The 13 Colonies

Sixteenth-century England was a tumultuous place. Because it was easier to make 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.

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, the English colonies in North America were mostly business ventures. They provided an outlet for England’s surplus population and (in some cases) offered more religious freedom than England, but their primary purpose was to make money for their sponsors.

In 1606, King James I divided the Atlantic seaboard into 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 his charter, the London Company sent 144 men to Virginia on three ships: Godspeed, Discovery and 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 and export tobacco, that it seemed the colony might survive. The first enslaved Africans in the 13 colonies arrived in Virginia in 1619.

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 enslaved workers.

But unlike Virginia’s founders, Lord Baltimore was a Catholic, and he hoped that his colony would be a refuge for his fellow persecuted Catholics. Therefore, Maryland became known for its policy of religious tolerance for Christians, though that openness did not extend to all faiths.

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 Native American tribes, the colonists soon got the hang of farming, fishing and hunting, and Massachusetts prospered.

As the Massachusetts settlements expanded, they formed 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 Jewish people–enjoyed complete “liberty in religious concernments.”

Farther north of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a handful of adventurous settlers formed the colony of New Hampshire.

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.

Most of the Dutch people (as well as the Belgian Flemings and Walloons, French Huguenots, Scandinavians and Germans) who were living in that region stayed put. This made New York one of the most diverse and prosperous colonies in the New World.

In 1680, Charles II 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 tolerance 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 and had enough money to establish themselves when they arrived. As a result, Pennsylvania soon became a prosperous and relatively egalitarian place.

By contrast, the Carolina colony was much less cosmopolitan. The territory stretched south from Virginia to Florida and west to an undefined point. (An early charter specified "sea to sea," but more likely it extended to the Mississippi River, excluding Native American lands.) In its rugged 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, which 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 that of South Carolina.

In 1700, there were about 250,000 European settlers and enslaved Africans in North America’s English colonies. By 1775, on the eve of revolution, that number had risen to an estimated 2.5 million. The colonists did not have much in common, but—partly inspired by Enlightenment political philosophy—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 in 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.

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.

During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress adopted a flag featuring 13 alternating red and white stripes and 13 five-pointed stars arranged in a circle. This variant is also known as the "Betsy Ross Flag," as she was believed to have designed it. The stars and stripes represent the 13 colonies.