Two hundred fifty years ago this week, 56 men signed the Declaration of Independence, breaking with the most powerful empire on earth. The Declaration rested on an extraordinary act of faith: that ordinary citizens, left to themselves, could govern themselves. It declared that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed” and asserted that a people have the right to alter or abolish a government that no longer commands that consent.
The promise was incomplete. Enslaved people, women, and most men without property had no voice. Yet the principle proved larger than the limitations of its age. Each generation since has been called to extend it more fully and to keep it alive.
In Massachusetts, self-government was more than a theory. The state and its towns had been practicing it for generations. The colony’s 1629 charter never said where its governing meetings had to be held, an omission its leaders seized upon by carrying the document itself across the Atlantic. For more than 50 years, they governed with no royal governor nearby to direct them, developing habits of local self-rule that became a defining feature of New England life.
Harvard’s open Town Meeting grew out of that tradition, meeting continuously since 1732, two generations before the Declaration was signed. Our town charter still commits Harvard to “encourage public participation in municipal affairs” and calls Town Meeting “the purest form of democratic government.”
But faith in self-government means trusting not only that the people can govern themselves, but that they will. This May, 336 residents out of 4,849 registered voters attended Annual Town Meeting, about one in 14. Across 25 boards and committees, 46 seats remain unfilled.
The founders’ faith was not misplaced. Self-government has endured in this town for nearly three centuries because generation after generation accepted the responsibilities that come with it.
As we celebrate the Fourth, we should remember that the founders placed their faith in us, the people. The responsibility that came with that faith now rests in our hands—to show up, to serve, to deliberate, and to govern ourselves well, so that we leave this inheritance a little stronger than we found it.