On this day 250 years ago in Braintree, Massachusetts, John Adams wrote “To a Friend in London”:

It is not easy to convey to you, Sir, an adequate idea of the state of this province. It is now at last true, that we have no government, legislative, executive, or judicial. The people determined never to submit to the act for destroying their charter, so dearly purchased, preserved and defended by the toil, treasure, and blood of their ancestors, are every where devoting themselves to arms. Our Duke of Alva is shut up with his troops, and his forlorn Mandamus Counsellors in Boston.—What the ministry will do is uncertain,—all the British fleet and army cannot change men’s opinions; they cannot make a juror serve, nor a representative. An attempt to cram a form of government down the throats of a people, to impose a constitution upon a united and determined people by force, is not within the omnipotence of an English parliament.

The “Duke of Alva” was a brutal Spanish governor who suppressed a rebellion in the Netherlands and alludes to Royal Governor Thomas Gage of Massachusetts.

Source: “From John Adams to a Friend in London, 10 February 1775,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-02-02-0076. [Original source: The Adams Papers, Papers of John Adams, vol. 2, December 1773 – April 1775, ed. Robert J. Taylor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977, pp. 391–393.]

Also on this day in Cambridge, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress formed “a committee to observe the troops said to be on their road to this town” and another committee “to prepare such rules and regulations, for the officers and men of the constitutional army which may be raised in this province, as shall be necessary for the good order thereof.”

Source: https://archive.org/details/journalsofeachprma00mass/page/94/mode/2up?view=theater