The Tories Essay, Research Paper
Graebner and Richards begin by asking questions about the cartoon (p. 149) of a Tory being tarred and feathered. The cartoon was obviously drawn by someone who supported the Tories because the faces of the men attacking the Tory look evil and demonic. This leads us to the two letters one written by a Tory woman and the other by a rebel. Ann Hulton, the Tory woman, describes the tar and feathering of a man in horrible detail on January 31, 1774. She claims that the rebels dislocated his arms, beat him with clubs, dragging him from the cart and giving him several whippings. Personally, I believe that since she is a Tory she is probably grossly exagerating the treatment of the man in hopes to persuade her friend (Mrs. Lightbody) that the rebels are evil and inhumane. One could relate it to the propaganda used by many countries during wartime. The second letter by an unknown rebel was written about a year later and also describes the tar and feathering of a Tory man. His description is more of what I ve always believed a tar and feathering to be: humiliating and a chance for the public to punish a person themselves. The rebel states that the man was stripped naked, tar and feathers put all over his body, then he was tied up and carted around the town while the public inflicted punishment for only half an hour, not like the five hours that Hulton describes. He doesn t describe what this punishment is but I m sure it wasn t as bad as the near-death experience that Ann Hulton described in her letter. These two letters show how two people who support different causes can describe an event in a way that sort of supports how they feel about what is happening, whether it s totally true or not.
Graebner, William, Leonard Richards. Silencing the Tories. The American Record.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995.
Hulton, Ann. Letters of a Loyalist Lady 1767-1776, Cambrige, Mass., 1927,
pp70-72.
Force, Peter, ed., American Archives: Fourth Series, 6 vols., M. St. Clair Clarke and
Peter Force, Washinton, D.C., 1837-1846, Vol.IV, p. 203.