 His son William Samuel Johnson in 1765 would represent Connecticut at the Stamp Act Congress, and the work hints at the controversies of the period; historian Joseph Ellis suggests that a disillusioned Johnson believed that "the underlying cause of the growing discontent between England and America was the breakdown of a sense of community".Parts of the work praise the British form of Parliamentary government, while others foreshadow the "Declaration of Independence", including its core principle that, “The natural obligation to virtue is founded in the necessity that God and nature lays us under to desire and pursue our happiness.” By 1767, Johnson was calling the British ministers in Parliament " a pack of Courtiers, who have no Religion at all.”

In 1767, his son William Samuel Johnson was appointed Colonial Agent to Great Britain for Connecticut, and left Stratford for London, where he would remain for five years.Johnson was left in Stratford with his daughter-in-law and grandchildren.