A Court of Tar and Feathers at Colonial Williamsburg

Margaret Thatcher notes in her excellent book Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World:

America is more than a nation or a state or a superpower; it is an idea–and one which has transformed and continues to transform us all. America is unique–in its power, its wealth, its outlook on the world. But its uniqueness has roots, and those roots are essentially English . . . It was from our Locke and Sidney, our Harrington and Coke, that your Henry and your Jefferson, your Madison and Hamilton took their bearings.

Indeed, America is the first nation founded on a bed of ideas, and those English ideas were refined, and the best ways to bring them to fruition debated, in the colonial capitals, coffeehouses, and taverns.

But it would be overly generous to claim that American independence was won only through reasoned discourse.

There were many in the American colonies who remained loyal not only to English ideas but also to British rule. Those who couldn’t be persuaded to join the patriots faced intimidation.

As the Revolutionary City program at Colonial Williamsburg dramatizes, bags of feathers and buckets of tar, not-so-subtle threats of what colonial royalists might expect, were publicly displayed around the colonies and used to win royalists to the patriots’ side.

Leslie Carbone

For two decades, I worked at political jobs.  Then my parents got sick, and I went home to help care for them, and they died, fourteen weeks apart, in their late 60s.  And I decided that life is too dear, and too uncertain, to fritter away in political offices.  I fought back the sorrow with travel, and started this blog.  I believe that passions are more fun when you share them with others, and my hope is to share my passions for travel and culture with you. Welcome!  Read more …