The Thirteen Colonies: Origins to Revolution

The thirteen colonies were the first major English-speaking settlements in the New World, and they were also, in the long run, the most important: the political institutions developed in colonial Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania became the inheritance of the most powerful state in the modern world. The argument of this article is that the British failure in 1776 was not the failure of an imperial system that had stopped working but the failure of an imperial system that had worked for most of a century and was then asked to do something its architects had never designed it to do: tax a population that had grown up expecting to govern itself. Jack P. Greene’s The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (2010) and Maya Jasanoff’s Liberty’s Exiles (2011) are the most useful recent accounts; the older nationalist narrative of George Bancroft, in which the revolution was the inevitable consequence of British tyranny, has not survived the archival work of the last forty years.

The Three Colonial Regions

The thirteen colonies can be divided into three broad regions. The New England colonies (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire) were founded largely by religious dissenters from the Church of England, particularly the Puritans, and they were characterised by town governments, a relatively homogeneous religious culture, and an economy based on fishing, shipping, and small-scale farming. The middle colonies (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware) were more ethnically and religiously diverse, including large populations of Dutch, German, and Scots-Irish settlers, and they were known for their grain farming, their commercial activity, and their relatively tolerant religious environment. The southern colonies (Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia) were characterised by tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations, often worked by enslaved Africans transported across the Atlantic in the Atlantic Slave Trade. The companion article on the American Revolution from the British Perspective examines the political tensions that led to revolution.

By 1770, the population of the thirteen colonies was approaching 2.5 million, and they were the wealthiest and most rapidly growing European settlements in the Atlantic world. The political institutions of the colonies — the elected assemblies, the town meetings of New England, the county courts of the southern colonies — had grown up under the British Crown with relatively little metropolitan interference. The British, in the words of the historian Bernard Bailyn in The Origins of American Politics (1968), had created “a set of representative institutions that worked,” and the working was the source of the trouble that was to come.

The New England Colonies

The Pilgrims’ voyage on the Mayflower in 1620 and the founding of Plymouth Colony in present-day Massachusetts marked the beginning of English settlement in New England. The Pilgrims were religious dissenters who had fled England for the Netherlands and then the New World. The Mayflower Compact, signed aboard ship in November 1620, established the basis for self-government in the colony: “we do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic.” The compact was, in the words of the historian Samuel Eliot Morison, “the first American document of self-government,” and the document is the foundation of the New England tradition of town meeting democracy.

Over the following decade, the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1628), the Connecticut Colony (1636), the Rhode Island Colony (1636), and the New Hampshire Colony (1638) were established, each with its own distinctive political and religious character. The Puritan settlement of Massachusetts Bay was the most consequential of the New England colonies, and the migration of perhaps 20,000 Puritans to Massachusetts in the 1630s — the so-called “Great Migration” — was one of the most significant episodes in the early history of British North America. The article on Jamestown and Early American Colonies examines the earliest English settlement in Virginia.

The Middle Colonies

The middle colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware were characterised by ethnic and religious diversity. New Amsterdam was captured from the Dutch in 1664 and renamed New York, after the Duke of York, the brother of King Charles II. New Jersey was carved from the territory of New York in 1674. Pennsylvania was established in 1681 by William Penn as a Quaker colony, and its 1681 Charter of Privileges established a representative government and freedom of religion. Delaware was originally part of Pennsylvania and became a separate colony in 1703. The middle colonies were known for their grain farming, their commercial activity, and their relatively tolerant religious environment; they were also important centres of trade with the Native American populations of the interior.

The Southern Colonies

The southern colonies of Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia developed a plantation economy based on tobacco, rice, and indigo. Virginia, the first of the southern colonies, had been established by the Virginia Company of London in 1607 at Jamestown; the colony survived its early disasters and became profitable with the introduction of tobacco as a cash crop in the 1610s. Maryland was founded in 1632 as a Catholic proprietary colony under Lord Baltimore. The Carolinas were established in 1663 and became important centres of rice and indigo production; South Carolina, in particular, had a large enslaved African majority by the early eighteenth century. Georgia, the last of the thirteen colonies, was established in 1733 as a buffer between the British colonies and the Spanish in Florida. The labour demands of the plantation system were met initially by indentured servants from Britain and, after the 1660s, increasingly by enslaved Africans transported across the Atlantic in the horrors of the Middle Passage. The article on British West Indian Slavery examines the parallel Caribbean experience.

The British Imperial System

The British imperial system attempted to bind the colonies more tightly to the mother country through a series of laws and regulations. The Navigation Acts, first enacted in 1651 and reinforced in 1660, 1663, and 1696, attempted to ensure that colonial commodities reached Britain before being re-exported to other countries, and to give British ships a monopoly of trade with the colonies. The Molasses Act of 1733 imposed duties on sugar and molasses imported from the non-British Caribbean. The colonial administration was supervised by the Board of Trade, established in 1696, and by the Privy Council, and the colonies were governed by royal, proprietary, or charter governments. The corresponding article on the Navigation Acts and Mercantilism examines the trade framework. The imperial system was not always enforced effectively, and the period between 1700 and 1763 has been described by historians as one of “salutary neglect.” The phrase is Robert Walpole’s, and the policy it describes was the foundation of the British American empire for most of the eighteenth century.

The Road to Revolution

The decade before the Declaration of Independence saw a series of crises between Britain and the colonies. The Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765 imposed new taxes on the colonies to help pay for the costs of the Seven Years’ War, and produced the first major coordinated colonial resistance. The British argument, advanced by George Grenville and Charles Townshend, was that the colonies should pay a share of the costs of the imperial system that protected them. The colonial argument, advanced most effectively by James Otis and John Adams, was that the colonies had not consented to the taxes and could not, under the British constitution, be taxed by a Parliament in which they were not represented. The “no taxation without representation” slogan, the political theorist Bernard Bailyn argued in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), was not just a constitutional argument but the rhetorical weapon that turned a dispute over taxes into a dispute over the nature of the British constitution itself.

The Boston Massacre of 5 March 1770, in which British soldiers killed five colonists, was followed by the Boston Tea Party of 16 December 1773 and the Coercive Acts of 1774. The First Continental Congress met in September–October 1774, and the Second Continental Congress convened in May 1775, after the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington and Concord. See the article on the American Revolution from the British Perspective examines the war from the British point of view, and the article on the loss of the thirteen colonies examines the conflict in detail.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the thirteen colonies was, for a long time, dominated by the American nationalist narrative — George Bancroft’s History of the United States (1834–74) and the work of the progressive historians of the early twentieth century. The British revisionist work of the last forty years, led by Jack P. Greene and the more recent writing of the Cambridge school of British history, has produced a more measured picture, in which the thirteen colonies are read as a British imperial project that worked for most of a century and then unravelled. The current debate, exemplified in the writing of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and Maya Jasanoff, is over how far the American Revolution was a uniquely American event and how far it should be read as a moment in a wider British imperial reorientation. The most recent work, of which Jasanoff’s Liberty’s Exiles (2011) is the most distinguished example, has insisted that the American Revolution was also a British imperial event, in which the British failure in 1776 was the consequence of British decisions as well as American choices.

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