and finally the Quebec Act, which, besides allowing French Canadians to practice Catholicism (not a popular provision among New England’s papist-hating Congregationalists), expanded that province all the way to the Ohio River to the south and to the Mississippi to the west. Many leading colonists, especially in Pennsylvania and Virginia, such as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, had applied for land grants in this huge swath of territory, which included modern Ohio and Illinois. By effectively prohibiting western expansion, Parliament had found a way—unrelated to the unrest in Boston—to
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