11; Walter Kendall Watkins, "Tarring and Feathering in Boston in 1770," Old-Time New England, XX (1929), p. 32; R.S. Longley, "Mob Activities in Revolutionary Massachusetts," New England Quarterly, VI (1933), pp. 113-15.
Pennsylvania Gazette, June 29, 1774.
Douglass Adair and John A. Shutz, eds., Peter Oliver's Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View (San Marino, 1963), 109; New York Packet, June 26, 1784.
Boston Newsletter, Oct. 26, 1777.
Adair and Shutz, Peter Oliver's Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion, p. 157.
Gaine's Mercury, Dec. 2, 1776.
Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 4, 1777.
Pennsylvania Gazette, June 23, 1779.
Thomas Hutchinson, The Diary and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson (Boston, 1886), p. 412.