Colonial America

COLONIAL AMERICA

Normally when we talk about the story of Colonial America, we are talking about the English colonies along the eastern seaboard but that story is incomplete: by the time the English colonies had begun to establish colonies in earnest there were very much of French, Spanish, Dutch and even Russian colonial outposts on the American continent.

The story of those 13 colonies is very important because it was those colonies that form the United States.

The Tobacco Colonies

In 1606, King James I divided the Atlantic seaboard in two, giving the southern half to the London Company and the northern half to the Plymouth Company.

People from Europe established in North America for 20 years.

In 1606 the London Company sent 144 men to Virginia: they reached the Chesapeake Bay in 1607 and they built a settlement that they called Jamestown.

In 1616 the people of Virginia learned to grow tobacco.

The New England Colonies

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. Ten years later, a wealthy syndicate known as the Massachusetts Bay Company sent a much larger group of Puritans to establish another Massachusetts settlement. With the help of local natives, the colonists soon learn to farming, fishing and hunting, and Massachusetts prospered.

The Middle Colonies

In 1664, King Charles II gave the territory between New England and Virginia to his brother James,the Duke of York. The English soon absorbed Dutch New Netherland and renamed it New York.

In 1680, the king granted 45,000 square miles of land west of the Delaware River to William Penn a Quaker who owned large tracks of land in Ireland

The Southern Colonies

Conversely, the Carolina colony was much less cosmopolitan. In its northern half, hardscrabble farmers eked out a living. In its southern half, farmers presided over vast estates that produced pork, corn, lumber and beef.

These Carolinians had close ties to the English planter colony on the Caribbean island that depends very much on African slave labor. As a result, slavery played a very important role in the development of the Carolina colony

In 1732, inspired by the need to build a buffer between South Carolina and the Spanish settlements in Florida, the Englishman James Oglethorpe established the Georgia colony.

The Revolutionary War and the Treaty of Paris

In 1700, there were about 250,000 European settlers and enslaved Africans in North America’s English colonies. By 1775, on the eve of revolution, there were an estimated 2.5 million. The colonists didn´t have much in common, but they were able to band together and fight for their independence.

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