The 13 Colonies

The 13 Colonies
Traditionally, when we tell the story of “Colonial America,” we are talking about the English colonies
along the Eastern seaboard. That story is incomplete–by the time Englishmen had begun to establish
colonies in earnest, there were plenty of French, Spanish, Dutch and even Russian colonial outposts on
the American continent–but the story of those 13 colonies (New Hampshire, Massachusetts,
Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North
Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia) is an important one. It was those colonies that came together to
form the United States.
The 13 Colonies
The original 13 colonies of North America in 1776, at the United States Declaration of Independence.
English Colonial Expansion
Sixteenth-century England was a tumultuous place. Because they could make more money from selling
wool than from selling food, many of the nation’s landowners were converting farmers’ fields into
pastures for sheep. This led to a food shortage; at the same time, many agricultural workers lost their
jobs.
Did you know? Virginia Dare, the first American-born child of English parents, was born in Roanoke in
1587.
The 16th century was also the age of mercantilism, an extremely competitive economic philosophy that
pushed European nations to acquire as many colonies as they could. As a result, for the most part, the
English colonies in North America were business ventures. They provided an outlet for England’s surplus
population and (in some cases) more religious freedom than England did, but their primary purpose was
to make money for their sponsors.
The Tobacco Colonies

In 1606, King James I divided the Atlantic seaboard in two, giving the southern half to the London
Company (later the Virginia Company) and the northern half to the Plymouth Company. The first English
settlement in North America had actually been established some 20 years before, in 1587, when a group
of colonists (91 men, 17 women and nine children) led by Sir Walter Raleigh settled on the island of
Roanoke. Mysteriously, by 1590 the Roanoke colony had vanished entirely. Historians still do not know
what became of its inhabitants.
In 1606, just a few months after James I issued its charter, the London Company sent 144 men to
Virginia on three ships: the Godspeed, the Discovery and the Susan Constant. They reached the
Chesapeake Bay in the spring of 1607 and headed about 60 miles up the James River, where they built a
settlement they called Jamestown. The Jamestown colonists had a rough time of it: They were so busy
looking for gold and other exportable resources that they could barely feed themselves. It was not until
1616, when Virginia’s settlers learned how to grow tobacco, that it seemed the colony might survive.
The first enslaved African arrived in Virginia in 1619.
READ MORE: What Was Life Like in Jamestown?
In 1632, the English crown granted about 12 million acres of land at the top of the Chesapeake Bay to
Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore. This colony, named Maryland after the queen, was similar to
Virginia in many ways. Its landowners produced tobacco on large plantations that depended on the
labor of indentured servants and (later) enslaved workers.
But unlike Virginia’s founders, Lord Baltimore was a Catholic, and he hoped that his colony would be a
refuge for his persecuted coreligionists. Maryland became known for its policy of religious toleration for
all.
The New England Colonies

The first English emigrants to what would become the New England colonies were a small group of
Puritan separatists, later called the Pilgrims, who arrived in Plymouth in 1620 to found Plymouth Colony.
Ten years later, a wealthy syndicate known as the Massachusetts Bay Company sent a much larger (and
more liberal) group of Puritans to establish another Massachusetts settlement. With the help of local
natives, the colonists soon got the hang of farming, fishing and hunting, and Massachusetts prospered.
READ MORE: What's the Difference Between Puritans and Pilgrims?
As the Massachusetts settlements expanded, they generated new colonies in New England. Puritans
who thought that Massachusetts was not pious enough formed the colonies of Connecticut and New
Haven (the two combined in 1665). Meanwhile, Puritans who thought that Massachusetts was too
restrictive formed the colony of Rhode Island, where everyone–including Jews–enjoyed complete
“liberty in religious concernments.” To the north of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a handful of
adventurous settlers formed the colony of New Hampshire.
The Middle Colonies

In 1664, King Charles II gave the territory between New England and Virginia, much of which was already
occupied by Dutch traders and landowners called patroons, to his brother James, the Duke of York. The
English soon absorbed Dutch New Netherland and renamed it New York, but most of the Dutch people
(as well as the Belgian Flemings and Walloons, French Huguenots, Scandinavians and Germans who
were living there) stayed put. This made New York one of the most diverse and prosperous colonies in
the New World.
In 1680, the king granted 45,000 square miles of land west of the Delaware River to William Penn, a
Quaker who owned large swaths of land in Ireland. Penn’s North American holdings became the colony
of “Penn’s Woods,” or Pennsylvania. Lured by the fertile soil and the religious toleration that Penn
promised, people migrated there from all over Europe. Like their Puritan counterparts in New England,
most of these emigrants paid their own way to the colonies–they were not indentured servants–and had
enough money to establish themselves when they arrived. As a result, Pennsylvania soon became a
prosperous and relatively egalitarian place.
The Southern Colonies

By contrast, the Carolina colony, a territory that stretched south from Virginia to Florida and west to the
Pacific Ocean, was much less cosmopolitan. In its northern half, hardscrabble farmers eked out a living.
In its southern half, planters presided over vast estates that produced corn, lumber, beef and pork, and–
starting in the 1690s–rice. These Carolinians had close ties to the English planter colony on the
Caribbean island of Barbados, which relied heavily on African slave labor, and many were involved in the
slave trade themselves. As a result, slavery played an important role in the development of the Carolina
colony. (It split into North Carolina and South Carolina in 1729.)
In 1732, inspired by the need to build a buffer between South Carolina and the Spanish settlements in
Florida, the Englishman James Oglethorpe established the Georgia colony. In many ways, Georgia’s
development mirrored South Carolina’s.
The Revolutionary War and the Treaty of Paris

In 1700, there were about 250,000 European and African settlers in North America’s 13 English colonies.
By 1775, on the eve of revolution, there were nearly 2.5 million. These colonists did not have much in
common, but they were able to band together and fight for their independence.
The American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) was sparked after American colonists chafed over issues
like taxation without representation, embodied by laws like The Stamp Act and The Townshend Acts.
Mounting tensions came to a head during the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, when
the “shot heard round the world” was fired.
READ MORE: 7 Events That Enraged Colonists and Led to the American Revolution
It was not without warning; the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770 and the Boston Tea Party on
December 16, 1773 showed the colonists’ increasing dissatisfaction with British rule in the colonies.
The Declaration of Independence, issued on July 4, 1776, enumerated the reasons the Founding Fathers
felt compelled to break from the rule of King George III and parliament to start a new nation. In
September of that year, the Continental Congress declared the “United Colonies” of America to be the
“United States of America.”
France joined the war on the side of the colonists in 1778, helping the Continental Army conquer the
British at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. The Treaty of Paris ending the American Revolution and
granting the 13 original colonies independence was signed on September 3, 1783.

The 13 Colonies

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The 13 Colonies

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The 13 Colonies

The Tobacco Colonies

The New England Colonies

READ MORE: What's the Difference Between Puritans and Pilgrims?

The Middle Colonies

The Southern Colonies

The Revolutionary War and the Treaty of Paris

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