Tarred, Feathered, and Branded

Note: Transcript is from an earlier broadcast and may contain some inaccuracies.

BRIAN: As of 2015, there are a very small handful of nations with whom the US does not have diplomatic relations. Iran is one. Cuba is another. Many Americans believe it should stay that way, but many don’t. And for the first time in decades, it appears that those people may soon succeed in edging both nations off our nation’s enemies list.

For the rest of the hour today, we’re reflecting on what it means to be America’s enemy. Why have some former enemies become fast friends, while others cannot seem to shake the enemy label? We’ll begin on a frigid Boston night in January, 1774. Things were about to get ugly for a man named John Malcolm.

ED: John Malcolm was perhaps the only person in all of revolutionary North America to be tarred and feathered twice.

PETER: This is historian, Ben Irvin, who has studied the history of tarring and feathering. He says above all, the practice was meant to humiliate. In Malcolm’s case, that involved the crowd parading his befeathered body throughout the city.

ED: But at every stop, they forced him to apologize to the crowd, and they forced him to drink tea until he vomited.

PETER: And despite the cold, the mob had stripped him of his clothing.

ED: His skin was frostbitten. And allegedly, this is gruesome. It allegedly pulled off as he attempted to scrub the tar from his body afterwards.

BRIAN: Malcolm was targeted for a few reasons. For one, many patriots thought he was a jerk, often harassing them in public. But even more damning, he was a British customs agent, the guy who enforced unpopular tax policies. At the beginning of the revolt, royal officials, like Malcolm, were popular targets for tar and feathers. But as the revolution wore on, Irvin says, American patriots found new targets.

ED: As the nature of the resistance movement changes, the nature of tarring and feathering changes, as well. In the mid 1770s, we begin to see groups of individuals applying tar and feathers to their internal enemies. One of the unique things about the American Revolution was that it was a civil war. It was an internal war. There were no clearer ethnic, or racial, or even necessarily religious boundaries between patriots and loyalists. And so within the former colonies, it was very important to the Patriots to distinguish their friends from their foes.

And tarring and feathering was one of the ways that they did that.

BRIAN: In dramatic fashion.

ED: Dramatic fashion. Spectacular fashion, if you will. And so in Savannah, in 1775, the Sons of Liberty tarred and feathered a man named John Hopkins, who was allegedly drinking offensive toasts. We might imagine that he drank to the King’s health, and that was enough to earn him tar and feathers.

PETER: Wow.

ED: In Charleston, South Carolina, in August, 1775, a crowd tarred and feathered a man named George Walker for cursing and abusing America and all her committee men. One of my favorite episodes, in Kinderhook, New York in September, 1775, the young women who had gathered for a patriotic quilting bee tarred and feathered a boy who came amongst them and began to speak against Congress. These young girls, they didn’t have access to tar and feathers. So instead, they used molasses and the tops of flags that grew in the meadows.

BRIAN: So when did tarring and feathering peak?

ED: Well, tarring and feathering, during the Revolutionary Period, will peak in the mid 1770’s. After the Continental Congress urges people to boycott British goods in 1774, but before perhaps the Declaration of Independence, when there are real questions about allegiance, and loyalty, and national identity. It will peter out as the war continues, as loyalists throughout British North America continue to flee for safety. As energies became redirected to the war effort, we’ll see fewer episodes of tarring and feathering. But tarring and feathering persists in American history throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

BRIAN: Wait a second. Hold on. You mean tarring and feathering goes past the Revolutionary War?

ED: Absolutely. Tarring and feathering is stitched through every major social crisis in US history. We see tarring and feathering in the 19th century repeatedly. Temperance advocates were tarred and feathered by their opponents. Abolitionists were tarred and feathered, as were defenders of slavery. In the Jim Crow Era, African Americans were tarred and feathered. Civil Rights activists were tarred and feathered. During World War I, German sympathizers were tarred and feathered. Throughout this whole period, persons who were suspected or accused of violating sexual taboos or domestic relations were tarred and feathered.

So prostitutes, adulterers, cohabitators–

BRIAN: So this expands well beyond what we might call political ideology, or even political interest to all kinds of social concerns and social morays.

ED: Absolutely, it does. I would argue though that it never is entirely divorced from the association of meanings that it acquires during the Revolutionary Period.

BRIAN: Right.

ED: To impose the tar and feathers is to lay claim to ultra American status. We, the crowd who tars and feathers are the true Americans. And that’s why it’s so important to cart these people through town and say, this is the behavior that we denounce. These are the individuals that we denounce. And for that reason, it’s really, really useful for crowds that want to assert their moral superiority and to lay claim to a particular set of American ideals.

Ben Irvin is a historian at the University of Arizona. He’s the author of Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty; The Continental Congress and the People Out of Doors.

PETER: It’s time for a short break. But stay with us. When we get back, America’s fledgling government is nearly brought down over a French Connection.

BRIAN: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be right back.