The Thirteen Colonies, also known as the Thirteen British Colonies or the Thirteen American Colonies, were a group of British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America.
During the war, each of the 13 colonies formed a Provincial Congress to lead them, now that they no longer accepted the laws of Great Britain. On July 4, 1776, the thirteen colonies declared themselves free and independent states at the Second Continental Congress by signing the Declaration of Independence.
The Thirteen Colonies were complete with the establishment of the Province of Georgia in 1732, although the term "Thirteen Colonies" became current only in the context of the American Revolution.
The American Colonies and the British Empire, 1607–1783. Pickering & Chatto. Wikimedia Commons has media related to Thirteen Colonies.
New England was represented as one segment, rather than the four colonies it was at that time. Delaware was not listed separately as it was part of Pennsylvania. Georgia, however, was omitted completely. Thus, it has eight segments of a snake rather than the traditional 13 colonies.
The Thirteen Colonies were complete with the establishment of the Province of Georgia in 1732, although the term "Thirteen Colonies" became current only in the context of the American Revolution.
The American colonies were the British colonies that were established during the 17th and early 18th centuries in what is now a part of the eastern United States. The colonies grew both geographically along the Atlantic coast and westward and numerically to 13 from the time of their founding to the American Revolution.
The United States was formed from thirteen British colonies in 1776. Many of these colonies had been around for well over 100 years including the first colony of Virginia which was founded in 1607. See below for a map of the thirteen original colonies.
United ColoniesOn September 9, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted a new name for what had been called the "United Colonies.” The moniker United States of America has remained since then as a symbol of freedom and independence.
VermontVermont was finally admitted to the union as the 14th state in 1790, after 14 years as an independent republic.
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0:114:16Why didn't Canada join the American Revolution? (Short ... - YouTubeYouTubeStart of suggested clipEnd of suggested clipCanada didn't exist it was instead comprised of the colonies of Newfoundland Nova Scotia QuebecMoreCanada didn't exist it was instead comprised of the colonies of Newfoundland Nova Scotia Quebec Rupert's land and Saint John's Island bar in Quebec the differences between the peoples of these states.
The Province of New York (1664–1776) was a British proprietary colony and later royal colony on the northeast coast of North America. As one of the Middle Colonies, New York achieved independence and worked with the others to found the United States.
Connecticut. Connecticut was the fifth of the 13 colonies. It was not actually considered a colony until 1636, but colonists began forming towns and cities in 1635.
Between 1776 and 1789 thirteen British colonies emerged as a newly independent nation, the United States of America.
British America comprised the colonial territories of the English Empire, which after the 1707 union of the Kingdom of England with the Kingdom of Scotland to form the Kingdom of Great Britain became the British Empire, in the Americas from 1607 to 1783.
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–but the story of those 13 colonies (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New 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.
The Southern Colonies. By contrast, the Carolina colony, a territory that stretched 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.
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 Company sent 144 men to Virginia on three ships: the Godspeed, the Discovery and the Susan Constant.
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.
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 adventurous settlers formed the colony of New Hampshire.
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.
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.
In the late 1630s, the settlements of Windsor, Hartford and Wethersfield began unifying under a rudimentary form of government that was composed of magistrates and representatives from each town.
George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, was a government official in England who became interested in colonizing North America.
In 1644, John Winthrop established the Saugus Works, which had a dam to provide water, a smelting furnace, a forge, and a rolling and slitting mill. The facility produced two types of iron—cast iron that could be poured into molds to make a product, and pig iron, large lumps that could be remelted and used in manufacturing.
After the British monarchy was restored in 1660 and Charles II took the throne, British admiral Sir William Penn, used some of his own personal wealth to rebuild and feed the Royal Navy.
In 1664, King Charles II gave a charter for New Netherland, the land between the Connecticut and Delaware Rivers, to his brother James, the Duke of York.
After the end of the French and Indian War in 1762, Governor Benning Wentworth, an appointee of King George III, felt it was time to increase the colony’s population.
In the 1730s, James Oglethorpe, a retired British army officer, decided to make it his mission to help the impoverished and debt-ridden inhabitants of London get a fresh start in life. He thought the best solution was for them to resettle in America.
The states that were part of the 13 original colonies are colored red on this 13 colonies map. Source: Wikimedia commons.
Below are the original thirteen colonies, separated into three groups based on location: New England Colonies, Middle Colonies, and Southern Colonies. For each colony, we include its official name, the year it first became a colony of England, and the year it became a crown colony (which meant it was officially controlled by the British government, unlike regular colonies which sometimes had more ability to self-rule). There’s also additional information on how each colony was founded and the role it played during the Revolutionary War.
Located in what is now considered the Southern United States, the Southern Colonies had economies based heavily on the cash crops of cotton, rice, and tobacco. They also had significantly higher numbers of slaves than most of the other colonies.
Britain had an extensive history of colonization, and it wanted colonies in North America for multiple reasons, including to increase their trading opportunities, create new jobs, and bring in revenue from colonial workers and goods.
At this meeting, colonial leaders rejected the tax because they had no representatives in British Parliament ( creating the phrase “no taxation without representation).
The fertile soil of these colonies allowed them to grow crops, particularly grains. Strong timber, iron, and shipbuilding industries helped make these colonies major trade centers. They were also the most diverse, both ethnically and religiously, of all the British colonies.
Colonists expelled from Massachusetts Bay due to their religious beliefs were the first people to settle Rhode Island. They founded Providence as a site of religious freedom. In 1774, Stephen Hopkins, a Rhode Island politician, introduced a bill that prohibited the importation of slaves into the colony.
All 13 colonies were marked by differences in geography, climate, natural resources, population, economic production and how they were governed. Intercolonial tensions were not uncommon and were usually fuelled by disputes over trade, borders and land claims.
Common heritage. As part of the British Empire, the 13 colonies shared some common heritage, attitudes and institutions. Because of this – and because they later joined together in revolution – many think of these colonies as a unified and homogenous group. This was far from the case.
Immigration continued apace, even at the height of the Revolutionary War. In addition to European population growth, almost 300,000 African-American slaves were landed in the British colonies between 1620 and the outbreak of the revolution in 1765.
Despite their growth and progress the 13 British colonies occupied only 20 per cent of the North American continent. The remainder was controlled or influenced by France and Spain. Their existence contributed to political and religious tensions. Citation information.
A map showing foreign colonies and influence in North America, 1750. The 13 British colonies were not alone on the continent. Three other European powers laid claim to territory in North America and shared borders with the British.
The American Revolution unfolded in 13 British colonies clustered the eastern coastline of North America. These 13 colonies were explored, settled and colonised over more than a century, beginning in 1607 (Virginia) and concluding in 1732 (Georgia). To understand the causes of the American Revolution requires an understanding ...
The vast majority of colonists lived in rural and provincial areas and worked on plantations, farms or harvesting natural resources. Though agriculture was dominant across all 13 colonies, there was considerable variation from region to region.
Historian Pauline Maier identifies more than ninety such declarations that were issued throughout the Thirteen Colonies from April to July 1776. These "declarations" took a variety of forms. Some were formal written instructions for Congressional delegations, such as the Halifax Resolves of April 12, with which North Carolina became the first colony to explicitly authorize its delegates to vote for independence. Others were legislative acts that officially ended British rule in individual colonies, such as the Rhode Island legislature renouncing its allegiance to Great Britain on May 4—the first colony to do so. Many "declarations" were resolutions adopted at town or county meetings that offered support for independence. A few came in the form of jury instructions, such as the statement issued on April 23, 1776, by Chief Justice William Henry Drayton of South Carolina: "the law of the land authorizes me to declare ... that George the Third, King of Great Britain ... has no authority over us, and we owe no obedience to him." Most of these declarations are now obscure, having been overshadowed by the declaration approved by Congress on July 2, and signed July 4.
The 13 states at the Declaration of Independence. The issue of Parliament's authority in the colonies became a crisis after Parliament passed the Coercive Acts (known as the Intolerable Acts in the colonies) in 1774 to punish the colonists for the Gaspee Affair of 1772 and the Boston Tea Party of 1773.