You may want to go back and reread about the whole tar and feather thing, it’s actually way more fucked up than you may know.
Even if the tar was only like ~140F like an asphalt road can hit pretty easily in the summer, it’s covering your body and sticking to your skin. But this was in a time where they didn’t have fine control of heat, and was likely just warmed over a fire. Very likely aren’t surviving that experience, especially when it was practiced…
It would honestly depend on the melting point of the tar and what it’s mixed with. I guess they could just heat pure wood tar, but they had the technical know how to mix it with volatile plant oils to make it more liquid.
The goal is to humiliate a person; running around like a chicken is more humiliating than being a dead chicken. Since they wanted a show, they would have went out of their way to make it less deadly.
You may want to go back and reread about the whole tar and feather thing, it’s actually way more fucked up than you may know.
Even if the tar was only like ~140F like an asphalt road can hit pretty easily in the summer, it’s covering your body and sticking to your skin. But this was in a time where they didn’t have fine control of heat, and was likely just warmed over a fire. Very likely aren’t surviving that experience, especially when it was practiced…
From what admittedly little I’ve read on the subject, it seems plenty of people survived tar and feathering.
It would honestly depend on the melting point of the tar and what it’s mixed with. I guess they could just heat pure wood tar, but they had the technical know how to mix it with volatile plant oils to make it more liquid.
The goal is to humiliate a person; running around like a chicken is more humiliating than being a dead chicken. Since they wanted a show, they would have went out of their way to make it less deadly.