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Tar, Feathers, and the Enemies of American Liberties, 1768-1776Author(s): Benjamin H. IrvinReviewed work(s):Source: The New England Quarterly, Vol. 76, No. 2 (Jun., 2003), pp. 197-238Published by: The New England Quarterly, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1559903 .Accessed: 02/11/2011 18:26

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Tar, Feathers, and the Enemies of American Liberties, 1768-1776

BENJAMIN H. IRVIN

ON 2 October 1775, the New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury was pleased to report a "droll affair lately hap-

pened at Kinderhook, New York." In that small village south of

Albany, a "number of young women" had gathered for a quilting bee when their peace was rudely disturbed: "A young fellow" dropped in on their "frolic" uninvited. This fellow-"an enemy to the liberties of America," as the Gazette reported- then commenced a lengthy harangue, "as usual," against the Continental Congress. The quilt makers apparently endured the young man's malediction for "some time," but at length, "exasperated," they "laid hold of him, [and] stripped him naked to the waist." To punish him for his "impudence," the "girls" tarred and feathered him. Well, not exactly. For want of tar, they "covered him with molasses, and for feathers, took the

downy tops of flags, which grow in the meadows, and coated him well."'

So was written a new chapter in the development of what the Boston Evening-Post had once dubbed "the popular punishment for modern delinquents."' Since bursting into American

I am deeply indebted to David Hackett Fischer, Alfred F. Young, Jane Kamensky, James Kloppenberg, and Edward Countryman for their insightful contributions to this paper. I would also like to thank the staffs and librarians of the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), the David Library of the Ameri- can Revolution, the International Center for Jefferson Studies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and, especially, Melissa Haley of the New-York Historical Society and Karen Stevens of the National Park Service's Independence National Historical Park. I am particularly grateful to the MHS for permission to quote from its collection. Finally, a special thanks to Douglas Watson for assisting in the preparation of the appendix.

'New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, 2 October 1775. 2Boston Evening-Post, 6 November 1769.

197

198 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

political life in the late 176os, the practice of tar-and-feathers had been thoroughly transformed. Initially confined to bustling seaport towns such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, by 1775 tar-and-feathers had made its way inland to quaint Hud- son River villages. Once reserved for imperial customs officials and colonial informants, the sticky punishment was now meted out to loudmouthed lads trumpeting unpatriotic beliefs. Previ-

ously the prerogative of hearty Jack Tars, tar-and-feathers was now the domain of young "girls," quilters no less, who had set aside their needles and thread. Nor were actual pine tar and

goose down any longer necessary; tarring and feathering could now be accomplished with syrup and cattails. It was these sorts of shifts in the practice of tar-and-feathers that imbued the Kinderhook affair with its drollery, that made an upstate quilting frolic newsworthy material for a New York City press. How, the Gazette's readers were left to wonder, had the ritual

changed so much in so little time? The answer to that question offers insight into the evolution and transmission of folk practices 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. The transformation of tar-and-feathers, it turns out, was anything but a "droll affair."3

3A few American historians, most notably Alfred F. Young, have examined tar-and- feathers in some depth. See Young's "George Robert Twelves Hewes (1742-1840): A Boston Shoemaker and the Memory of the American Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 38 (October 1981): 561-623; his The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), PP. 46-51; and his

"English Plebeian Culture and Eighteenth-Century American Radicalism," in The Ori- gins of Anglo-American Radicalism, ed. Margaret Jacob and James Jacob (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), pp. 185-212. Young's work built on earlier studies by Walter Kendall Watkins, R. S. Longley, Frank W. C. Hersey, and Albert Matthews. See Watkins, "Tarring and Feathering in Boston in 1770," Old-Time New England 20 (1929): 30-43; Longley, "Mob Activities in Revolutionary Massachusetts," New En- gland Quarterly 6 (March 1933): 98-130; Hersey, "Tar and Feathers: The Adventures of Captain John Malcom," Colonial Society of Massachusetts Transactions 34 (1941): 429-73; and Matthews, "Joyce, Jun," Colonial Society of Massachusetts Publications 8 (1903): 89-104. Other historians have discussed tar-and-feathers or closely related crowd behavior in their examinations of the American Revolution or of crowd behavior in general. See Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Pro- logue to Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., "Political Mobs and the American Revolution, 1765-1776," Proceed- ings of the American Philosophical Society 99 (August 1955): 244-50; Gordon S. Wood, "A Note on Mobs in the American Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser.,

TAR AND FEATHERS, 1768-1776 199

Although its precise origin is uncertain, tar-and-feathers dates back at least as far as medieval times.4 In 1189, Richard I of En-

gland ordered that any crusaders found guilty of theft "were to have their heads shaved, to have boiling Pitch dropped upon their Crowns; and after having Cushion-Feathers stuck upon the Pitch, they were to be set on shore, in that figure, at the first place they came to." Centuries later, in 1623, the Bishop of Halverstade ordered that tar-and-feathers be applied to a party of drunken friars and nuns, and in 1696, an angry crowd im-

posed the same punishment upon a London bailiff who at-

tempted to arrest a debtor. Other evidence, too, suggests that tar-and-feathers lingered in the folk culture of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century transatlantic rim. In London in 1741, a

pamphlet touting the economic importance of Jamaica told of a

plantation master who tarred and feathered disobedient slaves. In Dominica in 1789, a British soldier caught committing bes-

tiality with a turkey was drummed out of his regiment while

23 (October 1966): 635-42; Richard Maxwell Brown, "Violence and the American Rev- olution," in Essays on the American Revolution, ed. Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973): 81-120; James Barton Hunt, "The Crowd and the American Revolution: A Study of Urban Political Violence in Boston and Philadelphia, 1773-1776" (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1973); Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (New York: Vintage Books, 1774); Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765-1780 (New York: Acad- emic Press, 1977); Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Con- sciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Paul Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987) and Rioting in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Jesse Lemisch, Jack Tar vs. John Bull: The Role of New York's Seamen in Precipitating the Revolution (New York: Garland, 1997); and Robert Blair St. George, Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Car- olina Press, 1998). There have been few studies of tar-and-feathers outside of the Revo- lutionary context. Two notable exceptions are Bertram Wyatt-Brown's Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982) and James Elbert Cutler's Lynch-Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States (Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1969).

4Tarring and feathering may even have had its origins in antiquity. In post-Homeric Greece, tar was applied to homosexual men to remove body hair as a painful and dis-

paraging signifier of effeminacy. See Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, p. 441.


forced to wear the bird's feathers "round his neck [and] on his beard."5

From this brief survey it is clear that the practice of tarring and feathering was imported to the New World rather than created there. Apparently, tar-and-feathers did not arrive in the mainland colonies of North America until the middle of the

eighteenth century, when it was introduced through the maritime folkways of sailors. About that time, a skipper in New York tarred and feathered a prostitute attempting to board his

ship.6 In the early spring of 1766, another ship's captain, one William Smith, found himself on the receiving end of a tarring and feathering. Smith was seized in Norfolk, Virginia, after al-

legedly alerting royal officials to the presence of contraband aboard the snow Vigilant. The owner of that ship and several

accomplices bound him, carted him through town, stoned him, "bedawbed [his] body and face all over with tar and afterwards threw feathers upon" him, paraded him once again through the town, and finally dumped him into the harbor, where he was rescued by a passing boat just as he began "sinking, being able to swim no longer."'7

5Frederick Mackenzie, The Diary of Frederick Mackenzie, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Har- vard University Press, 1930), 1:11; Watkins, "Tarring and Feathering in Boston," p. 32; Longley, "Mob Activities," p. 113; The Importance of Jamaica to Great Britain (Lon- don, 1741), p. 19; Journal of Jonathan Troup, 26-29 October 1789, ms. 2070, Depart- ment of Archives and Special Collections, University of Aberdeen, Scotland. The author is grateful to Professor John Murrin for that last citation.

6Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743-1776 (New York: Knopf, 1955), p. 121. Alice Earle describes another incident in which a woman was tarred for attempting to go to sea disguised as a man, but she provides no place or date. See her Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (Chicago: Herbert S. Stone and Co., 1896), p. 126. These are the only incidents, to my knowledge, in which women were successfully tarred and feathered. During Parliament's debates over Lord North's Pro- hibitory Bill, the Earl of Sandwich accused the colonists of tarring and feathering three women, but I have uncovered no evidence to sustain that accusation. See Peter Force, comp., American Archives, 4th ser., 6 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1837-53), 6:220.

7Capt. William Smith to J. Morgan, 3 April 1766, "Letters of Governor Francis Fauquier," William and Mary Quarterly, 1st ser., 21 (January 1913): 166-78. For previous violence against customs officials and informants, see Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, pp. 7-8. I have found no evidence of any earlier use of tar-and-feathers against customs officials. Furthermore, newspaper accounts from the late 176os describe tar-and-feathers as if readers were unfamiliar with the spectacle. As Alfred Young points out, "The assumption underlying the rich detail is clear: it would not have been enough to say simply that an informer had been tarred and feathered; no one would have known what that meant." See Young, "Plebeian Culture," p. 186.

TAR AND FEATHERS, 1768-1776 2zo In Virginia, tar-and-feathers did not immediately stick, but

two years later the practice was introduced in New England, where it quickly became a popular method of intimidating customs officials and castigating informants. In June 1768, "the

Populace" of Salem became "enraged" by a person who gave "Information of a Vessel that arrived there with Molasses." To

punish the informant, the crowd "stripped him, then wrapped him in a Tarred Sheet, and rolled him in Feathers; having done this, they carried him about the Streets in a Cart, and then ban- ished him from the town for 6 weeks."' Before summer's end, Salem residents had feathered another informant and a low- level customs official. News of these events quickly spread along the Atlantic seaboard, and the tar-and-feathers trend

caught on. By March 1770, at least a dozen incidents of tar-and- feathers had taken place in towns as far away as Newburyport, Gloucester, Boston, Marlborough, New Haven, New York, and

Philadelphia (see appendix).9 The sudden popularity of tar-and-feathers in the late 176os

and the singularity with which customs officials and informants were targeted'0 suggest that the Sons of Liberty had appropri- ated the maritime practice as a means of resisting the Towns- hend Revenue Act." Passed by Parliament in 1767, this act

8Pennsylvania Gazette, 22 September 1768. French historian George Rudd persua- sively argued against historians' use of the value-laden word "mob." Jesse Lemisch, however, has recently observed that revisionist efforts to restore integrity to early modem crowds not only succeeded but to some extent even "bowdlerized a passionate, un-

ruly, robust, dynamic, often violent, and sometimes not very nice phenomenon." I agree with Lemisch on this point. Here, and throughout this essay, I use both "crowd" and "mob" in an effort to describe the nature of behavior under discussion. For Lemisch's

argument, see "Communications," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 56 (January 1999): 231-37.

9These patterns are based on all the cases of tar-and-feathers I have been able to lo- cate. Undoubtedly, many instances of tar-and-feathers never made it to the historical record, and I am sure that I have not found all those that did. Nevertheless, enough cases have emerged to reveal significant trends in the history of the ritual. My discussion of tar-and-feathers through 1770 is heavily indebted to the scholarship of Young, Hersey, Matthews, and Longley. Longley's article, in particular, catalogues a large number of incidents that took place in Massachusetts.

"'The sole exception was a Boston countryman who was tarred and feathered for en-

couraging a farm woman to sell her produce at the British barracks, where she was

badly harassed. See Boston Gazette, 6 November 1769. "This interpretation is supported by newspaper accounts of tar-and-featherings

committed by "Patriots" and the "Principle People." See note 15 below. The involve-


levied taxes on glass, paint, paper, and tea-adding to existing duties on molasses, wine, and other imported goods. To enforce the act, Parliament established the American Board of Cus- toms, which set up its headquarters in Boston. Two years earlier, the Sons of Liberty had defeated the dreaded Stamp Act by intimidating those royal officials whose job it was to enforce it. Though colonial legislatures were powerless to revoke Parlia- ment's onerous taxes, the people out-of-doors could prevent their collection. Andrew Oliver, for instance, promptly resigned his post as a Stamp Act official after a Boston mob ransacked his home and office.12

In the wake of the enactment of the Townshend duties, tar- and-feathers had a similar effect on officials and would-be informants. In October 1769, a Boston crowd feathered a man named George Gailer who had allegedly informed against the

sloop Success. One colonial newspaper later asserted that Gailer "belonged" to John Hancock's sloop Liberty, which British officials had seized the year before, sparking the famed Liberty riots of 1768. Though Gailer was never proven to have informed against Hancock, his association with that ship further implicated him as a snitch.13 His case was not unique. As a testament to the fearful specter of the tar brush, colonial newspapers were littered with small ads written by individuals to deny rumors that they had passed information to the authorities. In New Haven, one informer "acknowledged his Fault, [and] promised never to offend again." In Newburyport, mean- while, Joshua Vickery, who had already been tarred and feathered for informing, nevertheless appeared "before a justice of the peace and took oath 'that he never did directly or indi-

ment of the Sons of Liberty, whose organizations were linked from town to town by committees of correspondence, would also explain the nearly simultaneous appearance of tar-and-feathers in a number of New England seaports. By contrast, Alfred Young has argued that tar-and-feather assaults on customs officials were "the work of predom- inantly lower-class crowds ... led from within, and ... spur-of-the-moment events." See Young, "Plebeian Culture," pp. 193-94.

'"For the history of the Sons of Liberty and their role in resisting the Stamp Act, see Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, chaps. 3 and 4.

'3Pennsylvania Gazette, 22 September 1768, 5 October 1769, 9 November 1769.


rectly make or give any Information to any Officer of the Cus- toms.'""4

There is some evidence to suggest that patriot organizers par- ticipated in the tarring and feathering of these officials and informants. William Smith, the Norfolk ship's captain, later al-

leged that he had been tarred by "All the principle Gentlemen in town," including the mayor. The Essex Gazette reported that two informants had been tarred by "Patriots," and the Pennsyl- vania Gazette published word from New Haven that the "principle People there" had tarred yet another. Similarly, Boston merchant Elizabeth Cuming, who witnessed the tarring and

feathering of George Gailer, stated that the attack had been carried out by "a large crowd of those who call themselves gentlemen." Gailer later filed suit (unsuccessfully) against his assailants, naming as defendants two merchants along with five seamen and artisans.'5

But if Whig organizers instigated these attacks and even dirt- ied their hands in the tar, the practice was also embraced by or-

dinary townspeople. Sailors, of course, whose livelihood suffered when customs officials seized smugglers' ships, were

quick to participate in the old maritime custom. And as Dirk Hoerder has demonstrated, the large crowds that gathered to aid in tarring and feathering or simply to behold the spectacle were drawn from all walks of life. In the spring of 1770, more than two thousand Bostonians thronged to see the tarring and

feathering of a tidesman named Owen Richards. Even in that instance, there is evidence that Whig leaders may have supported or at least condoned the attack: John Hancock paid the

'4Essex Gazette, 20, 27 September 1768. 15The Norfolk mayor, Maximilian Calvert, "instead of suppressing the insult, encour-

aged it and threw stones at [Smith] himself." Capt. William Smith to J. Morgan, 3 April 1766, pp. 167-68; Essex Gazette, 20, 27 September 1768; Pennsylvania Gazette, 5 Oc- tober 1769; Elizabeth Cuming to E. Smith, 28 October 1769, James M. Robbins Pa- pers, MHS, quoted with permission; Legal Papers of John Adams, 3 vols., ed. L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 1:39-42. One of Gailer's assailants, David Bradley, or Bradlee, later took part in the Boston Tea Party. See David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere's Ride (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 302.


legal bills of at least one sailor whom Richards sued for trespass and assault.'6

During the flurry of tar-and-feather activity between 1768 and 1770, the practice began to take shape as a kind of folk ritual. Having captured an official or informant, the crowd would first apply the tar. Pine tar was a familiar commodity in colonial America; it was used to waterproof ships, sails, and rigging. A thick, acrid, dark brown or black liquid, tar was obtained by roasting mature pine trees over an open-pit fire and distilling the bituminous substance that boiled out. Some victims were fortunate enough to be tarred over their clothes or protected by a frock or sheet. Others were stripped, and the tar was brushed, poured, or "bedawbed" over their bare skin. When heated, tar would blister the skin, but there is little evidence to suggest that it regularly was. In one instance, the crowd simply "knocked the

top out of a tar barrel, and plunged" the offender in headfirst. Yet even when tar was applied cool, it made for a painful experience. Once dry, tar clung tenaciously to the skin and could be removed only with a tremendous amount of scrubbing, possibly with the aid of turpentine or other chemical solvents that would further irritate the skin. Presumably, most victims lost a good deal of body hair; others may have developed tar acne, a skin condition that commonly afflicted sailors. During a particularly brutal tarring and feathering in Boston in January 1774, the victim, having been carted around for several hours, suffered frostbite; later, as the tar was being removed, strips of dead skin were torn off with it.'7

'6John F. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Whiting and Thomas, 1856-57), 2:421; J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts, 1884), 1:282; New York Journal, 19 October 1769; Hoerder, Crowd Action, p. 241; Adams, Legal Papers, 1:40, n. 33. Sixty- seven witnesses, including three women and one African American, later testified about the tarring and feathering of Richards.

7"John Bridger, Informations and Directions for the Making of Tar (Boston: B. Green, 1707). The plentiful forests of New England and the Chesapeake provided a ready supply of tar; indeed, tar had come to be associated with the American colonies. In 1766, New Yorkers celebrated the repeal of the Stamp Act by hoisting two large


After the tar came the feathers, also a familiar commodity in British North America. Feathers were used to stuff beds, pillows, and cushions. Tory Peter Oliver noted that, like the pope in the popular schoolbook the New England Primer, feathered individuals appeared to have been struck with darts. A colonial

newspaper once described a "vile" public enemy as a "Bird of Darkness" and urged that he be tarred and feathered accord-

ingly.'" Though "[t]wo Pillows of Feathers" would generally suf- fice, on at least one occasion the crowd tore open a bed and rolled the victim in it. A Connecticut crowd forced its victim to

pluck one of his own geese, and a Salem crowd repeatedly hurled a live goose at the man it had tarred. The Boston mob that tarred and feathered Owen Richards subsequently set his feathers on fire, burning the skin beneath, but this treatment was not typical.19

The third and final act in the tar-and-feathers drama cen- tered on the ceremonial exhibition of the humiliated offender.

Typically, the crowd would hoist its victim upon a "one-horse cart" and parade him through "the principal streets of the town" while "a great concourse of people" cheered, sang, and made rough music with pots and pans. In this way, colonial

masts, one of which was adorned with "12 Tar and Pitch Barrels." As Paul Gilje has observed, this mast most likely "represented the triumph of American maritime interests now that trade was renewed." New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, 9 June 1766, quoted in Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy, p. 53. See also Pennsylvania Gazette, 22 Sep- tember 1768, 5 October 1769; Claude Halstead Van Tyne, Loyalists in the American Revolution (Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1959), pp. 1-2, citing Walter Clark, ed., The State Records of North Carolina, 30 vols. (Goldsboro, N.C.: Nash Brothers, 1886-1914), 11:835. The frostbitten victim was John Malcom, who, in hopes of securing a pension, allegedly forwarded several pieces of skin, with the tar still attached, to Par- liament. See Hersey, "Tar and Feathers."

'8Boston Gazette, 1 November 1773. Other scholars have observed that feathered victims bore a resemblance to the devil as he was portrayed in contemporary effigies. See Gilje, Rioting in America, pp. 47-78, and Shaw, American Patriots, pp. 185-90o.

'9Pennsylvania Gazette, 5 October 1769; Van Tyne, Loyalists in the American Revo- lution, pp. 1-2; Frank Moore, Diary of the Revolution (Hartford, Conn., 1876), p. 123; Hoerder, Crowd Action, p. 241. Several eyewitnesses of tar-and-featherings likened the practice to contemporary fashion, describing tar-and-feathers alternatively as a "modern jacket," "ignominious dress," and a "complete suit." See Massachusetts Spy, 27 Jan- uary 1774, 17 February 1774; Pennsylvania Gazette, 5 October 1769; Moore, Diary of the Revolution, pp. 90, 138, 219. Patriot crowds harangued Tories with the cheer: "May feathers and tar be your next birthday suit, / And the block be the fate of North, Mans- field and Bute."


crowds blended the maritime tradition of tar-and-feathers with

skimmington and charivari, two popular folk rituals used to ostracize community offenders in early modem Europe and America.2' As with skimmington, or "riding the stang," the pri- mary purpose of tar-and-feathers was to shame the victim by holding him up to the derision of the crowd. Indeed, the punishment's power to reform the offender and to deter others from committing offensive acts derived from the spectatorial nature of the procession."' Often lasting for several hours, tar- and-feather cavalcades made regular stops at such symbolic centers of community authority as the pillory, the whipping post, and the Liberty Tree, and also at the homes of any persons thought to have informed. At each of these locations, the offender was forced "to expiate his sins against his country, by a

public recantation." Some informants were made to wear labels or placards announcing to the world the crimes they had committed, and in Boston, one feathered victim was forced to carry a large glass lantern so that onlookers "might see the doleful Condition he was in, and to deter others from such infamous Practices."22

2"Throughout medieval Europe, skimmington prevailed as a popular form of local chastisement. Typically, a community offender would be forced to ride backwards on a donkey or would be carried on a hard wooden rail while village residents made rough music by beating pots and pans, ringing bells, and blowing horns and trumpets. In one form or another, this tradition traces back at least as far as the first century B.C.; in early modern Europe, it was inflicted primarily upon remarrying widows, spouse beaters, and adulterers. Skimmington and charivari persisted in America. The residents of Boston, for instance, used skimmington to punish an adulterer in November 1764. A few years later, in New Haven, after the "principal People" tarred and feathered an informer, they fixed upon his head an ancient skimmington symbol of adultery or cuckoldry, a pair of horns. The horns had little symbolic relevance to tarring and feathering, but they are indicative of the ways in which that practice merged with older folk customs. See Boston Post Boy and Advertiser, 5 November 1764, and Pennsylvania Gazette, 5 Octo- ber 1769. On at least two occasions, tar-and-feathers was combined with the early modem folk punishment of dunking, or "ducking," an individual in a body of water. See Capt. William Smith to J. Morgan, 3 April 1766, pp. 167-68.

"'Alfred Young also observes that the spectatorial nature of tar-and-feathers owes much to the tradition of ostracism in New England colonial punishments such as ear- cropping, the pillory, branding, and the wearing of letters. See Young, "Plebeian Cul- ture," p. 192; see also Gilje, Rioting in America, p. 48.

2"Boston Gazette, 1 November 1773; Connecticut Journal, 15 September 1769; Eliz- abeth Cuming to E. Smith, 28 October 1769; Pennsylvania Gazette, 9 November 1769. These processions were often gleefully reported by contemporary observers. The Boston Newsletter, for example, described one such procession as "the most extraordi- nary Exhibition of the Kind, ever seen in North America" (27 January 1774). The


"[I]nfamous Practices," as any contemporary would have understood, meant providing authorities with information about illicit cargoes or otherwise helping to prevent smuggling. After Parliament repealed the Townshend duties in 1770, the practice of tarring and feathering customs agents and informants declined significantly.23 However, the Sons of Liberty were al-

ready devising a new use for tar-and-feathers. In the late 176os, when colonial opposition to British taxes began to galvanize, Samuel Adams and other Whig organizers coordinated a series of nonimportation agreements, that is, pledges by colonial merchants not to import British goods. Some merchants, however, reluctant to sacrifice their profits, quietly disregarded the

agreements. In October 1769, Boston Chronicle printer John Mein challenged the integrity of the trade boycott by publish- ing the names of local merchants who secretly continued to im-

port goods in violation of the agreements they had signed.24 In the months that followed, Adams and his badly embarrassed

"Liberty Boys" waged a tar-and-feathers campaign against merchants who refused to join their boycott (see appendix).25

Boston crowd also called to townspeople along their route to light candles in their windows, a demand that was commonly made by English crowds. The need for lanterns and candles reveals that tarring and feathering was often performed at night. Early modern crowds traditionally operated at night, in part because darkness cloaked the

participants' identities and in part because the hierarchical relations that circumscribed social behavior during daylight hours could be inverted after darkness fell.

23During the two-year period between June 1768 and June 1770, I have found eleven incidents in which one or more customs officials or informants were tarred and feathered. In the following two years, from July 1770 to July 1772, I have found only one such incident.

24For Mein's publications in opposition to the nonimportation movement, see John E. Alden's "John Mein: Scourge of Patriots," Colonial Society of Massachusetts Trans- actions 34 (1943): 571-99.

25On 28 October 1769, the Sons of Liberty rallied a mob to confront John Mein, but he managed to escape. It is possible that this crowd was the same that tarred and feathered the customs informer George Gailer. For more on Samuel Adams's role as a patriot organizer, see John C. Miller, Samuel Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda (Boston: Lit- tle, Brown, 1936); John R. Galvin, Three Men of Boston (New York: Crowell, 1976); Pauline Maier, The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (New York: Knopf, 1980); William M. Fowler, Jr., Samuel Adams: Radical Puritan (New York: Longman, 1997); and my Samuel Adams: Son of Liberty, Father of Revolu- tion (New York: Oxford University Press, 200oo2).


This campaign lasted through the spring and summer of 1770, during which time the practice of tar-and-feathers shifted

significantly. Notably, not a single person was tarred and feathered for importing or selling British goods, despite numerous threats. Instead, Boston crowds began to tar and feather im-

porters' property and effects. Several homes were targeted, as was at least one store.26 In Marlborough, a crowd even tarred and feathered the horse of merchant Henry Barnes. The reason for this change in practice is not entirely clear. It may be that the Sons of Liberty recognized the duplicity in their system: some nonimportation advocates were themselves secretly im-

porting goods. Or perhaps they felt less justified in directly and

personally humiliating importers. Unlike customs agents and informants, who actively enforced taxation against which the colonists had no legal redress, importing merchants were sim-

ply trying to earn a living as they always had."7 In any case, the new tar-and-feathers campaign could not ultimately keep the nonimportation agreements alive. Colonial merchants were too heavily invested in trade with England to sever economic ties, and many demanded an end to the boycott. In August 1770, Boston Son of Liberty William Molineux learned firsthand just

26During this period of "nocturnal painting," assailants sometimes affixed the feathers with blubber oil or a rank mixture of human excrement and urine, derisively dubbed "Hillsborough Paint" after the detested secretary of state. Boston Tory George Erving complained that his house had been daubed with paint "of our own growth, and what is had from our own BOWELLS." Erving assured his vandals that he was "not insensible of the di-STINK-tion" they had shown him. Boston Newsletter, 2 June 1774. A few scholars have argued that mobs' use of fecal material-and its symbolic counterpart, tar-is a form of regression, common in mass violence, in which pregenital activity is used to express hostility. See Phyllis Greenacre, "Crowds and Crisis," Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 27 (1972): 144-45; Andrew Peto, "On Crowd Violence: The Role of Archaic Superego and Body Image," International Review of Psycho-Analysis 2 (1975): 450; Shaw, American Patriots, p. 186; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, p. 489.

27For Whig ideology on extralegal violence and its role in restraining pre-Revolution- ary crowds, see Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, chap. 2. It may also be that important issues of class were at play. It was one thing for the Sons of Liberty to tar and feather a customs official, who by his office represented a tyrannical ministry, and still another to tar and feather the sailors or tidewaiters, working-class men, who informed. But to tar and feather a merchant would have represented an assault on Boston's gen- teel ranks. Public opinion would not have supported such an attack unless the person tarred had first transgressed community norms, as for instance by informing or by attempting to collect an unjust tax. Apparently, importing was not at this time considered such an egregious offense.


how strong their feelings were on the issue. Arriving in Salem to promote the boycott, Molineux was greeted by rumors that a mob had gathered to tar and feather him. Molineux promptly left town, and two months later the Boston merchants voted to terminate the nonimportation agreements altogether.

The next three years passed in relative tranquillity, in large part because American colonists had grown weary of mobs, riots, and uproar. Having endured the Stamp Act Riots, the

Liberty Riots, the murder of Christopher Seider-a young patriot shot by notorious customs informer Ebenezer Richard-

son--and the Boston Massacre, New Englanders in particular were content to be done with tar-and-feathers. After the Townshend Act was repealed, the resistance movement began to lose steam, and as Pauline Maier has demonstrated, the Sons of Liberty were reluctant to jeopardize their reputation abroad

by engaging in further violence. Between mid-1770 and late 1773, only four individuals appear to have been tarred and feathered in the thirteen colonies: John Hatton, Jr., who trav- eled to Philadelphia seeking vengeance against sailors who had assaulted his father, a New Jersey customs collector; two Rhode Island tidewaiters tarred in the tumultuous days after the British revenue-enforcing vessel, the Gaspee, was sunk; and a New Hampshire customs official named John Malcom who seized a ship on such slim, technical grounds that even his British superiors were offended."s

This period of calm came to an end in May 1773, when the

passage of the Tea Act put the inhabitants of Massachusetts up in arms once again. The story of the so-called Tea Party has been well told and need not be recited here.g9 What must be

8sMaier, From Resistance to Revolution, pp. 97-1oo; Steven Rosswurm, Arms, Coun-

try, and Class: The Philadelphia Militia and "Lower Sort" during the American Revolu- tion, 1775-1783 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp. 32-33; Boston Gazette, 6 July 1772; Hersey, "Tar and Feathers," p. 440.

"gMost recently, the history of the Tea Party and its place in American memory has been discussed in Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party.


noted is that the destruction of the tea on 16 December quick- ened popular resistance in New England and ushered in a brief period of increased crowd activity. In late December a Boston crowd tarred and feathered a man who allegedly had reported a member of the Tea Party. Several weeks later, on the evening of 25 January 1774, two more, unrelated featherings took place. In Marblehead, where as in other parts of the country popular fear of epidemics created anxiety about the practice of inocula- tion, a mob estimated at over one thousand people tarred and feathered four men caught stealing clothing from a local smallpox hospital.

That very night, a Boston mob tarred and feathered John Malcom, the same malevolent official who had been so treated in New Hampshire just two months before. As Alfred Young has vividly recounted, Malcom was seized on this second occasion for cudgeling George Robert Twelves Hewes, a shoemaker who had rushed to the defense of a young boy who had collided with Malcom while riding a sled. When word spread of Mal- com's violent assault on Hewes, a mob arose, intent on punishing the despised official. Though "Several Gentlemen endeav- oured to divert the populace from their intention," the mob would not be dissuaded. Malcom was stripped, beaten, whipped, tarred, feathered, and paraded around town in this condition for several hours. "They drove to the Liberty Tree, to the gallows on the Neck, back to the tree, to Butcher's Hall, to Charlestown Ferry, and then to Copp's Hill, flogging him at every one of those places." The mob then forced Malcom to drink tea, toasting one member of the royal family with every gulp, until he vomited. The assault left Malcom in a gruesome condition and doctors feared he would not survive.30

The 25 January incidents were spontaneous events, and unlike most previous cases of tar-and-feathers, neither of these at-

3oFrancis S. Drake, Tea Leaves (Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1970), p. 110; Boston Newsletter, 27 January 1774; Hersey, "Tar and Feathers"; Young, "George Robert Twelves Hewes" and The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, pp. 46-51; Watkins, "Tarring and Feathering," p. 40.


tacks was directly related to patriot politics.3' Over the next several days, the mob's excesses were denounced throughout the

community. The Massachusetts Gazette received letters to the editor excoriating Malcom's abusers. Boston's Whig organizers were thoroughly alarmed, and with good reason. During the Tea Party, the "Mohawks" had purposefully acted with extreme restraint, going so far as to replace locks broken off tea chests. Such behavior, it was hoped, would demonstrate both at home and abroad that the destruction of the tea was a just and lawful protest against grievances for which there were no legal means of redress. The violent tarring and feathering of Malcom threatened to obscure that important message.3

31Though Malcom had served as a customs officer, and though the mob did attempt to imbue his tarring and feathering with patriotic significance by forcing him to drink tea, this second attack was precipitated not by any official act but by his private assault on Hewes.

32Hersey, "Tar and Feathers," pp. 445-55. The Sons of Liberty were justified in fear- ing that tar-and-feathers was hurting their reputation. King George III specifically questioned Gov. Thomas Hutchinson about the practice after Hutchinson fled to En- gland in 1774. And in the months that followed the Tea Party, several members of Par- liament mentioned tar-and-feathers during the debates over the Port Bill. One advo- cate insisted that Great Britain should no longer suffer the humiliation of royal authority in this manner. Henry Laurens recalled a conversation with two members of Parliament, "well meaning Men & friends to America," who nevertheless felt the colonists had gone too far: "They Consider, the destruction of the tea, the Cruelty of Tarring, feathering, & whipping, the flagitious Crime of burning one of the King's Ves- sels, as so many daring & outrageous Acts. They ... conclude that any thing short of hanging us & battering down our Towns, is perfect Lenity." Sympathetic Whigs such as Edmund Burke responded that harsh penalties would only push the colonists closer to rebellion. "You must therefore . . . abandon the scheme of taxing," he proclaimed, "or you must send the ministers tarred and feathered to America, who dared to hold out the royal faith for a renunciation of all taxes for revenue." See Thomas Hutchinson, The Diary and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, 2 vols., comp. Peter Hutchin- son (London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1883), 1:164; Laurens to James Laurens, Westminster, 7 May 1774, The Papers of Henry Laurens, 15 vols., ed. Philip M. Hamer (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968-), 9:437; Edmund Burke, The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 8 vols. (London: F. & C. Rivington, 1803), 2:374. The people of Massachusetts responded by demanding an end to crowd violence. Writing to his wife, Abigail, John Adams insisted, "These tarrings and featherings, this braking open Houses by rude and insolent Rabbles, in Resentment for private Wrongs or in pursuance of private Prejudices and Passions, must be dis- countenanced." Likewise, the famous Suffolk County Resolves of 1774 urged "all Per- sons of this Community, not to engage in any Routs, Riots or licentious Attacks." Adams to Abigail Adams, Falmouth, Mass., 7 July 1774, in Adams's Legal Papers, 1:140; William Thompson and Joseph Warren, At a Meeting of the Delegates, Early American Imprints, Ist ser., no. 13646 (New York: Readex Microprint, 1985).


The Sons of Liberty acted quickly to minimize the harm done to the resistance movement. Not long before the Tea Party, a

mysterious organization calling itself the "Committee for Tar-

ring and Feathering" had begun posting handbills in Boston and Philadelphia. Signed by the pseudonymous Joyce Jr., so named after the captor of Charles I, these handbills warned

townspeople not to engage in unpatriotic behavior.33 In

Philadelphia, for instance, the committee urged Delaware River pilots not "to make a Goose" of themselves by navigating tea-laden ships into port. Yet, several days after the tarring and

feathering of Malcom, Joyce wrote to the Boston Newsletter to dissociate himself and his committee from that attack. "[T]he modern Punishment lately inflicted upon the ignoble John Mal-

corn," Joyce explained, "was not done by our order. We reserve that Method for bringing Villains of greater Consequence to a Sense of Guilt and Infamy." In the following weeks, Joyce insisted that tar-and-feathers should never be used except as a means of extralegal resistance to the tyrannical administration of unjust laws. When one correspondent asked Joyce whether tar-and-feathers was an appropriate punishment for French ob-

33Whether the Committee for Tarring and Feathering was a real body that actually deliberated about who should be punished or whether it was a fictitious literary device has never been determined. Throughout 1774, Joyce posted broadsides and filled Massachusetts papers with tar-and-feathers propaganda. But as Alfred Young has as- tutely argued, Joyce's purpose was to limit the practice of tar-and-feathers, to lend cre- dence to out-of-doors behavior instigated by the Sons of Liberty without defending violent riots such as the assault on Malcom. Always writing in a humorous but earnest tone, Joyce published a litany of warnings and dares that invariably invoked the threat of tar-and-feathers. In January 1774, for instance, he issued a handbill urging the citizens of Boston to greet tea consignees with "such a Reception, as such vile Ingrates de- serve." Reprinted in the Boston Gazette, the handbill was followed by the advertise- ment: "WANTED, A QUANTITY of damaged Feathers-Also an old one Horse Cart. Inquire of the Printers." Boston Gazette, 17 January 1774. A similar ad was signed by "Thomas Tarbucket," "Peter Pitch," "Abraham Wildfowl," "David Plaister," "Benjamin Brush," "Oliver Scarcrow," and "Henry Hand-Cart" (Massachusetts Spy, 24 March 1774). Curiously, each of these first names appears on the roster of those who either belonged to the Loyal Nine or the Boston Committee for Correspondence or partici- pated in the Tea Party. See Fischer, Paul Revere's Ride, pp. 301-7. Might the role of Joyce have been played by James Otis or Samuel Adams? John Adams once recalled a visit to the Boston Gazette during which he found the two patriots "preparing for the next day's newspaper, a curious employment, cooking up paragraphs, articles, occur- rences, etc., working the political engine." Quoted in Brown, '"Violence and the Ameri- can Revolution," p. loi.


stetricians who were crowding the practice of colonial mid- wives, Joyce sternly replied that his committee would not take

"cognizance of any matters, but such, where villains and scoundrels are protected from just punishment, by arbitrary powers." He further declared that the "juice of pine, and the

plume of owls and crows" would not "be prostituted to the vile

purposes of covering 'certain pedagogues.'"34 Joyce's patriotic penal code was intended to limit the applica-

tion of tar-and-feathers to customs enforcers and importers. But the people of Boston went one step further, calling an end to the practice altogether. After the life-threatening assault on Malcom, no more individuals were tarred and feathered in Boston. In the spring and summer of 1774, several cryptic newspaper columns alluded to the "repeal" of "The Act for Tar-

ring and Feathering." Joyce no longer referred to his Commit- tee for Tarring and Feathering but instead warned his foes that

they would be whipped with birch switches. The town that con-

temporaries called the "Focus of tarring & feathering" and a

"seminar[y] in the art" now laid the practice to rest (see appendix).35

Elsewhere, however, tar-and-feathers was not so easy to

suppress. As the summer of 1774 drew on, the rift in Anglo- American relations deepened. The Coercive Acts, especially the

34Boston Gazette, 20o December 1773, 31 January 1774, quoted in Hersey, "Tar and Feathers," p. 458; Massachusetts Spy, 3, lo February 1774. One patriot wondered "whether Tar and Feathers would not be a constitutional" punishment for raising the

price of coffee during the tea boycotts. Still another writer, "upon hearing that the real errand of the commissioners ... was to grant pardons from the king, asked, 'whether it would be featherable for a man to be detected with one of them in his pocket."' Moore, Diary of the Revolution, p. 226. In keeping with this spirit of constitutionalism, colonial crowds would occasionally form mock courts, in which the offender would be tried and convicted for his transgressions.

35Boston Newsletter, 2 June 1774; Pennsylvania Gazette, 14 September 1774, quoting a Boston correspondent; Peter Oliver, Peter Oliver's Origin & Progress of the Amer- ican Rebellion, ed. Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1961), p. 109; New York Packet, 26 June 1774; New York Journal, 30 March 1775. Not all New England communities wanted to follow Boston's lead. In August 1774, a Symsbury, Connecticut, mob tarred and feathered a ship's captain there for

protesting the abuse of one of Gage's councilors. One correspondent described the event as proof "that the Act for tarring and feathering is not repealed!" Force, Ameri- can Archives, 1:731-32.


Boston Port Bill, shocked many colonists and gave rise to the call for a Continental Congress to meet in Philadelphia on 5 September.36 Among its many letters, petitions, and resolutions, the Congress approved a comprehensive plan of non-

importation and non-exportation known as the Articles of Asso- ciation. To enforce the plan, the eleventh of these articles recommended "[t]hat a committee be chosen in every county, city, and town ... whose business it shall be attentively to ob- serve the conduct of all persons touching this association." The

Congress further recommended that the names of persons who violated the association be published "to the end, that all such foes to the rights of British-America may be publicly known, and universally contemned as the enemies of American liberty." Though a complete break with England was still a long way off, the Continental Congress had advised the colonists to identify and ostracize individuals antagonistic to the American cause.

Along the entire Atlantic seaboard-except in occupied Boston-tar-and-feathers became popular once more (see appendix). In late 1774 and early 1775, local committees began using the punishment to compel compliance with the association. In Alexandria, Virginia, committees tarred and feathered tradesmen found guilty of importation, and in Baltimore, the

populace threatened to tar the owner of a brig loaded with boycotted goods. In Falmouth, Massachusetts, the store of Robert Pagan was tarred, and in Epsom, New Hampshire, town residents declared that they would tar and feather any "Pedlars, Hawkers, or Petty-Chap-men" caught selling imported goods.37

Yet as colonial Whigs became more adamant in their defense of American liberties, colonial Tories likewise hardened their opposition to American rebellion. In Duchess County, New York, Edward Short was tarred and feathered not because he

'6The Coercive Acts were several pieces of legislation designed to punish Bostonians for destroying the East India Company's tea. The most economically devastating was the Port Bill, which closed Boston Harbor to the transatlantic trade.

37The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774-1777 (London: J. Cape, 1925), pp. 43-44, quoted in Robert Patrick Reed, "Loyalists, Patriots, and Trimmers: The Committee System in the American Revolution, 1774-1776" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1988); Longley, "Mob Activities," p. 123; Force, American Archives, 1:1105-6.


clandestinely imported but because he openly refused to sign the association. Like Short, many loyalists flatly rejected the resolutions of the Continental Congress. Not long after it ad-

journed in late October 1774, a prominent New York Anglican minister named Samuel Seabury published a tract entitled "Free Thoughts, on the Proceedings of the Continental Con-

gress," in which he decried the "Fatal Tendency" of the association and claimed that members of Congress had "either igno- rantly misunderstood, carelessly neglected, or basely betrayed the interests of all the Colonies." In Monmouth County, New

Jersey, Seabury's tract was presented to the Committee of Ob- servation and Inspection, which, after "mature deliberation," declared it "pernicious and malignant ... replete with the most

specious sophistry ... calculated to deceive and mislead the un-

wary, the ignorant, and the credulous." The committee then handed the pamphlet "back to the people, who immediately be- stowed upon it a suit of tar and turkey-buzzard's feathers ... picked from the most stinking fowl in the creation." Finally, the crowd nailed the pamphlet, in "its gorgeous attire," to the pillory-post, "there to remain as a monument to the indignation of a free and loyal people."38

However rudely received in Monmouth County, Seabury's pamphlet was indicative of strong Tory resistance to the association; some local patriot committees experienced difficulty en-

forcing the mandates of Congress. In Philadelphia, a Tory attor-

ney named Isaac Hunt issued a summons against a committee member who had seized several pieces of imported linen. Simi-

larly, in Duchess County, New York, Judge James Smith sued and even jailed a committee member who had confiscated guns belonging to local Tories.39 Hunt and Smith were both ordered tarred and feathered-and here the significance of that practice shifted once again, in a subtle but important way. Whereas local

38Great Britain Colonial Office, Documents of the American Revolution, 1770-1783, 21 vols., ed. K. G. Davies (Shannon, Ire.: Irish University Press, 1972-1981), 10:177; Force, American Archives, 2:35-36.

39Force, American Archives, 3:171-73, 4:199; Moore, Diary of the Revolution, p. 138.


committees had first employed tar-and-feathers to enforce the Articles of Association, patriots now began using the punishment to defend their committees' legitimacy. During the criti- cal summer of 1775, several individuals were tarred and feathered for calling into question the authority of the Continental

Congress and its local committees. In Charleston, South Car- olina, two men were outfitted in "complete suits of tar and feathers" for toasting "Damnation to the Committee and their

proceedings," and a soldier at the town's Fort Johnson was tarred for "Wantonly Cursing & abusing America & all her Committee Men."40 Similarly, in York, Pennsylvania, the Com- mittee of Safety tarred a Tory for "Insulting Congress and its measures," while in Bladensburg, Maryland, a "great number of men, loaded with arms," attempted to tar and feather George Munro for "espousing strange sentiments."4' Before the end of the year, tar-and-feathers was doled out for comparable speech crimes in New York, Virginia, Georgia, and New Jersey.

Back in Philadelphia, the Continental Congress never explic- itly condoned tar-and-feathers, but in October 1775, the dele-

gates recommended that provincial governments arrest persons deemed dangerous "to the liberties of America." A few months later the Congress further ordered that any person who refused to accept Continental currency be "treated as an enemy of his

country."4' The private correspondence of several delegates suggests that tar-and-feathers was the treatment that Congress

40 The two men who toasted "Damnation" were Roman Catholics who had assaulted a Protestant man for stating that adherents of their faith should not be allowed to keep arms. But contemporary accounts suggest that it was the toast, rather than the assault, that earned them tar-and-feathers. Force, American Archives, 2:922-23; Moore, Diary of the Revolution, pp. 90-91; Great Britain Colonial Office, Documents, 10:62; Laurens, Papers, 10:305n; John Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution, 2 vols. (Charleston: A. E. Miller, 1821), 2:17.

41George Neisser, trans., "Moravian Diaries from the Congregation at York," 28, 31 May 1776 (unpublished, Historical Society of York County), quoted in Paul E. Doutrich, "York," in Beyond Philadelphia: The American Revolution in the Pennsylva- nia Hinterland, ed. John B. Frantz and William Pencak (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), p. 93; Reed, "Loyalists, Patriots, and Trimmers," p. 203.

42In Charleston, where specie was scarce, small notes were being issued "which none dare refuse under the penalty of being tarred and feathered." Great Britain Colonial Office, Documents, 6:55.


had in mind. In May 1777, the erstwhile conservative William Duer lamented to fellow delegate John Jay that the New York

assembly had not enacted "vigorous Laws to crush the disaffected." Expressing hope "that the Spirit of Whiggism will at

length break forth in some of the Populace," Duer explained that "[a] Spirit of this kind under the Name of Joyce Junr. has made his Appearance in Boston. I should not be surpris'd if he was to travel Westward. It would be attended with these good Effects: it would either supply the Want of Vigor in the present Government or it would induce those whose duty it is to act with Spirit and Vigor." No such infusion of enthusiasm was needed in Virginia, according to James Madison. The Virginian was proud to boast that a "fellow was lately tarred and feathered for treating one [of] our county committees with

disre[s]pect," unlike in New York where "they insult the whole

colony and Continent with impunity!"43

In the winter of 1774/75, the Continental Congress had drawn lines between friend and foe; soon many colonists would be forced to choose sides. In the meantime, the Congress bus- ied itself with preparations for a full-scale war with Great Britain. The armed conflicts at Lexington, Concord, and, later,

43Duer to Jay, 28 May 1777, Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-1789, 25 vols. (computer file), ed. Paul H. Smith and comp. Richard Dodge (Summerfield, Fla.: His- torical Database, 1995), 7:138. In 1777, an unknown individual wearing a white wig and red cape, said to be Joyce, made a public appearance in support of price control. See Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, p. 109, and Longley, "Mob Activities," p. 128. Madison to William Bradford, March 1775, The Papers of James Madison, 17 vols., ed. William T. Hutchinson and William Rachel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962-), 1:141, quoted in Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, p. 281 n. 12. The South Carolina Secret Committee of Five that ordered the tarring and feathering of the two Roman Catholic men consisted of at least three future delegates to the Continental Congress: William Henry Drayton, Arthur Middleton, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckey. If the evidence linking the Continental Congress to tar-and-feathers appears circumstantial, that may be because patriot leaders intended it that way. As John Alsop explained to James Duane in January 1776, "It is hard to say what is doing among us. Matters are kept very Secret when violence is intended." Alsop to Duane, 29 November 1775, Letters of Delegates, 2:427 n. 1.


Bunker Hill, together with King George's declaration that the colonies were in an open and avowed state of rebellion, con- vinced many delegates that the crisis with the mother country could not be resolved peaceably. On 26 May 1775, the Con-

gress agreed to put "these colonies . . . into a state of defence," and two weeks later it determined to organize a Continental

Army. As historian Charles Royster has demonstrated, these events fueled a rage militaire as thousands of men throughout the colonies volunteered for service.44

Caught up in the tide of enthusiasm, members of some militia and new army regiments engaged in tar-and-feathers while on the march. In New Milford, Connecticut, several militiamen tarred a Tory in August 1775; a few months later, officers and soldiers in Hays, North Carolina, tarred and feathered a man named Pollok, even though he had been "cleared by the Com- mittee of Safety."45 The following spring, Lt. Ebenezer Elmer, who kept a journal of the Third New Jersey Regiment's expedition to Canada, recorded that fellow soldiers and he "[m]arched up to where Daniel Stretch abused us, for which we gave him a new coat of tar and feathers, made him give three hearty cheers and beg our pardon, then proceeded on." Similarly, a southern

regiment marching through Richmond, Virginia, was hounded

by a Tory shoemaker who repeatedly shouted, "Hurrah for

King George!" For a time, "No one took any notice of him," but when the hurrahing continued, the commanding officer "ordered the pertinacious Tory" to be dunked in a nearby stream. Yet "every time he got his head above water he would cry for

King George." Though "his wife and four daughters were

crying and beseeching the father to hold his tongue ... still he would not"; finally the officer ordered that the "king-

44See Charles Royster's A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), chap. i.

45Moore, Diary of the Revolution, p. 123; Great Britain Colonial Office, Documents, 10:224. These sources do not reveal the nature of Pollok's offense, the reason he was cleared by the committee, or the reason why the officers and soldiers went ahead and tarred him anyway.


worshipper" be tarred and feathered in goose down taken from his own bed.46

America's new soldiers did not brandish the tar brush first. In March 1775, the soldiers of Britain's Forty-seventh Regiment, stationed just outside of Boston in the small town of Billerica, at last grew weary of being harassed and assaulted by the people of Massachusetts. They took their revenge on a poor countryman, an "ignoramus" by the name of Thomas Ditson. Accord-

ing to Ditson's account, a regular offered to sell him a gun, knowing the exchange to be illegal. Ditson accepted and was

immediately arrested. Proclaiming, "[D]amn you I am going to serve you as you have served our men," the commanding sergeant ordered that Ditson be tarred and feathered. The

troops carried out the punishment and further forced Ditson to wear a placard that read, "American Liberty: a Speciment [sic] of Democrasy [sic]." The soldiers then carted him through town to the accompaniment of drums, fifes, and fixed bayonets. "[T]o add insult they played Yankee Doodle."

Having recently "thought fit to repeal the tarring and feather-

ing act," the residents of Massachusetts were particularly galled that British troops had "adopted the very laws they were sent to abolish!" In the days that followed, the public outcry was thun- derous. Incensed colonists demanded that the commanding officer of the regiment, a Colonel Nesbitt, be brought to justice. Protesting Ditson's abuse to the governor, the selectmen of Bil- lerica reasoned, "Your Excellency must be sensible that this Act is an high Infraction on that personal Security which every En-

glishman is entitled to, and without which his boasted Constitu- tion is but a Name." Another dismayed New Englander ad- dressed the mother country: "Oh Britain, how art thou fallen! Is it not enough that British troops, who were once the terror of France and Spain, should be made the instruments of butcher-

ing thy children! but must they descend also to exploits too in-

46Ebenezer Elmer, "Journal Kept during an Expedition to Canada in 1776," Proceed- ings of the New Jersey Historical Society, Ist ser., 2 (1847): 98-99; Van Tyne, Loyalists in the American Revolution, pp. 1-2.


famously dirty for any but the meanest of the mobility47 to practice?" Thomas Gage, the governor of Massachusetts, worried that "the people seem at present very warm and much exasperated on account of the tarring etc. of Ditson." Only weeks before his soldiers were to march on Lexington and Concord, Gage presciently warned the Earl of Dartmouth that "[g]overn- ment is so unhinged that it is doubtful if it can revert to old channel without convulsion."48

Despite the efforts of British soldiers to make tar-and- feathers their own, it had become by this time a trademark of the American cause. As if to obscure the ancient origins of the ritual, contemporary writers, both patriots and loyalists, described it as a new invention.49 One colonial newspaper, for instance, described tar-and-feathers as "the present popular punishment for modern Delinquents"; another, perhaps in satire of merchants engaged in smuggling, dubbed it "the modem manner of Savings making." Still another told of offenders who had been "tarred and feathered in the modern Way." Loyalist historian Peter Oliver credited the people of Massachusetts with the invention of tar-and-feathers; he likened the practice to an infamous miscarriage of justice from the previous century: "The Town of Salem, about twenty Miles from Boston, hath the Honor of this Invention [tar-and-feathers], as well as that of Witchcraft in the Year 1692, when many innocent Persons suffered Death by judicial Processes." In London, a mezzotint cartoon depicting tar-and-feathers was captioned "A New Method of Macarony [sic] Making, as practised at Boston." The London

47"Mobility" was a common play on words that derisively blended "mob" and "mo- bile" with "nobility."

48Force, American Archives, 2:94; New York Journal, 30 March 1775; Moore, Diary of the Revolution, pp. 44-45; Pennsylvania Gazette, 29 March 1775; Gage to Earl of Dartmouth, 28 and 26 March 1775, Great Britain Colonial Office, Documents, 7:290, 9:69-70.

49For more on the invention of tradition, see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).


Chronicle reviewed a "Pantomime" at the Theatre Royal in which a character was given "the American suit of 'tar and feathers."' And back in Philadelphia, Isaac Hunt, the Tory at-

torney who sued a committeeman, was ordered "to receive an American coat of tar and feathers." Linked as it was to the American resistance movement, tar-and-feathers came, by ex- tension, to be linked to American identity. During the debates over the Boston Port Bill, one member of Parliament described tar-and-feathers as if it were endemic to the American character. "Americans," he confidently declared, "were a strange sett of people. ... [I]t was in vain to expect any degree of reasoning from them; that instead of making their claim by argument, they always chose to decide the matter by tarring and feather-

ing."50 The colonists, however, may not have felt as distinctly "Amer-

ican" as they appeared to observers across the Atlantic. Most

patriots had believed all along that their support for the Ameri- can cause was wholly consistent with their loyalty to the mother

country. The people of Monmouth County, New Jersey, for ex-

ample, had tarred and feathered Samuel Seabury's pamphlet because they perceived, without any sense of contradiction, that the tract tended "both to subvert the liberties of America, and the Constitution of the British Empire." The political events of 1775 and 1776, however, made it increasingly difficult for colonists to devote themselves to American liberties and si-

multaneously remain allegiant to the British throne. By autho-

rizing the arrest and hostile treatment of enemies of American

liberty, the Continental Congress forced colonists to declare "for" or "against." Whether by signing the Articles of Associa- tion, taking an oath of allegiance, or accepting continental cur-

rency, such declarations were often made in public and often

50Boston Gazette, 6 November 1769; Pennsylvania Gazette, 4 June 1772; Boston Evening-Post, 6 November 1769; Boston Newsletter, 27 January 1774; Oliver, Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion, pp. 93-94; Longley, "Mob Activities," p. 112; R. T. H. Halsey, The Boston Port Bill as Pictured by a Contemporary London Cartoon- ist (New York: Grolier Club, 1904), p. 93; London Chronicle, 19-22 November 1774; Force, American Archives, 3:171-73; Pennsylvania Gazette, 5 May 1774. See also Young, "Plebeian Culture," p. 194.


under tar-and-feathers duress. The recruiting practices of the North Carolina militia-as described by a Scottish woman trav- eling through America-illustrate this point: A "committeeman enters a plantation with his posse. The Alternative is proposed, Agree to join us, and your persons and properties are safe, ... if

you refuse we will proceed directly to cut up your corn, shoot

your pigs, burn your houses, seize your Negroes and perhaps tar and feather yourself." Likewise, a Georgia loyalist later recalled that "[i]n '76 the people . .. were inflamed against the Government of Great Britain, and were raising a ragged corps of all sorts.

.... [A]ll, gentle and simple, were made to declare whether they were on the side of the King or for the people.... If a Tory refused to join the people, he was imprisoned, and tarred and feathered."5'

As the meanings of "American" and "British" shifted, so too did the cultural significance of tar-and-feathers. Having already been employed by local committees to ostracize individuals who "Wantonly Curs[ed] & abus[ed] America" and by Ameri- can army regiments to silence taunting "king-worshipper[s]," tar-and-feathers was now laid on by ordinary folk as a means of

castigating Tories and loyalists or, indeed, anyone whose conduct or speech betokened opposition to the American cause. In Boston, the house of Edward Stow was tarred and feathered after he captured a pair of "gun carriages, swivels, and a cow horn" for the British army. Dr. Thomas Boulton of Salem, Massachusetts, was tarred and feathered for various displays of

loyalism, including having once performed a parody of Joseph Warren's famous 1775 oration commemorating the Boston Massacre. In Charleston, South Carolina, "John Roberts, a dis-

senting minister, was seized on suspicion of being an enemy to the rights of America, when he was tarred and feathered." In a violent display of animosity, the Charleston mob, "whose fury

51Force, American Archives, 2:35-36; Janet Schaw, Journal of a Lady of Quality, Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland, ed. Evangeline Walker Andrews and Charles M. Andrews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922), pp. 198-99, quoted in Reed, "Loyalists, Patriots, and Trimmers," p. 199; Elizabeth L. Johnston, Recollections of a Georgia Loyalist, ed. Rev. Arthur Wentworth Eaton (New York: M. F. Mansfield and Co., 1901), p. 44.


could not be appeased," then "erected a gibbet on which they hanged [Roberts], and afterwards made a bonfire, in which Roberts, together with the gibbet, was consumed to ashes." Two years later, in 1777, New Hampshire Freewill Baptist Church founder Benjamin Randal was threatened with tar-and- feathers for preaching the virtues of pacifism.5,

As the Revolution escalated, the role of American crowds in the folk ritual also evolved. The crowd had always performed an important function, either by seizing the offender and applying the tar and feathers or by cheering derisively as he was carted through town. But with few exceptions, tar-and-feathers appears to have been instigated by Whig leaders or organizations, such as the Sons of Liberty and local committees, or by army officers and regiments. In the mid-177os, as relationships between patriots and loyalists became increasingly antagonistic, American crowds began to tar and feather on their own initia- tive."3 For example, in the early spring of 1776, the women of Stratford, Connecticut, got word that a young mother had

52E. Alfred Jones, The Loyalists of Massachusetts (London: St. Catherine Press, 1930), pp. 44, 270; Moore, Diary of the Revolution, p. 359, quoting New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, 2 December 1776; Stephen Marini, Radical Sects of Revolution- ary New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 65. The killing of Roberts is the only incident of tarring and feathering in pre-Revolutionary America that may rightly be described as what we today understand by the term lynching, that is, a hanging and/or burning. For more on the relationship between tar-and-feathers and lynching, see James Elbert Cutler, Lynch-Law, chap. 3. Cutler understood tar-and- feathers to be a form of extralegal violence in the Revolutionary period, but he drew no lineage between that practice and the often racially motivated lynchings that were common in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South. More research is needed to de- termine whether tar-and-feathers evolved into lynching or whether each punishment evolved from a separate origin.

"5At times, the will of the crowd conflicted with the agenda of patriot leaders. After Philadelphia attorney Isaac Hunt sued a member of the Committee of Observation and Execution, his case was referred to the Committee of Safety, which apparently did not respond, for "several of the freemen of the City ... seeing the inactivity of those who ought to have stepped forward on the occasion," independently determined that Hunt should be tarred and feathered "if it could be done with safety to his life." Before Hunt could be tarred, however, a crowd of townspeople quickly arose and dragged a Tory as- sociate of Hunt's, Dr. John Kearsley, into the streets. The crowd resolved to tar and feather Kearsley too, but "the men under arms were afraid to proceed to the operation, lest the violence of the people should put it out of their power to protect his person." The guards then escorted Hunt and Kearsley back to their homes, so the mob "fell to, with the utmost violence, and broke [Kearsey's] windows and doors with stones and brickbats." See Force, American Archives, 3:171-73.


named her newborn son Thomas Gage, after the former British

army commander. Animated by the voluntaristic impulse and the military fever that had swept over the continent, these

women-roughly one hundred seventy in number-"formed themselves into a battalion, and with solemn ceremony ap- pointed a general and the other officers to lead them on." The women "then marched in the greatest good order to pay their

compliments to Thomas Gage, and present his mother with a suit of tar and feathers."54

Peter Oliver was appalled that the "fair Sex threw off their

delicacy" to participate in tar-and-feathers. Blinded by what he considered unseemly behavior, Oliver was unable to see that these women were demonstrating their allegiance to the Ameri- can cause: "The Feather Part indeed suited the Softness of the Sex; but when the Idea of Feathers, united with Tar, started into the Imagination, it was rather disgustfull. . . . When a Woman throws aside her Modesty, Virtue drops a Tear."55 Pa- triotic women obviously thought otherwise. For Revolutionary- era women, who could not vote and who were further excluded from American political affairs by gendered notions of the domestic sphere, tar-and-feathers provided an alternative means of participating in the independence movement. Thus the women of Stratford, unable to enlist in the Connecticut militia, formed their own tarring-and-feathering "battalion." Or, to re- turn to the young women of Kinderhook, New York: organizing a quilting bee may have been their patriotic response to the

Congress's call for an increase in "the manufactures of this

country." By coating their foe with molasses and downy flags, in imitation of tar-and-feathers, the quilters found yet another way to demonstrate their patriotism; the "young fellow," after all, had proven himself "an enemy to the liberties of America." In addition to political significance, this act of tarring and feathering had gendered meaning. That the youthful Tory was also a male rendered him even more obnoxious to the members of the quilting bee. His gender, like his loyalist opinions, placed

54The child's father averted their efforts. Moore, Diary of the Revolution, p. 219.

'5Oliver, Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion, pp. 97-98.


him outside the patriotic circle of women; as "the only man in

company," he personified the social forces that restricted women's political participation. By attacking him, the young quilters demonstrated that they would suffer the "impudence" neither of loyalists nor of men. With tar and feathers they proclaimed their intention to be included in the civic community of the United Colonies, soon to become the United States.56

By 1776, the Revolutionary-era transformation of tar-and- feathers was complete. Drawn from maritime traditions of the transatlantic rim, taken up by Whig organizers to resist unjust taxation and to enforce the association, tar-and-feathers was at last reclaimed by the American people as a means of both dis-

tinguishing friend from foe and asserting one's allegiance to the cause of liberty.57 As the Revolution wore on, however, the fre-

quency of tarring and feathering declined measurably.58 The

"6For the role of the Revolution in reshaping the lives of women, see Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980); Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intel- lect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); and Joan R. Gundersen, To Be Useful to the World: Women in Revolution- ary America, 1740-1790 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996).

57In February 1774, a tea merchant in Newport, Rhode Island, wrote to declare his allegiance to the American cause, offering as proof his participation in the tarring and feathering of John Malcom: "That He (the author) furnishes powerful Aid in the Doc- trine of Tar and Feathers, poor Malcom can wofully experience." Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-Letter, lo February 1774.

"8In local papers, debates arose over whether tar-and-feathers should continue. Speaking out against the practice, one editorialist wrote, "I would have every one punished that is deserving of it. But would not have it to be said by the INDIANS, We are SAVAGES." Likewise, Thomas Paine argued that tar-and-feathers ought to be aban- doned. In "The American Crisis, No. II," Paine wrote, "It is time to have done with tarring, feathering, carting, and taking securities for their future behavior; every sensible man must feel a conscious shame at seeing a poor fellow hawked for a show about the streets, when it is known that he is only the tool of some principal villain, biassed into his offense by the force of false reasoning, or bribed thereto through sad necessity." Yet others resisted Paine's proposal. Complaining to Samuel Adams about Boston merchants who, though patriotically inclined, nevertheless demanded exorbitant prices for military supplies, Francis Lightfoot Lee demanded to know, "How happens this my friend? is Joyce Junr. no more?" Continental Congress president Henry Laurens was not prepared to bring Joyce's law to bear against British agents, but he did promise James Duane that conciliatory offers received from Lord North would be sent back "decently tarred and feathered." As late as 1779, a Providence correspondent asked the American people to "take into serious consideration the vast number of infamous extor-


outbreak of full-scale war absorbed the time, labor, and re- sources of many Americans. The Declaration of Independence, which affirmed that the states were "absolved from all alle-

giance to the British crown," lent some clarity, at least in the minds of its supporters, to blurred matters of citizenship and civic obligation. As one contemporary pamphleteer succinctly explained, "The transition from Toryism to treason is nearly ef- fected and the rude custom of Tarring and Feathering will soon

give way to the severer punishment of the gibbet."59 But the

simplest and most significant reason that fewer people were

being tarred and feathered is that there were fewer potential targets for the punishment; over the course of the war, as many as sixty to eighty thousand loyalists fled to Canada or Great Britain. In recognition of tar-and-feathers' role in this forced exodus, London's Middlesex Journal printed an updated rendi- tion of Hamlet's "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy entitled "The

Pausing American Loyalist." The revised version read, in part,

To fly-I reck Not where: And, by that flight, t'escape Feathers and tar, and thousand other ills That loyalty is heir to: 'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To fly-to want- To want? Perchance to starve: Ay there's the rub!"

The word "rub" slyly reminded readers just how painful tar- and-feathers had been for those who dared to question Ameri- can independence.

After the war, American crowds continued to tar and feather, though with less frequency than before. The Tory Peter Oliver wrote that "In the Jersies, they naturalize [returning loyalists]

tioners, jobbers, and sharpers, linked together through the United States!--And Deter- mine whether the application of tar and feathers be not more absolutely necessary at this day, than at any time heretofore!" See Hersey, "Tar and Feathers," p. 455, quoting Massachusetts Gazette, 3 February 1774; Pennsylvania Gazette, 4 February 1777; Lee to Samuel Adams, 22 December 1777, Letters of Delegates, 8:459-60; Laurens to James Duane, 20o April 1778, Letters of Delegates, 9:457; Pennsylvania Gazette, 23 June 1779.

59"Four Letters on Interesting Subjects" (Philadelphia: Styner and Cist, 1776), n.p. "Middlesex Journal, 30 January 1776.


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." In Woodbridge, New Jersey, Thomas Crowell and Elias Barnes, two returning loyalists, were tarred on militia day in June 1784. About that time, "several disaffected citizens" were tarred and feathered in Fredericksburg, Virginia.61

Tar-and-feathers persisted into the early republic as well. In many cases, the practice derived its symbolic significance from the universe of patriotic meanings it had acquired during the Revolution. Recalling the abuse of customs officials in the 1760s, farmers in western Pennsylvania tarred and feathered a revenue agent during the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. That same year, "thousands of republicans" in Baltimore tarred and feathered an English ship's captain for flying an American flag upside down, an act widely perceived to be an insult to the United States. On 18 October 18o8, several Baltimore laborers tarred and feathered their foreman for cursing Americans, call-

ing for the reimposition of royal authority, and damning the

president of the United States. In the late summer of 1812, as the United States once again became embroiled in a war with

England, a sailor named Irvin was tarred and feathered for re-

fusing to take an oath of allegiance. And as late as 1835, a man named Cackler was tarred in Vicksburg, Mississippi, because his gambling activities had disrupted a Fourth of July barbecue.62

Tar-and-feathers was put to many of its old uses, as well as some new ones, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Victims ranged from domestic abusers, sex offenders, and adulterers to Mormons, abolitionists, "Negro crim-

61Hutchinson, Diary and Letters, 2:412; New York Packet, 26 June 1784; New York Gazetteer, 9, 14 July 1784; Gilje, Rioting in America, pp. 56-57; John C. Dann, ed., The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War for Independence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 235.

62Gilje, Rioting in America, pp. 55, 82; Charles G. Steffen, The Mechanics of Balti- more: Workers and Politics in the Age of Revolution, 1763-1812 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), pp. 149-50, 217-18; Military Monitor and American Register 1 (August 1812): 30; Cutler, Lynch-Law, p. 99.


inals," labor organizers, and pacifists.63 Yet notwithstanding its ancient and more recent histories, the practice retained its association with the American Revolution. By transforming tar- and-feathers from an obscure folk punishment into a popular patriotic ritual, Americans apotheosized that practice as an icon

63Tar-and-feathers was often used in the nineteenth century to punish crimes of im- morality. In 18o8, Capt. Floyd Ireson was tarred in Marblehead, Massachusetts, allegedly by the women of the town, for refusing to give aid to a sinking vessel. As had been the case with skimmington and charivari in early modern Europe, the pupishment was frequently applied in cases of domestic abuse or sexual offense. Not long after the Revolution, for instance, the men of Roxbury, Massachusetts, tarred Giles Alexander on suspicion of abusing his wife. On another occasion, the residents of Lexington, Ken- tucky, tarred and feathered both the male and female occupants of a brothel. In 1835, the residents of Colerain, Massachusetts, feathered a minister for "taking with his female disciples some liberties inconsistent with the holiness of his profession." Perhaps for this reason, tar-and-feathers became for a time a common means of driving Mor- mons, some of whom practiced polygamy, out of communities in the South and Mid- west. For example, Joseph Smith, Jr., was tarred and feathered in Ohio on 25 March 1832. In slaveholding areas of the country, tar-and-feathers was increasingly used against "Negro criminals" and antislavery advocates. In Dorchester, Maryland, James Simmons was tarred and feathered for fomenting a slave rebellion. In 1834, the residents of Columbia, Pennsylvania, threatened to tar and feather "a disciple of the Tap- pan school." In Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1855, slavery opponent William Phillips was tarred by pro-slavery members of the Squatters Claim Association. And a Georgia mob tarred and feathered a man for subscribing to the Liberator. See Esther Forbes, Paul Revere and the World He Lived In (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942), pp. 212-13; Lib- erator, 2 May 1856; Gilje, Rioting in America, pp. 79, 81; Cutler, Lynch-Law, pp. 97-103, 119; Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, p. 284. Tar-and-feathers came back into fashion in the early decades of the twentieth century. First applied to radical labor organizers--a socialist representative of the International Workers of the World was tarred and feathered in San Diego in 1912, and another IWW member was tarred in Tulsa in 1917-it was later meted out to pacifists during World War I in Oklahoma, Minnesota, and Washington. After the war, the revived Ku Klux Klan put tar-and-feathers to the old purpose of punishing gamblers and adulterers. My own grandmother re- members an incident in Bluefield, West Virginia, during the 1930s in which the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on an adulterer's lawn with a sign warning that he would be tarred and feathered. See Gilje, Rioting in America, pp. 133-37; Wyatt-Brown, South- ern Honor, p. 452; Brown, "Violence and the American Revolution," p. 104; Stanley I. Kutler, ed., Looking for America, 2d ed., 2 vols. (New York: Norton, 1979), 2:309-11. Editor Mitford M. Mathews has cited a threat as late as 1950 in A Dictionary of Ameri- canisms on Historical Principles, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 2:1706. Tar-and-feathers also appeared in other countries, including New Zealand, En- gland, and frequently in Ireland. It was used by the Irish Republican Army, especially during the first half of the twentieth century but continuing on as late as the 1970s. See Cutler, Lynch-Law, p. 60 n. 2, quoting R. G. Jameson, New Zealand, South Australia, and New South Wales (London: Smith, Elder, 1842), pp. o100-191; Young, "Plebeian Culture," p. 208 n. 44, citing an unpublished paper by Peter Linebaugh; Hutchinson, Diary and Letters, 2:410.


of their struggle for independence.64 But if Americans transformed tar-and-feathers, it also changed them. By enabling patriot colonists to purge loyalists from their ranks, tar-and- feathers refigured the American populace. Furthermore, the ritual helped the colonists confront their own conflicted sense of citizenship and national identity. By attacking their "enemies," often brutally, the colonists bound themselves ever more

tightly to that which they sought to defend: their "American liberties." And by participating in a shared ritual, patriots from

places as far apart as Pownalborough, New Hampshire, and Sa- vannah, Georgia, began to perceive that theirs was a common cause. Tar-and-feathers violence thus became an important means by which the colonists relinquished their British identities and pledged their allegiance to one another and to the new United States.

64For an example of literary uses of tar-and-feathers iconography, see Jonathan Trumbull's mock epic poem about the life and times of a British official in Revolution- ary America, M'Fingal. See also Nathaniel Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Mo- lineux," which, though set in mid-eighteenth-century Boston, before the folk ritual became popular, nevertheless employs the tarring and feathering of a British official to tell the story of American innocence lost.

Benjamin H. Irvin is completing his dissertation in American

history at Brandeis University. In July 2003, he will take resi- dence as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

APPENDIX

KNOWN INCIDENTS

OF TAR-AND-FEATHERS

IN BRITISH NORTH AMERICA, 1766-1784

Person or Thing Persons Date Place Tarred Cause Responsible

March 1766 Norfolk, Va. Capt. William Customs "All the Smith enforcement principal

Gentlemen in Town"'

June or Salem, Mass. Informant Customs July 1768 enforcement" September 1768 Salem, Mass. John Row, Customs

tidesman enforcement3 (Thomas Rowe?)

7 September Salem, Mass. Robert Wood Customs 1768 enforcement4

to September Newburyport, Joshua Vickery, Customs "Patriots"5 1768 Mass. Francis Magno enforcement

September 1769 New Haven, Nathan Smith Customs "Principal Conn. enforcement people"6

30 September New York, N.Y. Two Informers Customs 1769 enforcement7 October 1769 New York, N.Y. Kelly, Mitchner, Customs "Populace"8

and others enforcement

11 October 1769 Philadelphia, Pa. "Infamous Customs "Tars"9 informer" enforcement

'Capt. William Smith to J. Morgan, 3 April 1766, "Letters of Governor Francis Fauquier," William and Mary Quarterly, ist ser., 21 (January 1913): 167-68.

'Pennsylvania Gazette, 22 September 1768. 3Essex Gazette, 13 September 1768; James Duncan Phillips, Salem in the Eighteenth Century

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937), p. 296. 4Walter Kendall Watkins, "Tarring and Feathering in Boston in 1770," Old-Time New England

2o (1929): 30. 5Watkins, "Tarring and Feathering in Boston," p. 30. 6Pennsylvania Gazette, 5 October 1769.

7Isaac Leake, Memoir of the Life and Times of General John Lamb (1850; reprinted, Albany: Da

Capo, 1971), pp. 46-47.

sBoston Gazette, 16 October 1769.

9j. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts, 1884), 1:282; Pennsylvania Gazette, 12 October 1769; New York Journal, 19 October 1769.

230



28 October 1769 Boston, Mass. George Gailer Customs "Mob"0o enforcement

November 1769 Boston, Mass. "Countryman" Causing a "Mob"" woman to be harassed by soldiers

21 February 1770 Boston, Mass. The shop of Importation"' Theophilus Lillie

23 March 1770 Gloucester, Jesse Savil, Customs Mass. tidesman enforcement'3

18 May 1770 Boston, Mass. Owen Richards, Customs Joseph Doble, tidesman enforcement mariner, and

"nearly 2,000" people14

14 May 1770, Boston, Mass. The house of Importation's 5 July 1770, and Edward Stow 9 July 1770

June or July Boston, Mass. Patrick Importation Dr. Thomas 1770 McMaster Young and (threatened) "Mob"'6 10 June 1770 Marlborough, The horse of Importation'7 (threatened Mass. Henry Barnes, again on 5 July merchant 1770) 14 August 1770 Salem, Mass. William Advocating William (threatened) Molineux nonimportation Luscomb'"

'~Elizabeth Cuming to E. Smith, 28 October 1769, James M. Robbins Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; Pennsylvania Gazette, 9 November 1769; Legal Papers of John Adams, 3 vols., ed. L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1965), 1:41-42.

"Boston Gazette, 6 November 1769. "Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1981), p. 264 n. 21.

'3Boston Gazette, 26 March 1770.

'4The Letters and Diary of John Rowe, 1764-1779, ed. Anne Rowe Cunningham (Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1903), p. 202; E. Alfred Jones, The Loyalists of Massachusetts (London: St. Catherine Press, 1930), p. 243; Adams, Legal Papers, 1:39-40.

'NWallace Brown, The King's Friends: The Composition and Motives of the American Loyalist Claimants (Providence: Brown University Press, 1965), PP. 34-35.

'6Alfred F. Young, "English Plebeian Culture and Eighteenth-Century American Radicalism," in The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism, ed. Margaret Jacob and James Jacob (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), p. 209 n. 48.

'7Letters of James Murray, Loyalist, ed. Nina Moore Tiffany (Boston: printed, not published, 1901), p. 177.

'8Boston Newsletter, 23 August 1770.



Sometime after The house of Providing free the October William Hill bakery services 1770 Boston to British Massacre trials soldiers and

serving as a juror for the Massacre trials'9

November 1770 Philadelphia, Pa. John Hatton, Jr. Confronting his Sailors21 father's abusers

Late 1770 New York, N.Y. John Jones John Franklin and others"2

18 April 1772 Christianstaed, Captain Price Customs (threatened) St. Croix enforcement"2

July 1772 Rhode Island Two tidesmen Customs enforcement23

October 1773 Philadelphia, Pa. Ebenezer Shooting (threatened) Richardson Christopher

Seider24

November 1773 Pownalborough, John Malcom Customs Thirty sailors"5 N.H. enforcement

December 1773 Boston, Mass. Identifying Tea Party participant26

December 1773 Boston, Mass. Colonel Watson Protesting Tea (threatened) Party" 25 January 1774 Marblehead, Clarke and Stealing clothes "Mob"28

Mass. others from a smallpox hospital

25 January 1774 Boston, Mass. John Malcom Assaulting "Mob"29

George Robert Twelves Hewes

19Jones, Loyalists, p. 164. "oQuoted in Steven Rosswurm's Arms, Country, and Class: The Philadelphia Militia and "Lower

Sort" during the American Revolution, 1775-1783 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp. 32-33.

""Draft of Information for Carting John Jones," The King v. John Franklin & others, John Tabor Kempe Papers, New-York Historical Society, New York.

"2Pennsylvania Gazette, 4 June 1772. S

3Boston Gazette, 6 July 1772. S 4Boston Gazette, 1 November 1773. 5 Boston Gazette, 15 November 1773.

26Francis S. Drake, Tea Leaves (Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1970), p. 1lo. 27Boston Newsletter, 6 January 1774.

"SBoston Newsletter, 27 January 1774. "YMassachusetts Spy, 27 January 1774; Letters and Diary of John Rowe, 26 January 1774, p. 261.



26 January 1774 Boston, Mass. Ebenezer Shooting "Mob"'30 (threatened) Richardson Christopher

Seider

May 1774 Boston, Mass. The home of Importation3' George Erving

zo August 1774 Providence, R.I. The store of Importation32 Jonathan Simpson

25 August 1774 Symsbury, Conn. Captain Davis Protesting a mob's treatment of councilor Abijah Willard by "showing resentment, and treating the people with bad language"-"

29 August 1774 Freetown The person or "Mob"34 (Dartmouth), horse of Mass. Timothy Ruggles

October 1774 Alexandria, Va. Tradesmen Importation Local committees35

19 October Baltimore, Md. Anthony Stewart Importation Populace36 1774 (threatened) December 1774 Monmouth Co., Samuel "Tending both "[P]eople of the

N.J. Seabury's "Free to subvert the Township of

Thoughts, on the liberties of Freehold in Proceedings of America, and Monmouth the Continental the Constitution County""37 Congress" of the British

Empire"

*3Letters and Diary of ohn Rowe, 26 January 1774, p. 261.

3'Boston Newsletter, 2 June 1774. 32Samuel Greene Arnold, History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, 2 vols.

(New York and London: D. Appleton & Co., 1859-60), 2:338-39; National Park Service, Bicenten- nial Daybook, 9 vols. (Philadelphia: printed, not published, 1976), 27 August 1774.

'Peter Force, comp., American Archives, 4th ser., 6 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1837-53), 1:731-32.

34Peter Oliver's Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion, ed. Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1961), p. 152; National Park Service, Bicentennial Daybook, 29 August 1774.

35The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774-1777 (London: J. Cape, 1925), pp. 43-44.

36Aubrey C. Land, Colonial Maryland, a History (Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1981), pp. 301-3. 37Force, American Archives, 2:35-36.



January 1775 Falmouth, Mass. The store of Importation38 Robert Pagan

9 January 1775 Epsom, N.H. "Pedlars, Selling Town (threatened) Hawkers, or boycotted members39

Petty-Chap-men" goods February 1775 East Haddum, Dr. Abner Protesting the "Mob"40

(September Conn. Beebe abuse of his 1774?) uncle 12 February Fairhaven, Unknown Objecting to a 1775 Conn. persons Presbyterian (threatened) minister's

intention to join the militia41

15 February Savannah, Ga. Tidewaiter Customs 1775 James Egdar enforcement42

[sic]; seaman David Martin was also drowned

Before early Virginia "A fellow" Disrespect March 1775 toward a county

committee43 2 March 1775 Duck Creek, Robert Byrne Customs Teamsters44

Del. enforcement

9 March 1775 Billerica, Mass. Thomas Ditson Attempting to Soldiers of the buy a British Forty-seventh soldier's gun Regiment45

3 April 1775 Boston, Mass. The house of Capturing gun Edward Stow carriages, swivels,

and a cow horn for the king46

3"R. S. Longley, "Mob Activities in Revolutionary Massachusetts," New England Quarterly 6 (March 1933): 123.

39Force, American Archives, 1:1105. 4oOliver, Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion, p. 157; National Park Service, Bicenten-

nial Daybook, 14 September 1774. 40National Park Service, Bicentennial Daybook, 12 February 1775.

42Pennsylvania Gazette, 5 April 1775; Force, American Archives, 1:1253. 43Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of

American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 281 n. 12.

44Oliver Morton Dickerson, The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951), pp. 252-54; National Park Service, Bicentennial Daybook, to March 1775. See also Maier's From Resistance to Revolution, pp. 8-9.

45Force, American Archives, 2:94; Frank Moore, Diary of the Revolution (Hartford, Conn., 1876), pp. 44-45; Pennsylvania Gazette, 29 March 1775.

46Jones, Loyalists, p. 270.



8 May 1775 Bucks County, Tory Objecting to (threatened) Pa. committee

recommendation that townships form military associations47

June 1775 Wilmington, "[A]n English Smiling at a Militia (threatened) N.C. servant" militia's poor officers48

performance 8 June 1775 Charleston, S.C. Laughlin Martin, Disrespect Secret

James Dealy towards the committee49 (John?) general

committee

Mid-1775 York, Pa. Unknown "Insulting York County persons Congress and committee of

its measures" safety"s 24 July 1775 Savannah, Ga. John Hopkins "Offensive Sons of

Toasts" Liberty"' 26 July 1775 Pennsylvania or A "violent Tory" Toryism Pennsylvania

New Jersey riflemen"2

August 1775 Philadelphia, Pa. Isaac Hunt, Suing a local "Freemen of (threatened) Dr. John committee the city"53

Kearsley August 1775 Bladensburg, George Munro "Espousing "A great (attempted) Md. strange number of men,

sentiments" loaded with arms"4

August 1775 Augusta, Ga. Thomas Brown55

47National Park Service, Bicentennial Daybook, 8 May 1775.

48Wayne E. Lee, Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina: The Culture of Violence in Riot and War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), p. 147, quoting Evangeline W. An- drews and Charles McClean, Journal of a Lady of Quality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939), p. 190.

49Force, American Archives, 2:922-23; Moore, Diary of the Revolution, pp. 9o-91. 5oGeorge Neisser, trans., "Moravian Diaries from the Congregation at York," 28 and 31 May

1776 (unpublished, Historical Society of York County, Pa.), quoted in Paul E. Doutrich's "York," in John B. Frantz and William Pencak, eds., Beyond Philadelphia: The American Revolution in the

Pennsylvania Hinterland (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), p. 93. s5Great Britain Colonial Office, Documents of the American Revolution, 1770-Z783, 21 vols., ed.

K. G. Davies (Shannon, Ire.: Irish University Press, 1972-1981), 10:47-48; National Park Service, Bicentennial Daybook, 29 July 1775.

"George Morison, "Journal of the Expedition to Quebec," in Kenneth Roberts, ed., March to Quebec: Journals of the Members of Arnold's Expedition (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1938), p. 507.

-Force, American Archives, 3:171-73. 5Robert Patrick Reed, "Loyalists, Patriots, and Trimmers: The Committee System in the Ameri-

can Revolution, 1774-1776" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1988), p. 203.

5sGreat Britain Colonial Office, Documents, lo:1o8; The Papers of Henry Laurens, 15 vols., ed. Philip M. Hamer (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968-), 10:323.



August 1775 Smithfield, Va. Anthony Local Warwick committee 6

1 August 1775 Litchfield, Conn. Tory "Deriding the cause"57

8 August 1775 New Milford, Tory Southern Conn. riflemens8

11 August 1775 Virginia John Schaw Identifying a (threatened) militia fifer to

royal officials59 12 August 1775 Charleston, S.C. George Walker, "Wantonly

gunner of Fort Cursing & Johnson abusing America

& all her Committee

Men",o 22 August 1775 New York, N.Y. Tweedy, a Speaking against Populace"6

shoemaker Congress September 1775 Kinderhook, A youth Speaking against Women's

N.Y. Congress quilting bee62

19 September Duchess Co., Judge James Suing a county 1775 N.Y. Smith and committee63

Coen Smith

Early fall, 1775 Halifax, N.C. Unknown Militia64

persons 13 October 1775 Reading, Unknown Selling Tea65

Conn.? Pa.? persons 26 November Hays, N.C. Pollok "Although Officers and 1775 cleared by the soldiers'

Committee of Safety"

"5Richard Maxwell Brown, "Violence and the American Revolution," in Essays on the American Revolution, ed. Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973); William J. Van Schreeven, Revolutionary Virginia: The Road to Independence, 7 vols., ed. Robert L. Scribner (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973-83), 3:485-86.

57Morison, "Journal," p. 508. 58Moore, Diary of the Revolution, p. 123. 59National Park Service, Bicentennial Daybook, 11 August 1775. 6"Great Britain Colonial Office, Documents, io:62; Laurens, Papers, 10:305n; John Drayton,

Memoirs of the American Revolution, 2 vols. (Charleston: A. E. Miller, 1821), 2:17.

6'New York Gazette, 28 August 1775.

6"New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, 2 October 1775; Moore, Diary of the Revolution, p. 141.

63Force, American Archives, 3:823; Moore, Diary of the Revolution, p. 138.

64Lee, Crowds and Soldiers, p. 149. 61New York Journal, 26 October 1775. 6Great Britain Colonial Office, Documents, 10:224.


Person or Thing Persons

Date Place Tarred Cause Responsible

28 November Duchess Co., Edward Short Refusing to sign 1775 N.Y. Association67 November or South Carolina Mr. Brown Sons of December 1775 Libertym 6 December Quibbletown, Thomas Opposing Piscataqua 1775 N.J. Randolph Continental Township

Congress and committee" provincial convention

16 March 1776 Stratford, Conn. Mrs. Edwards, Naming her "Petticoat (threatened) a new mother baby Thomas Army"7o

Gage

"early days of Richmond, Va. A shoemaker "King-worship" Militia71 the American Revolution" 26 March 1776 In or near Daniel Stretch Abusing Third New

Cumberland soldiers Jersey Co., N.J. Regiment72

Prior to 27 Salem, Mass. Dr. Thomas Toryism (he "The American

July 1776 Boulton once parodied rebels"73 Joseph Warren's Massacre Day oration)

11 December Charleston, S.C. John Roberts, Being an "Mob"74 1776 dissenting "enemy to the

minister rights of America"

1777 New Hampshire Benjamin Pacifism7' (threatened) Randal, Freewill

Baptist Church founder

67Great Britain Colonial Office, Documents, 10:177.

"6Force, American Archives, 4:199.

69Moore, Diary of the Revolution, p. 178; Larry R. Gerlach, New Jersey in the American Revolu- tion: A Documentary History (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1975), p. 169.

7?Moore, Diary of the Revolution, p. 219.

71Claude Halstead Van Tyne, Loyalists in the American Revolution (Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1959), PP. 1-2.

72Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society (Newark, 1847), vol. 2, p. 99.

73Jones, Loyalists, p. 44. 74Moore, Diary of the Revolution, p. 359.

75Stephen Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1982), p. 65.



March 1777 Baltimore, Md. William Refusing to Whigs76 (threatened) Goddard identify the

author of an article published in his paper

c. June 1783 New London, Prosper Brown Returning Conn. loyalist77

1784 Woodbridge, Thomas Crowell, "Villagers"78 N.J. Elias Barnes

Early 178os Fredericksburg, "Several Va. disaffected

citizens"'79

76Charles G. Steffen, The Mechanics of Baltimore: Workers and Politics in the Age of Revolution, 1763-1812 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), p. 72.

77Catherine S. Crary, The Price of Loyalty: Tory Writing from the Revolutionary Era (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 370.

78New York Gazetteer, 9, 14 July 1784, cited in Paul Gilje's Rioting in America (Bloomington: In- diana University Press, 1996), pp. 56-57; New York Packet, 26 June 1784.

79John C. Dann, ed., The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the Warfor Indepen- dence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 235.

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