As our Island towns convene for their annual town meetings this spring 2026, we have the opportunity to reflect back 250 years, to when nearly 60 Massachusetts towns, in 1776 alone, debated the notion of Independence. In 1776 — actually, beginning in 1774 — the three towns on the Vineyard incorporated in 1671, Chilmark, Edgartown, and Tisbury, were taking up their own declarations.
When the British passed the Massachusetts Government Act in 1774 to ban town meetings, it was taken as a direct assault on liberty. In response, many towns barred their doors against British soldiers and continued meeting, often enumerating the grievances that became a foundational influence on the Declaration of Independence.
In 1774, delegates to the First Continental Congress from the various colonies met in Philadelphia in September and October to discuss the deepening crisis and Britain’s increasingly heavy-handed crackdown. While that was still going on, all three Vineyard towns formed “committees of correspondence” to do the same thing on a local level.
Representatives of the towns met at the courthouse in Tisbury on Nov. 9, 1774, and held a “county congress,” adopting a slate of 12 resolutions that mirrored those passed in Philadelphia: defying Parliament, protesting its oppressive taxation, and insisting on their right to control their own affairs. The ninth resolution demanded “that town meetings ought to be held in this county as hath been usual,” declared the ban on them an “oppressive act,” and accused the Crown and its supporters of “violating its just rights laws and liberties.”
The resolutions, endorsed unanimously by the county congress, reflected a belief in the power of words and reasoned argument — the cornerstones of the town meeting system. They cautioned against “violations and mobbish proceedings,” and urged the citizens of the Island to avoid “all acts of outrage and violence.” They called not for independence, but for a “happy union and harmony” between Mother England and the American colonies. They insisted, however, that the “just rights and privileges” of the colonists be respected. That, as always, was the sticking point.
The year 1774 — what historian Mary Beth Norton called “the Long Year of Revolution” — gave way to 1775, and Britain blundered deeper into a crisis from which it could have backed gracefully out. Preferring force to reason, Britain prepared to deploy the king’s army and navy to crush the rebellion. The Islanders, seeing the writing on the wall, continued to meet among themselves — to talk, to plan, and to coordinate action.
A resolution by Edgartown to boycott virtually all British goods, passed in the wake of the county congress, took effect on Jan. 1, 1775. Those who refused to sign, or sought to evade it, were declared to be “enemies of the country and supporters of the oppressive acts of the British Parliament.” Tisbury began the year by voting to send its taxes not to Boston but to the treasurer designated by the provincial congress. The town chose, in other words, to fund the voices of protest and dissent rather than support the oppressive and illegal acts of the Crown. Tisbury voted to form a five-man “Committee of Inspection,” meant to coordinate local resistance, in early March. Dukes County created a similar “Committee of Safety” on April 12.
The process of these colonial town meeting deliberations and votes translated local grievances into a unified philosophy of natural rights. These natural rights informed the aspirations enumerated in the Declaration of Independence.
They caused the spark of a revolution in 1775 with “the shot heard round the world” in Concord, to become the full conflagration of the American Revolution in 1776.
Deborah Medders is the former town moderator of Tisbury. She expresses appreciation to A. Bowdoin Van Riper of the Martha’s Vineyard Museum for his contributions.