Now some enterprising men from the American colonies, men names Washington and Jefferson, Hamilton and Franklin, realized that if things continued like this, American would be forever poor, reliant on their meager farm income, and England would forever become richer, benefiting from this unequal trade arrangement.

So the colonist rebel-ed. In Boston, they threw the high taxed, high profit English tea, into the Boston Harbor. It was a sign that things had changed. The Americans were not going to continue as a colony. They would build their own factories. They would supply the finished goods that the world needed. And they were going to protect those who manufactured those goods by erecting a tariff boundary around the county to keep colonial powers like England out.