The Thirteen Colonies are terms to refer to the British colonies on the east coast of the United States during the 17th century.
The thirteen colonies consisted of:
The colonies on the east coast of North America can be divided into three: northeast (New England), central and south, and each one of them developed a different socio-economic profile.
Traditionally, when we tell the story of “Colonial America”, we are talking about the English colonies along the east coast. This story is incomplete – by the time the British began to establish colonies in earnest, there were many colonial outposts French, Spanish, Dutch and even Russians on the American continent – but the history of these 13 colonies (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia) is important. It was these colonies that came together to form the United States.
Sixteenth-century England was a tumultuous place. As they could earn more from selling wool than from selling food, many landowners across the country 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 era of mercantilism, an extremely competitive economic philosophy that led European nations to acquire as many colonies as they could. As a result, for the most part, the British colonies in North America were commercial enterprises. They provided an outlet for England's surplus population and (in some cases) more freedom religious than England, but its main objective was to earn money for its sponsors.
In 1606, King James I divided the Atlantic coast into two parts, 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 been established 20 years earlier, in 1587, when a group of settlers (91 men, 17 women and nine children) led by Sir Walter Raleigh settled on Roanoke Island. Mysteriously, by 1590, the Roanoke colony had completely disappeared. Historians still don't know what happened to its inhabitants.
In 1606, just a few months after James I issued his charter, the London Company sent 144 men to Virginia in three ships: the Godspeed, Discovery, and Susan Constant. They reached the Chesapeake Bay in the spring of 1607 and drove about 60 miles to the James River, where they built a settlement called Jamestown. The Jamestown settlers had a hard time: they were so busy looking for gold and other exportable resources that they could barely feed themselves. It wasn't until 1616, when Virginia colonists learned to grow tobacco, that it looked like the colony might survive. The first African slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619.
In 1632, the English crown granted about 12 million acres of land atop 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 African serfs and (later) slaves.
But unlike Virginia's founders, Lord Baltimore was a Catholic and he hoped his colony would be a haven for his persecuted coreligionists. Maryland became known for its policy of religious tolerance for all.
The first English emigrants to what would become the New England colonies were a small group of Puritan separatists, later called Pilgrims, who arrived in Plymouth in 1620. Ten years later, a wealthy union known as the Massachusetts Bay Company sent a much larger (and more liberal) group of Puritans to establish another settlement in Massachusetts. With the help of local natives, settlers soon got the hang of farming, fishing and hunting, and Massachusetts prospered.
As Massachusetts settlements expanded, they spawned new colonies in New England. Puritans who felt that Massachusetts was not pious enough formed the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven (the two combined in 1665). Meanwhile, Puritans who thought Massachusetts was too restrictive formed the colony of Rhode Island, where everyone – including Jews – enjoyed complete “freedom from worry religious”. North of the Massachusetts 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 already it was occupied by Dutch merchants and landowners called patrons, to their brother James, the Duke of York. The British soon absorbed Dutch New Holland and renamed it New York, but most of the Dutch (thus as the Flemings and Belgian Walloons, the French Huguenots, the Scandinavians and the Germans who lived there) remained in the local. 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 a large tract of land in Ireland. Penn's North American properties became the colony of Penn's Woods, or Pennsylvania. Attracted by the fertile soil and the religious tolerance Penn promised, people migrated 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 settle down when arrived. As a result, Pennsylvania soon became a prosperous and relatively egalitarian place.
In contrast, the Carolina colony, a territory that stretched from southern Virginia to Florida and west to the Pacific Ocean, was much less cosmopolitan. In its northern half, tough farmers made a living. In its southern half, landowners controlled the vast properties that produced corn, timber, beef and pork and – from the 1690s onwards – rice. These Carolinians had close ties to the English planters colony on the Caribbean island of Barbados, which was heavily dependent on African slave labor, and many were involved in trafficking in slaves. 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, Englishman James Oglethorpe established the Georgia colony. In many ways, Georgia's development mirrored South Carolina. By 1700, there were about 250,000 European and African settlers in the thirteen English colonies of North America. In 1775, on the eve of the revolution, there were nearly 2.5 million. These settlers didn't have much in common, but they were able to band together and fight for their independence.
See too: Letter from Pero Vaz de Caminha
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