Thirteen Colonies

The Thirteen Colonies were thirteen British settlements along the east coast of North America. They were started in the 1600s and early 1700s. In 1776, they joined together, declared independence from Britain, and became the first thirteen states of the United States.

The colonies stretched from what is now Maine down to Georgia. From north to south, they were New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Most colonists lived within 100 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. The land farther west belonged to Native American nations who had lived there for thousands of years.

People from Britain came for many reasons. Some wanted land to farm. Some came to escape religious rules they did not agree with. The Pilgrims sailed to Massachusetts in 1620 to worship in their own way. Others came to make money from crops like tobacco. Some were brought against their will. Starting in 1619, ships brought enslaved Africans to the colonies. By the 1700s, slavery was legal in all thirteen colonies, though it was most common in the South.

The colonies are usually grouped into three regions. The New England Colonies in the north had cold winters and rocky soil. People there fished, built ships, and ran small farms. The Middle Colonies had better farmland and grew lots of wheat. They were also the most mixed in religion and language, with Dutch, German, Swedish, and English settlers living side by side. The Southern Colonies had warm weather and rich soil. Big farms called plantations grew tobacco, rice, and indigo, and depended on the forced labor of enslaved people.

By 1770, about 2.1 million people lived in the colonies. That is fewer people than live in the city of Houston today. Each colony had its own government and its own leader, called a governor. But all of them had to follow laws made by the British king and the British Parliament across the ocean.

That is where the trouble started. After 1763, Britain made the colonists pay new taxes on things like paper, glass, and tea. The colonists were angry because they had no representatives in the British Parliament. The phrase "no taxation without representation" became their rallying cry. Anger turned into protest, then into war. The American Revolution began in 1775. A year later, the colonies signed the Declaration of Independence and became something brand new in the world: thirteen states trying to govern themselves.