Description
In a typical tar-and-feathers attack, the mob's victim was stripped to his waist. Hot tar was either poured or painted onto the person while he was immobilized. Then the victim either had feathers thrown on him or was rolled around on a pile of feathers so they stuck to the tar. Often the victim was then paraded around town on a cart or wooden rail. The aim was to inflict enough pain and humiliation on a person to make him either conform his behavior to the mob's demands or be driven from town. The practice was never an official punishment in the United States, but rather a form of vigilante attack.
A more brutal derivation, called pitchcapping, was used by British forces against Irish rebels during the period of the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Sometimes only the head was shaven, tarred and feathered; at other times, a match was held to the feathers to light them and the tar on fire to inflict pain.
Read more about this topic: Tarring And Feathering
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“As they are not seen on their way down the streams, it is thought by fishermen that they never return, but waste away and die, clinging to rocks and stumps of trees for an indefinite period; a tragic feature in the scenery of the river bottoms worthy to be remembered with Shakespeare’s description of the sea-floor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The Sage of Toronto ... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a “global village” instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle’s present vulgarity.”
—Guy Debord (b. 1931)
“To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)