Thirteen Colonies
The Thirteen Colonies were a cluster of British colonies located along the Atlantic seaboard of North America. Founded for a variety of reasons – economic, political, and religious – the colonies emerged with their own distinct governments, colonial charters, and cultures, but were bound together through their shared language, history, religion (Protestantism), and allegiance to the British Crown. During the American Revolution (1765-1789), these colonies banded together to cast off British rule and emerged as a new nation, the United States of America.
Traditionally, the Thirteen Colonies have been grouped into three categories, divided by geography as well as by culture. The New England Colonies, comprising the northeasternmost part of the map, were founded primarily by Puritans seeking religious freedom, and included the colonies of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. The Middle Colonies, including New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, were known for their diverse economies and equally diverse populations and were sometimes called the 'breadbasket colonies'. The last category was the Southern Colonies, which were founded as agrarian societies based around cash crops like tobacco and rice and included Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.
Foundations: Chesapeake & New England
In the late 16th century, emboldened by its recent colonial successes in Ireland, the Kingdom of England turned its attention to the New World. By then, the English were about a century behind other European powers, like Spain, Portugal, and France, which had already established both permanent and temporary colonies in the Americas. Having taken note of the riches flowing across the Atlantic and filling the coffers of these countries – as well as the pockets of the men who funded such colonial enterprises – a group of prominent English noblemen pooled their resources to fund a colonial expedition of their own in the 1580s. Their first attempt, the Roanoke Colony, was a disastrous failure. Located off the coast of modern-day North Carolina, the colony was founded on infertile soil and was beset by hostile Native American neighbors. By 1590, it had been inexplicably abandoned, the fate of its settlers unknown to this day. The failure of Roanoke stalled all English attempts at New World colonization for the next decade and a half. Then, in 1606, King James I of England (reign 1603-1625) granted charters to two companies, the Plymouth Company and the Virginia Company of London, to found colonies in North America.
In 1607, the Plymouth Company founded the Popham Colony in modern-day Maine, which lasted about a year before failing. For a while, it seemed as if the colony established that same year by the Virginia Company – Jamestown – would suffer the same fate. Situated along Chesapeake Bay, the Jamestown colony of Virginia struggled to persist as starvation, disease, and Native American warfare killed off its settlers in large numbers. During the brutal winter of 1609-10, a period known as 'the Starving Time', as many as 350 of the estimated 500 Jamestown colonists died, and the survivors were reduced to eating rats, dogs, horses, and, eventually, the bodies of the dead. This dismal situation was reversed in 1611 when one newcomer, John Rolfe (1585-1622), experimented with a new strain of tobacco seed he had brought from Bermuda. The seed took well to the fertile Chesapeake soil, and before long, tobacco had become the cash crop of Virginia. By 1624, the colony was producing 200,000 pounds of the plant, a number that soared to 3 million pounds by 1638; by then, Virginia had outstripped the West Indies as the main exporter of tobacco to Europe. This enterprise was incredibly lucrative, leading to the foundation of a second Chesapeake tobacco colony, Maryland, in 1632.
As the Chesapeake colonies began to flourish, a new set of colonies was developing in the north. Driven out of England by religious persecution from the Anglican Church, 102 Puritan religious separatists – better known today as the 'Pilgrims' – anchored off the coast of Massachusetts in November 1620, aboard the ship Mayflower. Initially bound for the fertile lands north of Virginia, they had been blown off course and instead found themselves in a colder climate with stony soil and dense forests. In the bitter winter that followed the establishment of the Plymouth Colony, nearly half of these settlers died. Then, in the spring of 1621, the surviving colonists were saved by the intervention of Native Americans like Squanto (1585-1622) and Samoset (1590-1653), who taught them how to plant corn, beans, and squash, a trifecta of crops referred to by the indigenous people as the 'three sisters'. This newfound agricultural knowledge allowed Plymouth to survive and, before long, to expand. In 1630, a large wave of Puritan settlers, called the 'Great Migration', came over from England. Led by John Winthrop (1588-1649), these newcomers established the Massachusetts Bay Colony, hoping to build a society based on strict Puritan values. Eventually, the original Plymouth Colony would be absorbed into Massachusetts.
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