13 Colonies Map Appalachian Mountains

Traditionally, when we tell the story of "Colonial America," nosotros are talking about the English 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–merely the story of those 13 colonies (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Bailiwick of jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Northward Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia) is an of import one. It was those colonies that came together to form the United states.

WATCH: The Revolution on HISTORY Vault

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

Culture Lodge/Getty Images

English Colonial Expansion

Sixteenth-century England was a tumultuous identify. Because they could make more coin from selling wool than from selling nutrient, many of the nation's landowners were converting farmers' fields into pastures for sheep. This led to a nutrient shortage; at the same fourth dimension, many agricultural workers lost their jobs.

The 16th century was also the age of mercantilism, an extremely competitive economical philosophy that pushed European nations to acquire as many colonies equally they could. As a result, for the most part, the English colonies in North America were business ventures. They provided an outlet for England's surplus population and (in some cases) more than religious freedom than England did, just their primary purpose was to brand money for their sponsors.

READ More: 13 Everyday Objects of Colonial America

The Tobacco Colonies

In 1606, Rex James I divided the Atlantic seaboard in two, giving the southern half to the London Visitor (subsequently the Virginia Company) and the northern one-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 its charter, the London Visitor 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 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 tobacco, that it seemed the colony might survive. The first enslaved African arrived in Virginia in 1619.

READ More than: What Was Life Like in Jamestown?

In 1632, the English crown granted about 12 million acres of state at the meridian of the Chesapeake Bay to Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore. This colony, named Maryland after the queen, was like to Virginia in many ways. Its landowners produced tobacco on large plantations that depended on the labor of indentured servants and (later on) enslaved workers.

Simply dissimilar Virginia'southward 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 outset English language 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 subsequently, a wealthy syndicate known as the Massachusetts Bay Company sent a much larger (and more liberal) group of Puritans to constitute another Massachusetts settlement. With the aid of local natives, the colonists soon got the hang of farming, line-fishing and hunting, and Massachusetts prospered.

Scroll to Continue

Every bit the Massachusetts settlements expanded, they formed new colonies in New England. Puritans who idea that Massachusetts was not pious enough formed the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven (the two combined in 1665). Meanwhile, Puritans who idea that Massachusetts was also 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 adventurous settlers formed the colony of New Hampshire.

READ MORE: What's the Departure Between Puritans and Pilgrims?

The Middle Colonies

In 1664, King Charles 2 gave the territory between New England and Virginia, much of which was already occupied by Dutch traders and landowners chosen patroons, to his brother James, the Duke of York. The English soon absorbed Dutch New Netherland and renamed information technology New York.

Most 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 one of the most diverse and prosperous colonies in the New Globe.

In 1680, the king granted 45,000 foursquare miles of land westward of the Delaware River to William Penn, a Quaker who owned large swaths of land in Ireland. Penn'southward North American holdings became the colony of "Penn's Woods," or Pennsylvania.

Lured past the fertile soil and the religious toleration that Penn promised, people migrated there from all over Europe. Like their Puritan counterparts in New England, about of these emigrants paid their own style to the colonies–they were non indentured servants–and had enough money to constitute themselves when they arrived. Every bit a event, Pennsylvania before long became a prosperous and relatively egalitarian place.

The Southern Colonies

By contrast, the Carolina colony, a territory that stretched southward from Virginia to Florida and westward to the Pacific Ocean, was much less cosmopolitan. In its 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 area island of Barbados, which relied heavily on African slave labor, and many were involved in the slave trade themselves. Every bit a issue, slavery played an of import role in the development of the Carolina colony. (It dissever into North Carolina and South Carolina in 1729.)

In 1732, inspired past 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'south evolution mirrored South Carolina's.

The Revolutionary War and the Treaty of Paris

In 1700, there were most 250,000 European settlers and enslaved Africans in North America's English colonies. Past 1775, on the eve of revolution, in that location were an estimated ii.5 million. The colonists did not accept much in common, but they were able to band together and fight for their independence.

The American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) was sparked after American colonists chafed over problems like tax without representation, embodied by laws like The Stamp Human activity and The Townshend Acts. Mounting tensions came to a head during the Battles of Lexington and Concord on Apr 19, 1775, when the "shot heard round the globe" 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 Annunciation 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 year, the Continental Congress alleged the "United Colonies" of America to exist the "U.s. of America."

France joined the war on the side of the colonists in 1778, helping the Continental Ground forces conquer the British at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. The Treaty of Paris ending the American Revolution and granting the xiii original colonies independence was signed on September 3, 1783.

READ MORE: 13 Facts About the 13 Colonies