Reality and idealization mingled almost from the start in descriptions of the town system put forward by early theorists of American democracy. The vision of a few thousand people governing their shared concerns and living together in prosperous but unpretentious conditions seemed like the perfect negation of European monarchism, with its grandiose aristocrats lording over exploited peasants and enfolding ever larger territories into the power systems of imperial states. Thomas Jefferson, in spite of his role as a Southern aristocrat and spokesperson for the independent yeoman farmer, heaped praise on New England’s geographic organization. The “townships in New England,” he wrote in an 1816 letter, “are the vital principle of their governments, and have proved themselves the wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government, and for its preservation.” He hoped that townships would become the model for local jurisdiction in the trans-Appalachian west, insisting that the new states should be subdivided into local “ward” governments “laid on the same basis as that of Massachusets [sic].”
Alexis de Tocqueville considered the New England town so fundamental a site for democratic experimentation that he devoted nearly an entire chapter of his 1835 treatise Democracy in America to explaining its significance. Observing that local government “produced greater results in New England than elsewhere” in the young republic, Tocqueville pointed to participatory practices that were made possible by the town’s emphasis on communal structure. A town gave up geographic extension in exchange for political power: its “sphere is limited, indeed; but within that sphere its action is unrestrained.” Tocqueville saw such polities as so organically constituted that he referred to the town itself as a kind of superorganic “individual,” arguing that it “forms the common center of the interests and affections of the citizens.”
Unlike other theoretical principles of democracy — for instance, representative assemblies, checks and balances, or constitutional rights — the town’s relationship to political theory was unique in that it referred to a place as much as to an institution, or, more specifically, to the unification of geography and polity. In its original sense, the town was a settlement unit adapted for the ecological and economic conditions of small-scale colonial agriculture in the New England environment. But upon this material geography, the town stacked layers of legal and associative power; it was a jurisdiction as well as a social bloc. It therefore expressed an attitude often assumed but rarely made explicit in theories of democracy: the self in self-government is constituted geographically.
The town in the early American republic was seen by thinkers such as Jefferson and de Tocqueville as part of the dawning democratic experiment. But by the later 19th century, as industrial expansion and waves of migration roiled the structures of American social and political life, the town came to express a two-faced orientation towards history, conjoining an imagined idealization of the past with normative templates for dealing with the crises of modernity. Different interpretations of this history were invoked by different political movements. For some racial purists and cultural conservatives, the town offered a retrograde vision of exclusionary harmony. For others, such as socialists who believed in re-establishing the primacy of political power over economic life, the self-governed town seemed like the seedbed of a radical tradition in American history, an alternative to frontier exploitation and cowboy capitalism.