This is from the Town of Sutton, MA website…
Town Meeting Origin
"Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring
it within the people's reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it."
--Alex de Tocqueville
The history of Town Meetings is the history of liberty in Massachusetts.
Massachusetts’s residents began holding Town Meetings over 350 years ago,
shortly after the Puritans arrived from England, seeking liberty.
One reason that Massachusetts’s colonists revolted against Great Britain was
the British attempt to ban most Town Meetings except by permission. In 1774,
British Soldiers tried to stop a Salem Town Meeting in progress, but the
citizens barred the door of their town house and continued to meet.
On the American Revolution's first day of fighting, members of the Lexington
militia gathered on the town common at around 2:00 in the morning on April
19,1775. There they held an impromptu open-air Town Meeting to "consult what
might be done" about the British soldiers marching from Boston, as the local
minister later wrote.
Attending Town Meetings was once mandatory for freemen who owned land.
==========
I might also add that a long series of debates preceding the “Boston Tea Party”
were held from November 29th, 1773 until December 16, 1773: first at Faneuil
Hall and then (due to lack of space) moved to the Old South Meetinghouse in
Boston, were officially a Town Meeting. The meeting was continued from day to
day until the night of the Tea Party itself. It is said that around 5,000
people attended those meetings.
==========
As is widely known, many towns in Massachusetts used their meetinghouses both
for Town Meetings as well as religious services. Massachusetts at that time
was a Theocracy: church and state were one. This practice persisted, gradually
evolving and ultimately fading away, finally ending entirely with the
Disestablishment Act of 1833. This act was adopted in response to the numerous
church splits occurring at the time due to the Unitarian controversy: the State
finally gave up trying to arbitrate which church merited the state’s financial
support following each split. —Numerous lawsuits were filed as each
congregation tried to claim those funds for their own use.
===========
Thoughts...
The free and open debate of issues in a public forum is a dangerous thing - by
its very nature it is a challenge to centralized authority. If done well, they
generate widespread consensus, which in turn form the basis for communal
action. This is why the British authorities tried to suppress the practice in
Massachusetts in the years leading up to the Revolution, and why dictators (and
would-be dictators) to this day continue to try and shut down public debate in
any form.
I think it healthy to question if (and how) we should continue the tradition of
Town Meetings here in Lincoln, and throughout Massachusetts.
It was never a perfect system. Many towns - including Lincoln - were
established because local families found it very difficult to get to the local
parish that they were required to attend on Sunday mornings, especially in
inclement weather, this included attendance at Town Meetings, too. Also, as
noted above, early Town Meetings were hardly representative of the population
since women and non-landowners were excluded.
On the other hand, Town Meetings have long been crucial in promoting a healthy,
active, frequently entertaining, and often deeply thoughtful public debate on
the issues of the day. It has always been critical in generating strong
consensus and support within the community on how to confront and address such
issues.
I also think we can separate the issue of debate - which is where the Town
Meeting has long been central and effective - from the act of voting.
As political life has evolved in Massachusetts, the two have separated, but
remain complementary: we need both the debate, which may be prolonged,
strident, and exhausting; but which, by virtue of its nature, might be attended
throughout by only a subset of the town’s population. We also need the vote
that follows, which confirms the consensus generated in those debates via a
vote that the whole of the town is able to engage-in should they choose to do
so.
- Allen Vander Meulen
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