Hudson River Map 13 Colonies

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 constitute colonies in hostage, 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 Bailiwick of jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia) is an important one. It was those colonies that came together to form the United States.

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

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English Colonial Expansion

Sixteenth-century England was a tumultuous place. Because they could brand more coin 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 fourth dimension, 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 as they could. As a result, for the well-nigh 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 freedom than England did, but their main purpose was to make money for their sponsors.

READ MORE: 13 Everyday Objects of Colonial America

The Tobacco Colonies

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

The first English settlement in N 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 withal do not know what became of its inhabitants.

In 1606, just a few months later on James I issued its charter, the London Visitor sent 144 men to Virginia on three ships: the Godspeed, the Discovery and the Susan Abiding. They reached the Chesapeake Bay in the spring of 1607 and headed virtually 60 miles up the James River, where they congenital 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. Information technology was not until 1616, when Virginia's settlers learned how to grow tobacco, that it seemed the colony might survive. The showtime enslaved African arrived in Virginia in 1619.

READ MORE: What Was Life Similar in Jamestown?

In 1632, the English crown granted almost 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 (later) enslaved workers.

But dissimilar Virginia'south founders, Lord Baltimore was a Catholic, and he hoped that his colony would exist a refuge for his persecuted coreligionists. Maryland became known for its policy of religious toleration for all.

The New England Colonies

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 constitute Plymouth Colony. 10 years later, a wealthy syndicate known every bit the Massachusetts Bay Company sent a much larger (and more liberal) group of Puritans to plant another Massachusetts settlement. With the aid of local natives, the colonists before long 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 thought that Massachusetts was non pious plenty formed the colonies of Connecticut and New Oasis (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." To the north of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a handful of audacious settlers formed the colony of New Hampshire.

READ MORE: What's the Difference Betwixt Puritans and Pilgrims?

The Middle Colonies

In 1664, King Charles Two gave the territory betwixt New England and Virginia, much of which was already occupied past 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.

About of the Dutch people (as well as the Belgian Flemings and Walloons, French Huguenots, Scandinavians and Germans) who were living there stayed put. This made New York one of the near various 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 large swaths of land in Ireland. Penn's Due north American holdings became the colony of "Penn's Woods," or Pennsylvania.

Lured by the fertile soil and the religious toleration 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–they were not indentured servants–and had enough money to found themselves when they arrived. As a result, Pennsylvania shortly became a prosperous and relatively egalitarian identify.

The Southern Colonies

By dissimilarity, the Carolina colony, a territory that stretched due south from Virginia to Florida and west to the Pacific Ocean, 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, beef and pork, and–starting in the 1690s–rice.

These Carolinians had close ties to the English planter colony on the Caribbean area island of Barbados, which relied heavily on African slave labor, and many were involved in the slave trade themselves. As a effect, slavery played an important office in the development of the Carolina colony. (Information technology split into North Carolina and Due south Carolina in 1729.)

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

The Revolutionary War and the Treaty of Paris

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, there were an estimated ii.5 million. The colonists did not take much in common, but they were able to band together and fight for their independence.

The American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) was sparked afterwards American colonists chafed over issues similar revenue enhancement without representation, embodied by laws like The Stamp Act 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 circular the world" was fired.

It was not without warning; the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770 and the Boston Tea Party on Dec 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 interruption 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 exist the "United states of america of America."

French republic joined the war on the side of the colonists in 1778, helping the Continental Regular 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.

READ MORE: 13 Facts Virtually the xiii Colonies