Meanwhile, in port cities such as Boston and New York, artisans, laborers, and decommissioned soldiers bore the brunt of the new taxes Parliament imposed on the Colonies. As speculators, they had no intention of moving west themselves they simply wanted to flip the real estate, cashing in on the backs of poor settlers. But it wasn’t the poor white settlers whose complaints stoked patriotic fervor: George Washington, a wealthy Virginia slaveholder and Seven Years’ War veteran, and Benjamin Franklin, an affluent publisher and slaveholder as well, had bought western land now deemed inaccessible. British policymakers in London “concluded that settlers, rather than Indians, posed the greatest threat to imperial peace.” In consequence, they drew a firm line in the sand-the Proclamation Line of 1763, running along the Appalachian Mountain chain, across which colonists could not venture.
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