Confederate monument actually gets tarred and feathered: 'Somebody ... put a little thought into it

An investigation is underway after a monument for the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway in Arizona was tarred and feathered, KSAZ-TV reported.

The monument bearing the name of the only president of the Confederate States of America sits near Gold Canyon along U.S. Route 60, the station said.

"Somebody had to put a little thought into it, but this is going to cost a lot of money to clean up," John Rogers in Mesa told KSAZ.

"It is vandalism," Tom Hill of Mesa told the station. "This is state property. State property. It is vandalism. The state controls this."

The Confederate Troops Memorial outside the Arizona Capitol was spray-painted white sometime before Thursday morning, KSAZ added.

Defacement and dismantling of Confederate monuments have picked up speed around the country since the deadly demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend, which focused on the removal of a Gen. Robert E. Lee statue there.

Protesters used a rope to topple a Confederate monument in Durham, North Carolina, on Monday. The city of Baltimore removed four Confederate statues overnight Tuesday. And in related news, Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants Confederate names erased from two streets on a Brooklyn Army base, and a Chicago pastor wants a statue of George Washington — and his name — removed from a park since the first U.S. president was a slave owner.

Interestingly, tarring and feathering was used commonly during the American Revolutionary War, not the Civil War.

Although isolated incidents of tarring and feathering can be found throughout the history of the 19th and 20th centuries, the practice had fallen out of public favor long before the Civil War began, and the practice is, in America, historically associated with the Revolutionary War.