During the weeks following the tarring and feathering of John Malcom on January 25, 1774, in Boston Mass. (see Part 1), Malcom issued public bulletins regarding his recovery. In April, a long, overly glowing letter appeared in the Boston Gazette sharing a positive assessment of Malcom’s character and motivations, an account likely written by Malcom but attributed to an anonymous “A.Z.” Apparently, Malcom was seeding public opinion with his account of being sorely wronged.  

On May 2, Malcom sailed for London to petition Prime Minister Lord North for recompense. While waiting through the summer for a response to his memorial, Malcom decided to run for a seat in Parliament against John Wilkes, a great supporter of Liberty and a champion of the colonies. King George III viewed Wilkes disdainfully and was also reveling, at the time, in Parliament’s passage of the Boston Port Act, punishing the entire colony beginning June 1 for the “destruction of the tea.” The act closed the port of Boston and sent a military man to serve as the new Royal Governor of Massachusetts. On election day, Wilkes was elected unopposed, because Malcom, despite his claims of bravery on the battlefield, did not bother to appear at the poll. (Wilkes County, Georgia, 1777, and Wilkes County, North Carolina, 1778, are named in his honor.) 

In October 1774, however, a new account of Malcom’s tarring and feathering appeared in a dispatch from London offering an episode previously unreported and entangling Malcom’s ill treatment with the “destruction of the tea” and because he was a customs officer. None of that was true. Nevertheless, the claims of such in London sparked an illustration, a political cartoon, by British artist Phillip Dawes, titled “The Bostonian’s Paying the Excise-man, or Tarring & Feathering.” Notably, the illustration, pure propaganda, shows five Americans forcing Malcom to drink from a teapot, their faces highly charactered. The illustration also reviews, by reference, the prior 10 years of tension between Great Britain and its American colonies, alluding to the Stamp Act, the Liberty Tree, and the recent “destruction of the tea.”  

But another print had appeared three weeks earlier showing two Americans with a kneeling victim of tarring and feathering. Scholars believe the careful detailing of the victims’ face makes it highly probable this is a portrait of John Malcom. The rascal had succeeded in selling a convincing bald-faced lie to an unsuspecting British public already predisposed to look down on those in the colonies as less than “real” British citizens. And proof of his villainy had now come back to the colonies displayed in the newspapers as the hoodwinking disinformation Malcom had concocted. The cockade on the hat of one American denotes membership in an organized group of “rebels” such as the Sons of Liberty or Samuel Adams’ non-descript “the body.” The “45” on the other man’s hat refers to Number 45 of the North Briton (published April 23, 1763) in which Liberty-loving John Wilkes criticized a speech by King George III and had to escape the country or face charges of “treason.” This illustration, titled “A new method of macarony making as practiced in Boston,” was a further dig by British elites at the sophistication lacking among Americans, “macarony” referring to foppish attire (e.g., feathers) rather than real style.  

Malcom petitioned to British ministers for compensation for his suffering, beginning in 1775 a long list of repeated attempts that involved angry, ill-advised lawsuits, obsequious appeals through overly fawning memorials, and desperate pleadings which garnered for him much less than the £100 annuity he sought. He even appealed directly to King George III to make him the single “Knight of the Tarr.” Instead, Malcom was made an Ensign in the Independent Company of Invalids at Plymouth, England, and not, in fact, returned to America, as he hoped, with sufficient support for a livelihood to provide for his wife and five children. Instead, the Board considering his appeal called him “insane.” Malcom never returned to America, living 15 years in exile in Great Britian until well after the American Revolution was fought and ended by treaty in 1783. John Malcom died on November 23, 1788, with hardly anyone on either side of the pond caring much about his plight. 

The two illustrations of tarring and feathering have confused Americans ever since, causing generations to assume that Boston patriots did such a thing at the time of what Americans have come to call the “Boston Tea Party.” But the events depicted in that way never happened like that and only came into being because John Malcom actively and repeatedly told this falsehood in London until those willing to believe it embraced its depiction as such. Yes, he was tarred and feathered, but because of his own behaviors as a belligerent, swaggering braggart, a “bully Drawcansir” as North Carolina Royal Governor Josiah Martin called him, not because he was somehow involved with landing the tea through British customs at Boston.  

The facts reveal that the citizens of Boston perpetrated an orderly and non-violent protest on the evening of December 16, 1773, to prevent the landing of tea from ships in the harbor, a landing which would have reinforced the notion that Parliament could control the colonies from afar and without any representation by colonists in determining their own governance. The events of that night were a protest, a demonstration in support of democratic norms, the rights of Englishmen as it was considered at the time. But how the British Parliament, Ministers, and King responded afterward set in motion the events of what Americans would later call “the Long ’74,” the beginning of the American Revolution.