How To Draw The 13 Colonies

Traditionally, when we tell the story of "Colonial America," we are talking about the English language 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 thirteen colonies (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia) is an of import 1. It was those colonies that came together to form the Us.

READ MORE: 13 Facts Well-nigh the 13 Colonies

English language Colonial Expansion

Sixteenth-century England was a tumultuous place. Considering they could brand more than coin 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 fourth dimension, many agricultural workers lost their jobs.

The 16th century was also the age of mercantilism, an extremely competitive economic philosophy that pushed European nations to larn every bit many colonies as they could. As a result, for the most part, the English colonies in Northward 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 coin for their sponsors.

READ MORE: 13 Everyday Objects of Colonial America

The Tobacco Colonies

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

The starting time 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 ix children) led by Sir Walter Raleigh settled on the island of Roanoke. Mysteriously, by 1590 the Roanoke colony had vanished entirely. Historians still exercise not know what became of its inhabitants.

In 1606, just a few months after James I issued its lease, 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 virtually 60 miles upwardly the James River, where they built a settlement they chosen 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 non until 1616, when Virginia's settlers learned how to abound tobacco, that it seemed the colony might survive. The offset 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 big plantations that depended on the labor of indentured servants and (later) enslaved workers.

But unlike Virginia'due south 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 emigrants to what would get 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, angling and hunting, and Massachusetts prospered.

READ More: What's the Divergence Between Puritans and Pilgrims?

Equally 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 ii combined in 1665). Meanwhile, Puritans who thought that Massachusetts was too restrictive formed the colony of Rhode Isle, where anybody–including Jewish people–enjoyed consummate "liberty in religious concernments." To the due north of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a handful of adventurous settlers formed the colony of New Hampshire.

The Middle Colonies

In 1664, Male monarch Charles II gave the territory between New England and Virginia, much of which was already occupied past Dutch traders and landowners chosen patroons, to his brother James, the Duke of York. The English shortly absorbed Dutch New Netherland and renamed information technology New York.

Well-nigh of the Dutch people (besides as the Belgian Flemings and Walloons, French Huguenots, Scandinavians and Germans) who were living there stayed put. This made New York ane of the most diverse and prosperous colonies in the New Globe.

In 1680, the male monarch granted 45,000 foursquare miles of land west of the Delaware River to William Penn, a Quaker who endemic large swaths of state in Ireland. Penn'south N American holdings became the colony of "Penn'southward Woods," or Pennsylvania.

Lured past the fertile soil and the religious toleration that Penn promised, people migrated there from all over Europe. Similar their Puritan counterparts in New England, about of these emigrants paid their own mode to the colonies–they were not indentured servants–and had plenty coin to establish themselves when they arrived. Every bit a effect, Pennsylvania presently became a prosperous and relatively egalitarian place.

The Southern Colonies

By dissimilarity, the Carolina colony, a territory that stretched s from Virginia to Florida and due west to the Pacific Bounding main, was much less cosmopolitan. In its northern half, hardscrabble farmers eked out a living. In its southern one-half, planters presided over vast estates that produced corn, lumber, beefiness and pork, and–starting in the 1690s–rice.

These Carolinians had shut ties to the English planter colony on the Caribbean isle 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 evolution of the Carolina colony. (Information technology split into North Carolina and South Carolina in 1729.)

In 1732, inspired by the need to build a buffer betwixt Southward Carolina and the Spanish settlements in Florida, the Englishman James Oglethorpe established the Georgia colony. In many ways, Georgia's development mirrored South Carolina'due south.

The Revolutionary War and the Treaty of Paris

In 1700, at that place were nigh 250,000 European settlers and enslaved Africans in N America'south English language colonies. By 1775, on the eve of revolution, there were an estimated 2.5 million. The colonists did not accept much in common, but they were able to ring together and fight for their independence.

The American Revolutionary State of war (1775-1783) was sparked afterwards American colonists chafed over issues like taxation without representation, embodied by laws similar The Stamp Act and The Townshend Acts. Mounting tensions came to a caput during the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April nineteen, 1775, when the "shot heard circular the world" was fired.

READ MORE: vii Events That Enraged Colonists and Led to the American Revolution

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

The Proclamation of Independence, issued on July four, 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 twelvemonth, the Continental Congress declared the "United Colonies" of America to be the "United states of america of America."

French republic joined the war on the side of the colonists in 1778, helping the Continental Ground forces conquer the British at the Boxing 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.