Town Meeting: Concord’s Living Wonder

BY SAM COPELAND

Concord usually gets attention for its past. Even Louisa May Alcott worried that her town was “degenerating into a museum of revolutionary relics.” She, of course, belonged to an intellectual event that gave a second chapter to Concord’s celebrated history, but the Concordian of today is liable to feel that everything great belongs to the past.

There are many wonderful things about the town – wonderful people and places to walk – but what is there that, like the Battle of Lexington and Concord or the Transcendentalists, can be held up against the whole of human history and still shine bright and, furthermore, is available to us in the present? There is town meeting. Town meeting is not unique to Concord – it exists in over 1000 New England towns – but if it were, then uniqueness would be just one more of its remarkable qualities. First and foremost, the Concord town meeting is a direct democracy. Those in attendance of town meeting, which is open to any voter registered in Concord, are simply the legislature of Concord’s town government. Their sovereignty is not mediated by representatives or plebiscites.

Political theorists from Alexis de Tocqueville to John Stuart Mill have looked on jealously at the direct democracies of New England. Thoreau asserted that, “When, in some obscure country town, the farmers come together to a special town-meeting, to express their opinion on some subject which is vexing the land, that, I think, is the true Congress, and the most respectable one that is ever assembled in the United States.”

Direct democracy makes the Concord town meeting, if not a unique institution, at least a very rare one. Although modern democracy is often traced back to the direct democracy of ancient Athens, direct democracies are rare in modern societies. Even some formerly direct town meetings have switched to representative models.

In fact, the democratic system established in the American Constitution was expressly created in opposition to the direct democracy of New England town meetings. Alexander Hamilton, a favored figure of today, said, “It has been observed that a pure democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. Their very character is tyranny; their figure deformity.”

Concord Town Meeting

Courtesy of the Town of Concord

But town meeting proves that the drafters of the Constitution are not the sole founders of American democracy. Another remarkable feature of the Concord town meeting is its age. Being as old as Concord itself, it predates the US government by roughly a century and a half. And the relationship between the Concord town meeting and the Battle of Lexington and Concord is not merely geographical.

In 1773 the meeting made a declaration on Britain’s “infringements on the rights and privileges of the province,” stating, “As subjects of Great Britain we have a right to personal security, personal liberty, and private property. No power on Earth agreeable to our constitution can take them from us or any part of them without our consent.”

The people of Concord were concerned that the rights laid out in the colonial charter of Massachusetts were under threat, rights that included self-governance through town meeting. In 1774 they voted not to “buy, sell, or use any East India Tea or any other tea imported from Great Britain while a duty for raising revenue is affixed thereon by Act of Parliament.”

That same year they created a Committee of Safety “to aid all untainted magistrates who had not been aiding and assisting in bringing on a new mode of government in this province.” The Battle of Lexington and Concord happened a few months later. As the statements of town meeting suggest, it is no coincidence that the conflict with Britain was brought to a head by a community with such strong democratic attachments.

While we can say that town meeting played a role in the formation of American democracy, the formation of town meeting itself is a matter of controversy. Some historians trace it to an English system in which local parishes decided on municipal questions like the building of roads; others trace it to John Calvin’s Geneva; still others trace it to the Norse Vikings. The historian Charles Francis Adams opposes all of these theories, arguing that the New England town meeting was “autochthonous”, meaning that it sprang from local necessities more than historical influences.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony was established by the Massachusetts Bay Company, a joint-stock corporation not unlike the East India Companies of England and the Dutch Republic. Adams therefore conceived of the Massachusetts town as a subsidiary of the company and the property holders of the town as its shareholders. Town meeting was then, according to Adams, a meeting of shareholders whose will was executed by the selectboard, a kind of board of directors.

The historian Susan Kurland argues along similarly “autochthonous” lines that the intensely deliberative nature of town meeting was necessitated by the initial absence of police in towns like Concord; laws could only be enforced through their agreeableness to the townspeople.

There are, nonetheless, strong links between town meeting and Calvinism. As Calvinists, the Puritan colonists believed that parishes had a right to elect their own clergymen, rather than have them appointed by bishops or aristocrats. It’s unsurprising, then, how involved the Concord town meeting was in religious as well as secular affairs, to the point where the distinction nearly vanished.

Concord Town Meeting

Courtesy of the Town of Concord

The original meeting house for the Concord town meeting was the First Parish Church. Town meeting approved the parish’s choice of minister and raised funds for the minister’s salary. Sometimes First Parish created new offices at the behest of a town meeting vote. Even the structure of services and the rules for admitting new parishioners fell under the meeting’s sovereignty.

The gradual disentanglement of town and church affairs is just one change that the Concord town meeting has undergone in its nearly 300-year history. One of its most significant and heartening changes is the expansion of its franchise. At first, only adult male citizens could participate in town meeting, and this at a time when Black and Indigenous people could not become citizens.

Even among adult male citizens, certain property-owning or taxpaying thresholds had to be met to participate, as one might expect of a form of government descended from joint-stock companies. It was only in 1811 that any adult male citizen could participate in town meeting so long as he had lived in Concord for a year and was liable to be taxed.

Adult female citizens were only granted full participation in town meeting when Massachusetts ratified the 19th Amendment in 1919. Abigail May Alcott was an early woman suffragist who hoped to vote before she died, “even if my daughters have to carry me.” This hope went unrealized, but in 1880 her daughter, Louisa May Alcott, was among the first women to vote at the Concord town meeting.

The previous year Massachusetts had allowed women to vote on appointments for school committees, but not anything else. Louisa May Alcott was one of 20 women who appeared at the next town meeting to vote. After her vote was cast, she commented, “No bolt fell on our audacious heads, no earthquake shook the town, but a pleasing surprise greeted a general outbreak of laughter and applause.”

Carmin Reiss, the current moderator of the Concord town meeting, is the first woman ever to hold the office. “It was very moving for a lot of people,” says Reiss, “After my first town meeting people came up to me with tears in their eyes to tell me how thrilled they were to be saying ‘Madam Moderator.’”

Reiss’ election is especially moving in light of the fact that the office is older than that of the US president. In 1715 Massachusetts required that moderators preside over town meetings in order to prevent “the disorderly carriage of some persons in the said meetings” by which “the affair and business thereof is very much retarded and obstructed.” Echoing this original law, Reiss says, “Town meeting goes best when we strike a balance between efficiency and a full hearing of the issues. We want every point of view heard, but not heard too many times.”

After almost 300 years of history, the Concord town meeting is left as a direct democracy whose franchise and offices are open to all adult citizens regardless of race or gender, and therefore as an almost complete anomaly in human history. But the Concord town meeting is anomalous for another, more melancholy reason.

Concord Town Meeting

Courtesy of the Town of Concord

In contrast to national politics, the Concord town meeting is largely unpolluted by partisan venom. At this last town meeting citizens argued their sides passionately, but without personal attacks. The few moments of misconduct were addressed swiftly by Carmin Reiss with the support of the meeting. On the whole, disagreements were held between people who expected to run into each other at the grocery store the next day.

“We have a magnificent sense of community here, but I’m always aware of the fragility of that,” says Reiss, “That has to be nourished.” So long as it is, the Concord town meeting may continue to represent a hope of what American democracy could be.

Sam Copeland is a Concord native and a writer based on New York.

Opening image ©istock.com