On September 20, 1774, Harvard Professor John Winthrop wrote to the theologian and intellectual Richard Price, one of America’s firmest supporters in London, that the Massachusetts Government Act “mutilated the Charter [of Massachusetts], so as to leave only a phantom remaining and, by depriving the people of every privilege has erected an absolute despotism.” Her further complained that the “manifest design” of the Administration of Justice Act was “to empower the military to kill the inhabitants without danger or fear of punishment.”

Also on that day, Governor Thomas Gage of Massachusetts wrote to Lord Dartmouth in London that when news of the Massachusetts Government Act and the Administration of Justice Act arrived in Massachusetts it “overset” his plans to strengthen Royal authority “and the flame blazed out in all parts at once beyond the conception of everybody.”

Source: Mary Beth Norton, 1774 The Long Year of Revolution at 132-34