Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're about to demonstrate the subject of today's Short Stuff.
On Jerry No, no.
Never, never, Okay, we're not going to do that. Let's just describe it instead.
I guess. So we were just chatting before the show. I know we've talked about this at some point, tarring and feathering.
I don't know that I agree. I have zero recollection of that.
I know we did. I know they covered it on Ridiculous History, our colleagues Ben and Knowle. But I know we talked about the stocks and tarring and feathering what and I'd like to I want to think it was like a top ten, you know, something like that, like punishments or something from the old times.
I really don't know what you're talking about.
Seriously, Well, maybe someone will remind us. I'm trying to google it now, but I'm not really seeing anything come up except for that live July fourth show we did with Hallie Haglin and Wyatt Sinek and Joe Randezzo.
Mm hm.
That was twenty eleven, So like I don't even count that.
Okay, let's not let's just move on and talk about tarring and feathering.
That's right. This was a form of punishment and colonial America that initially was done to criminals and then sort of quickly was co opted and done to people that they thought were you know, like the Sons of Liberty took over and they're like, hey, if you're not on board with us, and you're you're down with England, then we might just haul you out in the street and do this to you.
Yeah. It was a tactic of mop justice in colonial America, essentially in revolutionary America, and it was so you so did not want to be tarred and feathered, no, because not only was it humiliating, it was also painful and it usually was a ay by pretty serious beatings that just the threat of being tarred and feathered could keep people in line, you know. Yeah, and that's how they
used it. And like you said, it's used on criminals first, but after I think the British really kind of stepped up and its attempt to control and keep a stranglehold on the American colonies, and that just kind of caused the revolutionary colonists to bristol even further, especially like when they passed the Townsend Acts, which were a series of acts that really kind of put the colonies back under
the thumb of Great Britain. Tarring and feathering really stepped up around that, So we're talking late seventeen sixties, early seventeen seventies is when it was I guess the golden age of tarring and feathering or in the American colonies.
I hope someone has a list that has named the Golden ages that you have dubbed over the years. You too, Yeah, no, but I don't know. You feel more of a Golden Ager than me.
A I disagree. I think the Golden Age is your thing, and I just took it.
Well, this is the Golden age of our disagreeing.
That's really funny. You really think that Golden age's mine. I think of it as yours first.
Oh really?
Yeah? Yeah, oh, that's it's your gift to the world.
You know what someone will do Italian it's probably like fifteen to fifteen.
That'd be appropriate.
So here's how you tar and feather somebody. You first strip them down. Most of the times it was just taking their shirt off, but a lot of times it was or sometimes rather it was all of their clothes. Then you would brush hot pine tar on their body. This was a substance used on baseball bats and Major League Baseball to cause stickiness and also to waterproof ships and sails and things back in the day. And it
was hot. It wasn't as hot as like our petroleum based tar that we use these days, but it would blister and burn your skin, and it was not meant to be comfortable. No, I mean not meant to be comfortable in the stickiness, but also it was meant to hurt you.
Yeah. So pine tar melts at one hundred and forty degrees parent height, which is sixty degrees celsius. So you can imagine hot pine tar and your skin would not be would not make you happy at all. The colinist would very frequently brush it on, and then sometimes they would pour it on, which would be way worse. And as far as we know, no one died from tarring and feathering. But like you said, this is not something you wanted to go through. That was the pain part.
The humiliation part was quickly quick on the heels of the pain part.
That's right. They would stand someone up in front of a large fan and they would put a table full of chicken feathers in front of that van and then plug it in.
This is like a muppet sketch.
No, actually, they wouldn't do it that way, of course, but they would. They would then bring out those chicken feathers and they would dump them on someone to make them look like a big chicken.
And hopefully you weren't a colonial germophote, because that would have freaked you out really badly.
Yeah, that's a good point, like one on your tard lip. No good. And then they would put them on a cart usually and they would or or a wooden rail or something, and they would parade them through town mock them. Sometimes they would hold up signs saying like what they had done that kind of thing. And like you said, a lot of times there were whippings and beatings that also came along with it.
Yes, And one of the most famous episodes of tarring and feathering and Colonial America took place on top of John Malcolm, a customs official. And I say, we take a break and we'll come back and tell the sorry story of the tarring and feathering of John Malcolm.
As why s k as.
Should know, definitely should know child of y S.
K all Right, Josh promised a specific case of tarring and feathering. It's probably the most egregious famous case when customs official John Malcolm hit a supporter of the Patriots there in Boston. And I don't mean a Tom Brady fan, I mean the og Patriots. This is in seventeen seventy four, in January, and the mob got ahold of him. They tarred and feathered him. And this is quotes from an
actual article from the time. Quote punched with wh a long pole, beaten with clubs, capital c led to Liberty tree. They're whipped with cords and though a very cold night, led onto the gallows, then whipped again.
And because that tarring and feathering caused such burns and blisters, quote, they say his flesh comes off his back in steaks. I looked all over for what that use of steaks was, couldn't find it, but just suffice to say his flush was coming off his back very easily.
Well, I would think steaks like you would eat, but it's spelled st A k E.
S no idea hm. So John Malcolm, he was a real piece of work. Don't feel too sorry for him. The person that he's struck in the street. That led to his tarring and feathering interceded when John Malcolm was threatening a boy, right, So he was not the greatest guy ever. And if that doesn't really kind of tell you what kind of person John Malcolm was. That tarring and feathering was his second in two years he was
tarred and feathered. He was a tax collector of customs official I think customs official right, and he was just a real jerk from what I can tell.
Yeah, he would be what's that Reddit? Who's the a hole? Or am I the a hole? He'd be very popular thread on that one. Probably people would be like, yes, yeah, that was not the first one though, that's just merely
the most famous. The first one was in seventeen sixty six, eight years before this, in Norfolk, Virginia, when a William Smith, who was a sea captain, and this is another great quote, he wrote this down that seven men, including the mayor, had bedaubed my body and face all over with tar and afterwards threw feathers upon.
Me the mayor. Can't you see him being like you're the mayor? The Mayor's like so eruh. So they also threw rotten eggs at him stones. They then they humiliated him by carting him through every street in the town with two drums beating, so they weren't trying to do
this subtly. And then they tossed him off a wharf where he nearly drowned from what I read, and the reason that he was tired and feathered is that he had been accused of tipping off a royal official about smuggling going on, and the Patriots the Whigs did not take very kindly to that kind of thing. And because it worked so well, the Sons of Liberty and just Bostonians in general started adopting tarring and feathering three years after Williams Smith T andF episode.
Not P ANDV.
So let's tell them a little bit about the who got tard each other, Like we said, customs officials, that kind of stuff, people who were not loyal to the revolution, people who are more loyal to the crown still, but there was like a even among those people, there was still just a certain subset that were true targets of tarring and feathering.
Yeah, there was sort of a carve out for the Brits or the colonial Brits. I guess that were of a little higher status. It wasn't They still had this kind of reverence for that social structure going on. And so if you were an officer, a British officer, or if you were loyal to the crown and you were wealthy or something, or just of a higher class, you
would not be tart and feathered. It was kind of just for the under classes and the lower classes, you know, working class, middle class, kind of in the same way I saw. I'm not sure where you got this, but it was likened to the fact that you wouldn't be challenged to a duel if you wanted to get revenge on someone, if they were a lower class you would just like, you know, get in a fight or horsewhip them or something.
Yeah, it was an insult that really played up that person's inferior social status.
Yeah, exactly.
So it took There was one last instance of tarring and feathering that took clear it in the nineteen eighties. So in Alabama in nineteen eighty one, that's impossible, No,
oh no, it's not. So there was a woman named Marietta Macklway and her sister got their hands on a woman named Elizabeth Jamison, and Elizabeth Jamison was going to marry Marietta Macklway's ex husband later that week, and so Marietta and her sister held Elizabeth at shotgun point and cut her hair and tarred and feathered her in nineteen eighty one. Wow, and you would think, like, wow, that
must have really worked wrong. Marietta and her sister were both arrested like appropriately, and Elizabeth washed off all of the tar later that week, got a wig, and they got married after all. Wow, isn't that quite a story?
Yeah? Where was that again?
Nineteen eighty one in Alabama?
Eighty one?
Nineteen eighty one?
I thought you said ninety one earlier? No, I mean eighty one's not any better.
Yeah, you're like, oh yeah, yeah, everybody's doing that in the eighties.
No, No, No, that's still hard to believe.
Yeah, you're like, nineties, that's crazy. So can't you imagine somebody tarring and feathering somebody just like Zach Morris or something wearing.
A cosmic shudder? Yeah not at all.
I guess, Chuck. Things seem to have petered out a little bit, and we've said everything we have to say about tarring and feathering. So I say short stuff is that agreed?
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