The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

by H.W. Brands

The colonists had other complaints. At the insistence of a handful of self-interested British merchants, they had been deprived of the right to issue paper currency of their own. Equally selfish parties benefited from prohibitions against the Americans’ producing nails, steel—even hats. “It is of no importance to the common welfare of the empire, whether a subject of the King’s gets his living by hats on this side or that side of the water. Yet the hatters of England have prevailed to obtain an act in their own favour, restraining that manufacture in America, in order to oblige the Americans to send their beavers to England to be manufactured, and purchase back the hats, loaded with the charges of a double transportation.” No less galling was the long-standing practice of allowing the prisons of Britain to dump their human refuse upon American shores. For decades England had been availing itself of this opportunity to export its rogues and villains; just recently Scotland won this dubious distinction.