03b: The Thirteen Colonies

The British and North America
The inhabitants of Great Britain's American colonies were a unique lot from the start. They reached the New World from various locations for various reasons, most of which involved freedom of worship. While the Spanish and French colonies in North America never attracted many Spanish and/or French settlers, Britons (and other Europeans) came to the British colonies in droves. On becoming residents of the New World, they thought of themselves first as members of their colony and only then as subjects of the King of England. The two earliest, and therefore most prominent, of the British colonies were Virginia and Massachusetts.

Virginia goes back to the abortive Roanoke Colony (1586-1587) of Sir Walter Raleigh, which had been chartered and established for the purpose of exploiting its natural wealth. But there was no gold there; only malaria and angry Indians. The Jamestown Colony of 1607 was more reality-based and proved more successful. Seeking to avoid conflict with the Spanish, the Jamestown colonists settled roughly 35 miles up the James River from the bay. Like the Roanoke colonists, they were more interested in finding gold than farming, making it hard to become self-sufficient and fight off Indian attacks.  Fortunately for Virginia’s economy, a new strain of tobacco was discovered in 1612. It eventually became the colony’s prime source of revenue. Although Virginian soil was now profitable, the colony itself struggled. In 1624 it became a royal colony. Class structure in Virginia and the southern colonies tended to reflect the sharply defined upper and lower classes to be found in Great Britain. Small farmers were few and far between, compared with the plantations owned by the wealthy and worked by the lower classes. One famous product of this Virginia plantation gentry was America's first President, George Washington.

Massachusetts had a somewhat different start. After 13 years in Dutch exile, a group of Puritans set out for Virginia on board the Mayflower. In autumn 1620 they instead eached Cape Cod. They believed that residence in the New World had removed them from the command of Great Britain and all other European powers. Therefore, the Pilgrims drafted the Mayflower Compact, a formal agreement to abide by "just and equal laws" drafted by elected leaders. Such a thing would never have happened in the thinly-settled French or Spanish territories, where the king's word was law. In December the Mayflower reached Plymouth and the Pilgrims began to build their settlement. Nearly half the colonists died of exposure and disease that winter. Neighboring Indians saved them by teaching them how to raise corn; sadly, they came to regret their good deed. More immigrants arrived on Massachusetts Bay in 1630 with a grant from King Charles I to establish a colony. Their leader, John Winthrop, openly set out to create a "city upon a hill,” in effect, a place where Puritans would live in accordance with their religious beliefs. Because they had their own charter from the king, authority over their colony was located not in Great Britain, but in Massachusetts itself. This provoked some novel ideas about self-government. The charter granted all power to the General Court, which was made up of men belonging to the Puritan Church. This guaranteed the Puritans would dominate the colony not just religiously, but politically too. Most of New England was run along the same lines as Massachusetts, although the theocracy (government subject to religious beliefs) was not quite as pronounced.

The Puritans’ theocratic tendencies weren't for everyone, though, and freethinking types such as Roger Williams rebelled. In 1636 Williams bought land from the Indians on the site of what is now Providence, Rhode Island. There he set up the first American colony to practice total complete separation of church and to offer total freedom of religion. A fellow dissident preacher, Anne Hutchinson, took advantage of this haven, although she was later killed by Indians in New York. Freedom of religious worship was also a main concern in the central seaboard colonies of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware. There, eve  publicly scorned denominations as Quakers and Roman Catholics were made to feel welcome, as were Jews from all over Europe. Indeed, the colonies on the central Atlantic coast became considered the most cosmopolitan, wedged in as they were between the diligent and devout small farmers of New England, and the plantation culture of the Southern colonies. The cities of Philadelphia and New York took their places with Boston as the colonies' leading cities.

The French and Indian War (1754-1763) is regarded in in Europe as part of the massive Seven Years' War. To the British colonists, though, it was a grim struggle against both the French army and its Indian allies.

In 1752, the French wanted to drive the British out of the Ohio River Valley without a war. They hoped that building two forts at strategic locations would scare the British out. In response, the governor of Virginia (which claimed much of the Ohio territory) sent  young Colonel George Washington with a letter requesting the forts be removed. When the French refused, Washington started building his own fort, Fort Prince George: the modern day Pittsburgh. But before Washington could finish building it, the French captured it in 1754, finished it, and named it Fort Duquesne.  The British sent an expeditionary force sent to recapture the fort, with Washington as second in command. Washington's part of the force skirmished with a French scouting party near Great Meadows, Pennsylvania and was forced to surrender at Fort Necessity on July 4, 1754. The French and Indian War had begun.

The French had large forces of well-trained regular soldiers scattered throughout their New World territories. Since the English could spare only a few regular troops, the colonists wound up doing most of the fighting. On February 10, 1763 the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years' War. In the New World, France ceded all of Canada to the British, and ceded the Louisiana Territory to Spain. The British also got Florida from the Spanish. Great Britain won the war, hands down, but the colonists had nothing to show for their important role. Instead, more British troops were shipped in to "protect" the colonists from the Indians. The British also raised taxes on the colonists to help pay for this unwanted "security." The colonials' common anger against the British was the first sign of an American national spirit. In fifty years' time, the French and English settlers of the Ohio River Valley would all be Americans and proud of it. The British would be all gone.