Cluck 'em.

I was thinking about our lovely New York legislature and the fine chap who runs our executive branch, and the mayors and governors of those municipalities that have been encouraging rioters to the detriment of the non-riotous community, and I got to wondering: Has anyone ever really been tarred and feathered? Just a hypothetical.

Well, Dr. Wikipedia is our first stop on this tour of knowledge. 

Tarring and feathering is a form of public humiliation and punishment used to enforce unofficial justice or revenge. It was used in feudal Europe and its colonies in the early modern period, as well as the early American frontier, mostly as a type of mob vengeance.
      The victim would be stripped naked, or stripped to the waist. Wood tar (sometimes hot) was then either poured or painted onto the person while they were immobilized. Then the victim either had feathers thrown on them or was rolled around on a pile of feathers so that they stuck to the tar.

Examples are given of specific times this has been known to have happened, such as the tarring and feathering of British Customs Commissioner John Malcolm in 1774. This was Malcolm's second experience with colonial displeasure. It seems to have gotten a reputation as a real American way to handle the wicked, even that early. 

The Straight Dope is listed as a source for a good deal of information in the article, so let's go see what Cecil has to say: 

Unlike its close cousin lynching, tarring and feathering usually wasn’t fatal. One historian says it was employed chiefly when a mob was feeling “playful.” But the victim usually had a lot less fun than his tormentors. A Tory assaulted by a mob in 1775 was stripped naked and daubed with hot pitch, blistering his skin, then covered with hog dung. In 1912 Ben Reitman, companion of the radical agitator Emma Goldman, was beaten by a mob in San Diego, then tarred and covered with sagebrush. Afterward he spent two hours cleaning off the worst of the gunk with turpentine and tar soap — just the kind of helpful hint we at the Straight Dope pride ourselves in providing. Hope you don’t have occasion to use it.

The question that neither of these articles answers, though, is -- why the feathers? 

Another source cited was from the legendary 1911 edition of the Encylopaedia Britannica:

TARRING AND FEATHERING, a method of punishment at least as old as the Crusades. The head of the culprit was shaved and hot tar poured over it, a bag of feathers being afterwards shaken over him. The earliest mention of the punishment occurs in the orders of Richard Cceur de Lion, issued to his navy on starting for the Holy Land in 1191. "Concerning the lawes and ordinances appointed by King Richard for his navie the forme thereof was this . . . item, a thiefe or felon that hath stolen, being lawfully convicted, shal have his head shorne, and boyling pitch poured upon his head, and feathers or downe strawed upon the same whereby he may be knowen, and so at the first landing-place they shall come to, there to be cast up" (trans, of original statute in Hakluyt's Voyages, ii. 21). A later instance of this penalty being inflicted is given in Notes and Queries (series 4, vol. v.), which quotes one James Howell writing from Madrid, in 1623, of the "boisterous Bishop of Halverstadt," who, "having taken a place where there were two monasteries of nuns and friars, he caused divers feather beds to be ripped, and all the feathers thrown into a great hall, whither the nuns and friars were thrust naked with their bodies oiled and pitched and to tumble among these feathers, which makes them here (Madrid) presage him an ill-death"." In 1696 a London bailiff, who attempted to serve process on a debtor who had taken refuge within the precincts of the Savoy, was tarred and feathered and taken in a wheelbarrow to the Strand, where he was tied to the Maypole which stood by what is now Somerset House. It is probable that the punishment was never regarded as legalized, but was always a type of mob vengeance.

So the feather portion of the program was to make sure everyone knew the thiefe or felon that hath stolen was covered in tar due to his lawlessness. Or so... presage the innocent with an ill-death? You lost me there, E.B. But the point was identification, that the victim be known that this was done on purpose, that he didn't just have a bad day at the tar office. I suppose the feathers also helped keep him from sticking to things that the mob didn't want him to stick to, but that does not seem to have been the main idea. Also, while I guess the treatment could be applied to cowards (rendering them more visibly "chickens"), it doesn't seem to have been done for that reason. 

If I were a leftist and was writing this piece and hinting strongly about a certain Orange Man, I would probably indicate that you could buy a five-gallon drum of roofing tar for $85 and bags of feathers for a five-spot, but neither I nor this blog would ever recommend or condone acts of actual violence on anyone except in defense of self or others. That sort of cute ha-ha-sorry-I-incited-the-mob-I'm-such-a-jokester crap deserves felony indictment but seldom gets it.

It's less violent to run someone out of town on a rail, by the way, but I still don't condone it. However, Lincoln is supposed to have gotten a good gag out of the practice. Lincoln got good stories out of a lot of things.