Thirteen Colonies

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Thirteen Colonies grew from about 2 thousand people in 1625 to 2.4 million in 1775. They were British colonies strung along the Atlantic coast of North America. During the Revolutionary War of 1775-1783, they broke from the British Crown and joined to form the United States of America. Each colony answered to London separately, and historians sort them into three traditional groups: New England, the Middle Colonies, and the Southern Colonies. That growth largely displaced the Native Americans who already lived in the region. Why did so many settlers cross the ocean, and what were they hoping to find? Who was allowed a voice in running these places, and who was shut out? How did colonies that once dealt with Britain one by one come to act together against it?

  404142699

• 2. Faith and Fortune

  ›

  In 1606, King James I granted charters to two groups, the Plymouth Company and the London Company, to plant permanent settlements in America. The London Company's colony took root at Jamestown, near Chesapeake Bay, on the 14th of May 1607. Its investors were hunting for gold. The settlers found disease, starvation, wars with local Indians, and almost no gold. Tobacco as a cash crop finally saved the colony. The Plymouth Company's Popham Colony, planted on the Kennebec River in 1607, was abandoned in 1608.

  The Mayflower reached America in 1620 carrying the Pilgrims, a small band of Puritan separatists. They considered the Church of England corrupted and wanted physical distance from it, so they first moved to the Netherlands. On arrival in America they drew up the Mayflower Compact, binding themselves into one community. William Bradford was their main leader.

  Massachusetts Bay began in 1629 with 400 Puritan settlers. They wanted to reform the Church of England by building a purer church in the New World. By 1640, some 20,000 had arrived. Many died soon after landing, but the survivors found a healthy climate and plenty of food.

  Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts Bay after theological disagreements. In 1636 he founded Providence Plantations on land provided by the Narragansett sachem Canonicus. His settlement promised majority rule "in civil things" and "liberty of conscience" in matters of religion. In 1637 a second group, including Anne Hutchinson, settled on the island now called Aquidneck. Samuel Gorton's settlement of Shawomet was a target for Massachusetts Bay, so he travelled to London to seek a royal charter. The Earl of Warwick helped him, and Gorton renamed the settlement Warwick in thanks. In 1663 Williams won a Royal Charter that joined these settlements into the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.

  In 1632, King Charles I granted the charter for Maryland to Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore. Calvert's father had been a prominent Catholic official who encouraged Catholic immigration to the English colonies. The charter itself offered no guidelines on religion. Pennsylvania followed in 1681 as a proprietary colony of the Quaker William Penn. Philadelphia, with its central location and excellent port, grew into the largest city in the colonies.

  The Lords Proprietors of Carolina obtained a Royal Charter in 1663, hoping their colony would turn a profit as Jamestown eventually had. An earlier English attempt at Roanoke, established in 1585 and re-established in 1587, had been found abandoned in 1590. Carolina itself went unsettled until 1670, and the first attempt failed because nothing drew emigrants there. The Lords then pooled their remaining capital and sent a mission led by Sir John Colleton. He found fertile, defensible ground at Charleston, first named Charles Town for Charles II of England.

  In the 1730s, the Parliamentarian James Oglethorpe proposed settling the land south of the Carolinas with the "worthy poor" of England. This would offer an alternative to overcrowded debtors' prisons. Oglethorpe and other philanthropists secured a royal charter as the Trustees of Georgia on the 9th of June 1732. They hoped for a utopian colony that banned slavery and admitted only the most worthy settlers. By 1750 it remained sparsely populated, and in 1752 the Trustees gave up their charter, making Georgia a crown colony. The set of thirteen was now complete, yet the phrase "Thirteen Colonies" only became common once the Revolution was under way.

  610112163

• 3. Dutch Beginnings

  ›

  Beginning in 1609, Dutch traders built fur-trading posts along the Hudson, Delaware, and Connecticut rivers. The Dutch West India Company later founded permanent settlements on the Hudson, creating the colony of New Netherland. In 1626, Peter Minuit bought the island of Manhattan from the Lenape Indians and set up the outpost of New Amsterdam.

  Relatively few Dutch people settled there, yet New Netherland came to dominate the regional fur trade. It also became a base for extensive trade with the English colonies, and Dutch ships carried many New England and Virginia products to Europe. The Dutch joined the Atlantic slave trade as well. They brought some enslaved Africans to English colonies in North America, though many more went to Barbados and Brazil. The settlers who did arrive included English, German, Walloon, and Sephardic people.

  In 1638, Sweden founded New Sweden in the Delaware Valley. Its leaders were former Dutch West India Company men, including Peter Minuit. The colony built trading ties with the English colonies to the south and shipped much of the tobacco grown in Virginia. The Dutch conquered it in 1655, while Sweden was busy with the Second Northern War.

  Richard Nicolls captured the lightly defended New Amsterdam in 1664, and his subordinates quickly took the rest of New Netherland. The 1667 Treaty of Breda ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War and confirmed English control of the region. The Dutch briefly regained parts of New Netherland during the Third Anglo-Dutch War. In the 1674 Treaty of Westminster they surrendered their claim, ending the Dutch colonial presence in America.

  The English renamed New Amsterdam "York City" or "New York." Large numbers of Dutch people stayed and dominated the countryside between Manhattan and Albany. Settlers from New England and immigrants from Germany moved in around them, and New York City drew a polyglot population. Also in 1674, the English carved the proprietary colonies of East Jersey and West Jersey out of lands that had belonged to New York.

  1314151617

• 4. Voting and Self-Rule

  ›

  In Connecticut and Rhode Island, colonists elected their own governors, while London appointed the governors of the other colonies. By 1776 there were three forms of colonial government: provincial, proprietary, and charter. All of them were subordinate to the British monarch, and none had representation in Parliament.

  A provincial, or royal, colony was ruled by a governor and council appointed by the crown. The governor held general executive powers and could call an assembly elected by the freeholders and planters. He could also veto its laws absolutely, and he could delay or dissolve the assembly. Assemblies made local laws, which were supposed to match the laws of Britain. Many assemblies tried instead to expand their own powers and limit those of the governor and crown. The Privy Council or Board of Trade could also examine and veto their laws.

  Proprietary colonies worked much like royal ones, except that a lord proprietor chose the governor instead of the king. They were set up after the English Restoration of 1660, and they typically enjoyed greater civil and religious liberty. Pennsylvania, which then included Delaware, New Jersey, and Maryland were proprietary colonies. Charter governments were political corporations created by letters patent. Their charters handed the grantees control of the land and the powers of legislative government.

  In 1680, only Virginia was a royal colony. By 1720, half the colonies were under royal governors tied closely to the government in London. The sharpest clash came in 1685, when King James II closed the legislatures and merged the New England colonies into the Dominion of New England under Governor Edmund Andros. New York and the two Jerseys joined the dominion in 1688. Andros was overthrown in 1689 after the Glorious Revolution deposed James, and the former colonies were re-established. According to Guy Miller, the Rebellion of 1689 was the "climax of the 60-year-old struggle between the government in England and the Puritans of Massachusetts over the question of who was to rule the Bay colony."

  In Britain, 19 out of 20 men were controlled politically by their landlords. The colonies had no hereditary aristocrats and no rich gentry renting farmland to tenants. Any property owner could vote for the lower house of the legislature. London told governors to exclude men who owned no land, but good farmland was so cheap that 50% to 80% of men qualified. The historian Donald Radcliffe judged that, as the Revolution neared and property ownership fell, probably less than 60 percent of adult white males could vote. The South Carolina legislature explained the logic in 1716: "it is necessary and reasonable, that none but such persons will have an interest in the Province should be capable to elect members of the Commons House of Assembly." Women, children, indentured servants, and slaves were folded into the head of the family and had no vote. Indians and free blacks stood outside the system and usually could not vote.

  Election day drew men from the countryside to the county seat to shake hands, hear speeches, eat, drink, and gamble. Voters shouted their choice to the clerk while supporters cheered or booed. In Virginia, the candidate George Washington spent £39 on treats for his backers. Candidates knew they had to "swill the planters with bumbo," meaning rum. Typically about half of eligible men turned out, and turnout ran higher in Pennsylvania and New York, where factions based on ethnic and religious groups mobilized voters. New York and Rhode Island developed two-faction systems that lasted for years, built on a few leaders and their family connections rather than on ideology. There were no political parties anywhere. Before 1774, the colonies remained independent of one another, each having begun as its own separate settlement.

  7375762526

• 5. The Mercantile Ledger

  ›

  Between 1700 and 1754, the value of exports from America to Britain tripled. Colonists were barred from trading with other European powers, but they found profitable partners in other British colonies, especially in the Caribbean. They sent foodstuffs, wood, and tobacco and received Asian tea, West Indian coffee, and West Indian sugar. American Indians far from the coast supplied beaver fur and deerskins to the Atlantic market. A thriving shipbuilding industry grew up, particularly in New England, and much travel went by water. By 1764 a stagecoach route linked Philadelphia and New York City, and by 1773 it reached Providence and Boston. By 1770, the Thirteen Colonies produced forty percent of the gross domestic product of the entire British Empire.

  London ran this empire on the mercantile system, which concentrated trade inside the empire and forbade trade with rival empires. The aim was to enrich Britain, its merchants, and its government. Government and merchants acted as partners, using trade barriers, regulations, and subsidies to push exports up and imports down. Britain aimed for trade surpluses so that gold and silver would flow into London. The colonies were captive markets, shipping raw commodities to Britain and buying back finished goods. Whether this suited the colonists was not a question that troubled London.

  Britain tried to enforce the system through the Navigation Acts, which Americans dodged whenever they could. Smuggling became a favorite American technique for trading with the French, Spanish, or Dutch. Royal officials answered with open-ended search warrants called Writs of Assistance. In 1761, the Boston lawyer James Otis argued that the writs violated colonists' constitutional rights. He lost the case, but John Adams later wrote, "Then and there the child Independence was born." Even then, colonists took care to say they did not object to British regulation of their external trade. They opposed only legislation that reached into their internal affairs.

  The whole arrangement leaned on forced labor. As one observer in 1720s Britain put it, "all this great increase in our treasure proceeds chiefly from the labour of negroes" in Britain's colonies.

  4128858287

• 6. Slavery and Law

  ›

  About 287,000 enslaved people were imported into the Thirteen Colonies over a period of 160 years. That was only 2% of the estimated 12 million taken from Africa to the Americas. The great majority went to Caribbean sugar colonies and to Brazil, where life expectancy was short and the numbers had to be continually replenished. By the mid-18th century, life expectancy was much higher in the American colonies.

  Slavery was legal in all thirteen colonies. In most places it meant house servants or farm workers. It carried real economic weight on the export-oriented tobacco plantations of Virginia and Maryland and on the rice and indigo plantations of South Carolina. In the North, enslaved people worked in a variety of occupations.

  Improved economic conditions and easing religious persecution in Europe made it harder to recruit laborers, so many colonies leaned harder on slave labor, especially in the South. The enslaved population grew dramatically between 1680 and 1750, driven by forced immigration and by births. There were a few local attempts at revolt, among them the Stono Rebellion and the New York Conspiracy of 1741. Both were suppressed.

  By the time of the Revolution, each mainland colony had at least the rudiments of a statutory law of slavery, and nine had elaborate slave codes. The historian William M. Wiecek identified four legal traits. Statutes defined slavery as a lifelong condition, unlike servitude for a term of years. Slave status passed through the mother, reversing the common-law rule that status followed the father. The law tied slavery to race. Colonial legislators struggled most with the fourth trait, the slave's status as property, and southern jurisdictions settled on the definition of a "chattel personal."

  The enslaved population grew through a very high birth rate and low mortality, reaching nearly four million by the 1860 census. From 1770 until 1860, its natural growth outpaced that of any nation in Europe and ran nearly twice as fast as England's.

  4748504929

• 7. Fever, Faith, and Schooling

  ›

  Of the newly arrived, able-bodied young Anglican missionaries in the Carolinas, over one-fourth died within five years. Malaria was deadly to many newcomers, especially in the Southern colonies. Infants and small children died often from diphtheria, smallpox, yellow fever, and malaria. Most sick people turned to local healers and folk remedies, and others relied on minister-physicians, barber-surgeons, apothecaries, or midwives. Bloodletting was a common treatment, and nobody understood germs. Public health drew little government attention. By the 18th century, colonial physicians following English and Scottish models had brought modern medicine to the cities and made some advances in vaccination, pathology, anatomy, and pharmacology. Good health also helped explain the rapid growth of the colonies, since more children survived long enough to have children of their own.

  By 1776, about 85% of the white population traced its ancestry to the British Isles, 9% to Germany, 4% to the Netherlands, and 2% to French Huguenots and other minorities. More than 90% of colonists were farmers. In 1760, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston each had more than 16,000 people, which was small by European standards.

  According to Patricia Bonomi, "early Americans in all sections lived not in a spiritual desert but in a world where religion formed a key component of their mental landscape." Protestantism predominated. The Church of England was officially established in most of the South, where local vestries ran Anglican parishes and handled public duties such as road repair and poor relief. Puritan descendants, split into Congregational and Unitarian churches, held the established position in Massachusetts and Connecticut into the 19th century. In practice, that meant tax revenues went toward church expenses. Quakers were well established in Pennsylvania, where they controlled the governorship and the legislature for many years. Catholics were about 1.6% of the population, or 40,000, in 1775. Of the 200,000 to 250,000 Irish who came between 1701 and 1775, fewer than 20,000 were Catholic. In the 1740s, the First Great Awakening revival brought rapid growth to Baptists and Methodists.

  Nine institutions of higher education were chartered in the colonial era. They were Harvard, the College of William & Mary, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Rutgers, and Dartmouth, and most of their students were aspiring Protestant ministers. Seven of them became private Ivy League universities. Except for William & Mary, all stood in New England or the Middle Colonies. Southern families held that educating children was a family duty, so wealthy ones hired tutors from Britain or sent children to school in England. Most New England towns sponsored public schools for boys, while girls learned at home or in small private schools and could not attend college. Aspiring physicians and lawyers usually apprenticed with an established practitioner, though some young men studied medicine in Scotland.

  5659696443

• 8. Road to Independence

  ›

  In 1745, British and colonial forces captured the town of Louisbourg during a conflict most colonists called King George's War. The 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ended it. Many colonists were angered when Britain handed Louisbourg back to France in exchange for Madras and other territories.

  The French and Indian War of 1754-1763 was the American branch of the Seven Years' War. Unlike earlier colonial wars, it began in North America and spread to Europe. William Pitt the Elder decided to pour major military resources into the continent, making it a theater of what amounted to a world war. British officers trained colonial soldiers, most notably George Washington, and colonial legislatures had to cooperate intensively. At the 1754 Albany Congress, Benjamin Franklin proposed the Albany Plan for a unified government of the colonies, but most colonial leaders rejected it. In the Treaty of Paris of 1763, France ceded to Britain all its territory east of the Mississippi River, including Quebec, the Great Lakes, and the Ohio River valley. Britain also gained Spanish Florida and divided it into East and West Florida.

  Britain emerged from the war with large debts, and its leaders decided to raise taxes and tighten control. The Sugar Act 1764 came first, followed by the Currency Act 1764, the Stamp Act 1765, and the Townshend Acts of 1767. The Stamp Act taxed newspapers and official documents, and colonial printers spread protest against it. Each side felt it had carried the heavier load. The British elite, the most heavily taxed in Europe, complained that colonists paid little. Colonists answered that their sons had died in a war serving European interests. The Royal Proclamation of 1763, which closed land west of the Appalachian Mountains as an Indian Reserve, angered colonists further because nobody had consulted them.

  The 1773 Tea Act reduced taxes on East India Company tea in an effort to undercut competitors. Americans in every colony boycotted the tea, and in Boston the Sons of Liberty dumped thousands of pounds of it into the harbor. In 1774 Parliament answered with the Intolerable Acts, which sharply restricted self-government in Massachusetts and sent Thomas Gage to serve as its governor. The First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in September 1774 and approved a boycott called the Continental Association. British imports dropped dramatically, and the colonies split between Patriots and Loyalists.

  Gage was ordered to seize Patriot arsenals, and his march on Concord, Massachusetts, set off the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775. The Patriots then besieged Boston. In May 1775 the Second Continental Congress began recruiting soldiers, printing its own money, and appointing George Washington to command. A Committee of Five, including John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston, and Thomas Jefferson, was told to prepare the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson wrote the first draft between the 11th and the 28th of June 1776 in a rented house at 700 Market Street in Philadelphia. Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration on the 4th of July 1776. With chief help from France, the Patriots won the decisive victory at Yorktown in 1781, and the Treaty of Paris of 1783 recognized American independence.

  Historian Ashley Jackson notes that the loss was followed by a "swing to the east," as Britain built a second empire on commercial and territorial expansion in South Asia.

  3032369888