Map Of The Delaware Colony

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 found 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, Due north Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia) is an important one. It was those colonies that came together to class the U.s..

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The 13 Colonies — The original 13 colonies of North America in 1776, at the United States Proclamation of Independence.

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English language Colonial Expansion

Sixteenth-century England was a tumultuous place. Considering they could make more money from selling wool than from selling food, many of the nation'south 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.

The 16th century was besides the age of mercantilism, an extremely competitive economic philosophy that pushed European nations to learn as many colonies equally they could. Every bit a consequence, for the most part, the English colonies in North America were business ventures. They provided an outlet for England'due south surplus population and (in some cases) more religious liberty than England did, merely their primary purpose was to brand money for their sponsors.

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The Tobacco Colonies

In 1606, Rex James I divided the Atlantic seaboard in two, giving the southern one-half to the London Company (later the Virginia Company) and the northern half to the Plymouth Visitor.

The first English language settlement in Due north America had actually been established some xx years before, in 1587, when a grouping 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 all the same do not know what became of its inhabitants.

In 1606, but a few months afterwards James I issued its charter, the London Company sent 144 men to Virginia on three ships: the Godspeed, the Discovery and the Susan Abiding. They reached the Chesapeake Bay in the jump of 1607 and headed about threescore miles up the James River, where they built a settlement they called Jamestown.

The Jamestown colonists had a crude fourth dimension of it: They were and so decorated looking for gold and other exportable resources that they could barely feed themselves. Information technology was not until 1616, when Virginia's settlers learned how to grow tobacco, that information technology seemed the colony might survive. The first enslaved African arrived in Virginia in 1619.

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In 1632, the English crown granted nearly 12 1000000 acres of state at the height 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.

Just 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 kickoff English language emigrants to what would go the New England colonies were a small grouping of Puritan separatists, later called the Pilgrims, who arrived in Plymouth in 1620 to found Plymouth Colony. X years later, a wealthy syndicate known as the Massachusetts Bay Company sent a much larger (and more liberal) group of Puritans to found another Massachusetts settlement. With the assist of local natives, the colonists soon got the hang of farming, fishing and hunting, and Massachusetts prospered.

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As the Massachusetts settlements expanded, they formed new colonies in New England. Puritans who idea that Massachusetts was non pious enough formed the colonies of Connecticut and New Oasis (the 2 combined in 1665). Meanwhile, Puritans who thought that Massachusetts was too restrictive formed the colony of Rhode Island, where everyone–including Jewish people–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.

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The Heart Colonies

In 1664, King Charles Two gave the territory between New England and Virginia, much of which was already occupied by Dutch traders and landowners chosen patroons, to his brother James, the Duke of York. The English shortly absorbed Dutch New Netherland and renamed it New York.

Most of the Dutch people (also equally the Belgian Flemings and Walloons, French Huguenots, Scandinavians and Germans) who were living there stayed put. This made New York i of the most diverse and prosperous colonies in the New Globe.

In 1680, the king granted 45,000 square miles of country westward of the Delaware River to William Penn, a Quaker who endemic large swaths of land in Republic of ireland. Penn's Northward American holdings became the colony of "Penn'southward Woods," or Pennsylvania.

Lured by the fertile soil and the religious toleration that Penn promised, people migrated in that location from all over Europe. Like their Puritan counterparts in New England, most of these emigrants paid their ain way to the colonies–they were not indentured servants–and had enough money to institute themselves when they arrived. As a result, Pennsylvania soon became a prosperous and relatively egalitarian identify.

The Southern Colonies

By dissimilarity, the Carolina colony, a territory that stretched south from Virginia to Florida and westward 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 language planter colony on the Caribbean island of Barbados, which relied heavily on African slave labor, and many were involved in the slave trade themselves. Every bit a result, slavery played an important function in the development of the Carolina colony. (It split into North Carolina and South Carolina in 1729.)

In 1732, inspired past 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'southward development mirrored Southward Carolina's.

The Revolutionary War and the Treaty of Paris

In 1700, there were near 250,000 European settlers and enslaved Africans in North America's English colonies. Past 1775, on the eve of revolution, in that location were an estimated ii.5 million. The colonists did not accept much in mutual, but they were able to band together and fight for their independence.

The American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) was sparked later American colonists chafed over bug like taxation without representation, embodied by laws like The Postage Deed and The Townshend Acts. Mounting tensions came to a caput during the Battles of Lexington and Agree on April 19, 1775, when the "shot heard round the earth" was fired.

Information technology was not without warning; the Boston Massacre on March v, 1770 and the Boston Tea Political party on December 16, 1773 showed the colonists' increasing dissatisfaction with British dominion in the colonies.

The Declaration of Independence, issued on July iv, 1776, enumerated the reasons the Founding Fathers felt compelled to interruption from the rule of King George III and parliament to start a new nation. In September of that year, the Continental Congress alleged the "United Colonies" of America to be the "United States of America."

France joined the state of 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 xiii original colonies independence was signed on September iii, 1783.

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