An original American practice. Maybe we should bring it back.
American Revolution
In 1766, Captain William Smith was tarred, feathered, and dumped into the harbor of Norfolk, Virginia by a mob that included the town's mayor. A vessel picked him out of the water just as his strength was giving out. He survived and was later quoted as saying that they "dawbed my body and face all over with tar and afterwards threw feathers on me." Smith was suspected of informing on smugglers to the British customs agents, as was the case with most other tar-and-feathers victims in the following decade.[6]
The practice appeared in Salem, Massachusetts in 1767, when mobs attacked low-level employees of the customs service with tar and feathers. In October 1769, a mob in Boston attacked a customs service sailor the same way, and a few similar attacks followed through 1774. The tarring and feathering of Customs Commissioner John Malcolm received particular attention in 1774. Such acts associated the punishment with the Patriot side of the American Revolution. An exception occurred in March 1775, when a British regiment inflicted the same treatment on Thomas Ditson, a Billerica, Massachusetts man who attempted to buy a musket from one of the regiment's soldiers. There is no known case of a person dying from being tarred and feathered in that period. During the Whiskey Rebellion, local farmers inflicted the punishment on federal tax agents.[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarring_and_feathering