User:Jerry in San Diego/sandbox

It was not a punishment, just a chore, like sweeping down the deck.

The latter had to be heated to a higher temperature to use, and so was called "hot tar." Therefore it is difficult to know, in any particular instance, just what the material might have been that someone was tarred and feathered with. Unless the tar was boiling, it was not necessarily a brutal procedure. Often it seems to have been more a matter of humiliation than torture.