Every One of the 13 Original Colonies

In the summer of 1776, thirteen scrappy strips of coastline declared war on the most powerful empire on earth. The British had more ships, more soldiers, more money, and more experience. What the colonies had was roughly 2.4 million people who had spent 150 years learning how to survive without much help from anyone, a shared grievance about taxation, and - it would turn out - enough stubbornness to outlast a professional army. It worked, which is why we still talk about these thirteen places the way we talk about founding myths rather than real estate.

They were not a unified bloc. They had different religions, different economies, different weather, different relationships with enslaved people and Indigenous neighbors, and in some cases a genuine dislike of each other. New England Puritans looked down on Anglican Virginians. Quaker Pennsylvanians made everyone a little uncomfortable. Georgia was founded partly as a dumping ground for English debtors. What held them together was geography - strung along the Atlantic coast like beads on a string - and a gradually dawning realization that the Crown was treating them as a revenue source rather than as British subjects.

Here is each of them, in the order they appeared.

Virginia

Virginia has a legitimate claim to being where the American story starts, though it nearly didn’t start at all. The Virginia Company of London dispatched 105 settlers on three ships in December 1606 - the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery - and they reached the Chesapeake Bay in May 1607, pushing about 60 miles up the James River to build a palisade fort they called Jamestown. It was a miserable choice of location: marshy, mosquito-ridden, and ringed by the powerful Powhatan Confederacy.

By the end of that first winter, two-thirds of the settlers were dead. The colony stumbled along for years, kept alive by Indigenous food and periodic resupply from England. The thing that finally saved Virginia was tobacco, which settlers began exporting profitably around 1616. Demand in Europe was enormous, and the crop transformed the colony from a failed gold hunt into a plantation economy. The first enslaved Africans arrived in 1619 - the same year the colony established the House of Burgesses, the first representative legislative assembly in British North America. Virginia had discovered, early on, how to hold democracy and slavery in the same hand. It would be an American tension for another two and a half centuries.

Named for Elizabeth I, the “Virgin Queen,” Virginia would eventually produce four of the first five U.S. presidents.

Massachusetts

Massachusetts began twice. The first time was in 1620, when a group of Separatists - 102 people who had concluded the Church of England was beyond saving - crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower and landed at Plymouth in November. They had aimed for Virginia and missed by a considerable distance. Half of them died that first winter. The half that survived, with substantial assistance from the Wampanoag, planted enough crops the following autumn to hold what most Americans now call Thanksgiving.

The second founding was larger and more consequential. In 1630, a much bigger wave of Puritans under John Winthrop arrived with eleven ships, about 700 people, and a colonial charter for the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Winthrop famously told his followers they would be “a city upon a hill” - a model Christian community watched by the world. That ambition set the tone. Massachusetts became the most aggressively self-governing of all the colonies, with a general court, town meetings, and a culture of fierce debate about civic and religious life. It also became the colony where colonial discontent eventually boiled over: the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and the first shots of the Revolution at Lexington and Concord all happened here.

New Hampshire

New Hampshire’s colonial history is mostly the story of Massachusetts doing things and New Hampshire eventually sorting out who it was in relation to that. The first European settlements appeared around 1623 along the Piscataqua River - fishing camps and trading posts set up by English merchants who had no particular religious agenda and just wanted access to the coast. The region was absorbed into Massachusetts Bay in 1641, lived there for several decades, and was separated out as a royal province in 1679.

It was among the least populous of the original thirteen and spent much of its colonial life worrying about French Canada to the north and the raiding parties that periodically came with it. The Abenaki people, allied with the French, attacked settlements throughout the late 17th and early 18th centuries in a series of conflicts the colonists called the French and Indian Wars - a name that grouped together several distinct conflicts. New Hampshire supplied soldiers and money for all of them. The colony developed a reputation for independence that would serve it well in 1776: it was the first colony to establish its own government independent of royal authority, doing so in January 1776 - six months before the Declaration of Independence.

Maryland

Maryland owes its existence to Catholic persecution in England and to a man named George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, who had converted to Catholicism in 1625 - a move that cost him his government position - and then petitioned the Crown for a colonial charter where Catholics might worship freely. He died before the charter was finalized, so it passed to his son Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, who was granted roughly 8 million acres at the top of the Chesapeake Bay in 1632. The first settlers arrived in 1634.

What makes Maryland interesting is what happened next. The Catholic minority that Lord Baltimore had intended to protect was soon outnumbered by Protestant settlers, and the colony responded with the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649 - one of the first laws in the world to mandate religious tolerance for Christians. It didn’t last forever; Protestants later repealed it during a period of political upheaval. But the impulse was there. Maryland’s economy mirrored Virginia’s: tobacco, large plantations, and enslaved labor. The two colonies were so similar in character that the boundary between them had to be surveyed by a pair of English astronomers in the 1760s - hence the Mason-Dixon Line, which later became one of the most freighted geographic facts in American history.

Connecticut

Connecticut’s founding story is essentially a Puritan argument. In 1636, the Reverend Thomas Hooker led about 100 Massachusetts settlers through the wilderness to the Connecticut River valley because he disagreed with the leadership of the Massachusetts Bay Colony - specifically with John Winthrop’s insistence that only church members should vote. Hooker thought that was too restrictive. He wanted a broader basis for civil authority, and in 1639 his colony produced the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, which historians often describe as the first written constitution in America that derived authority from the people rather than from the Crown.

Connecticut also absorbed the New Haven Colony - a separate, even more strict Puritan settlement - in 1665. The combined colony became one of the more prosperous and self-governing in New England, with a representative assembly, a strong merchant class, and a tradition of local autonomy that it guarded jealously. When Charles II issued a new royal charter in 1662 that was actually more liberal than expected, Connecticut’s leaders were so pleased with it that, according to legend, they hid the original document in a hollow oak tree to prevent a royal governor from seizing it. The Charter Oak became a Connecticut symbol that persists on the state quarter today.

Rhode Island

Rhode Island was founded by people kicked out of Massachusetts, which tells you most of what you need to know about the colony’s character. Roger Williams arrived in Massachusetts in 1631, promptly began arguing with church authorities about land rights and religious liberty, and was banished in 1636. He walked south in winter, was taken in by the Narragansett people, purchased land from them, and founded Providence - a settlement where, as he put it, men might live “according to the most painfull and closest binding way of worship to God, yea and civil government too.” That meant complete religious tolerance.

Anne Hutchinson, banished from Massachusetts in 1638 for holding unauthorized theology discussions in her home, also found her way to Rhode Island. The colony that emerged was the most religiously free in North America: it welcomed Quakers, Jews, and religious dissenters of all kinds at a time when such tolerance was genuinely radical. The Newport Jewish community, established in the 1650s, was among the earliest in the hemisphere. When George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport in 1790, assuring them that the new republic would give “to bigotry no sanction,” he was in some ways acknowledging a tradition that Rhode Island had pioneered 150 years earlier.

Delaware

Delaware has the distinction of being the colony that technically belonged to three different European powers before settling its identity, and even then spent decades attached to Pennsylvania like an awkward afterthought. Swedish settlers established Fort Christina in 1638 near what is now Wilmington - the first permanent European settlement in the region. The Dutch seized Swedish New Sweden in 1655. The English took it from the Dutch in 1664 when the Duke of York absorbed everything between Maryland and New England. William Penn received the territory along with Pennsylvania in 1682 and called it the Three Lower Counties.

For twenty years, Delaware sent representatives to Pennsylvania’s assembly. Then in 1704, it got its own assembly while still technically under the same governor as Pennsylvania - an arrangement that persisted until the Revolution. Delaware’s small size and somewhat accidental origins gave it an outsized historical moment in 1787, when it became the first state to ratify the new U.S. Constitution, earning it the nickname “The First State” - a point of pride that Delawareans mention to this day with the enthusiasm of people who know they don’t have much other competition.

North Carolina

The Carolina colony dates to 1663, when Charles II granted a vast territory between Virginia and Spanish Florida to eight loyal proprietors who had supported his restoration to the English throne. The northern and southern halves developed so differently that by 1712 they had separate governors, and by 1729 the Crown had bought out the proprietors and made them separate royal colonies.

North Carolina’s northern half attracted a different population than its southern cousin. Many settlers came down from Virginia - farmers who couldn’t afford the tobacco plantations dominating that colony and wanted their own land. They mixed with Scotch-Irish and German immigrants who came in from Pennsylvania along the backcountry, producing a rugged, independent culture with deep suspicion of authority. North Carolina was harder to govern than almost any other colony: it had no natural harbors good enough for major commerce, which meant no dominant trading city to serve as a political center, which meant power dispersed widely and ornery local autonomy became a way of life. The Regulator movement of the 1760s and 1770s - when backcountry farmers rose up against corrupt colonial officials - was a forerunner of the Revolutionary spirit, even if it technically opposed the colonial government rather than the Crown.

South Carolina

South Carolina grew up looking south and east rather than north. Its early planters had deep ties to Barbados, the English sugar colony where large-scale plantation slavery had already been refined into a system. When those Barbadian planters came to the Carolina coast in the 1670s and 1680s, they brought that system with them. By the 1690s they had found their cash crop: rice, which required flooded paddies and the specific agricultural knowledge held by enslaved West Africans from rice-growing regions. South Carolina’s rice economy grew so lucrative, and so dependent on enslaved labor, that by the mid-18th century enslaved people outnumbered white colonists by roughly two to one.

Charles Town (later Charleston), founded in 1670, became the wealthiest city in colonial British America south of Philadelphia. Its merchant and planter class built grand townhouses, patronized arts and theater, and cultivated the particular self-image of a refined aristocracy perched on top of a brutal economic system. Indigo, used to produce blue dye, became a second major export after Eliza Lucas Pinckney successfully cultivated it commercially in the 1740s. South Carolina would go on to fire the first shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter in 1861, a grim epilogue to the story that began in those rice paddies.

New York

New York almost wasn’t English at all. The Dutch West India Company established New Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan in 1626 - the same year they reportedly purchased the island from the Lenape people - though the specific price of 60 guilders exists only according to tradition, not in any contemporaneous record. For nearly forty years, New Netherland was a genuinely cosmopolitan outpost: Dutch, Flemish, Walloon, French Huguenot, Scandinavian, and German settlers traded furs, farmed the Hudson Valley, and generally went about their business under a series of autocratic governors. By one count, eighteen languages were spoken on Manhattan Island in the 1640s.

In 1664, King Charles II gave the entire territory to his brother James, Duke of York, without bothering to mention that the Dutch were already living there. An English fleet appeared in the harbor, the Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant wanted to fight, his colonists declined, and New Amsterdam became New York with remarkably little bloodshed. Most of the Dutch stayed. That ethnic diversity became one of New York’s defining characteristics - its commerce oriented, its population mixed, its culture more interested in trade than in theology. By the time of the Revolution, New York City was the second-largest city in British North America, and the colony itself was politically divided enough that it abstained from the initial vote on independence.

New Jersey

New Jersey had the misfortune of being sandwiched between New York and Pennsylvania, two of the most significant colonies in British North America, and the further misfortune of being divided in half for most of its early existence. When Charles II gave the territory to his brother in 1664, the Duke of York promptly gave the middle portion to two friends, Sir George Carteret and John Berkeley. East Jersey and West Jersey developed separately for two decades - different proprietors, different religious cultures, different settler populations - before being reunited as a royal colony in 1702.

Despite the administrative confusion, New Jersey was reasonably prosperous. Its fertile soil produced wheat and other grains. Its location between two major commercial cities made it a crossroads for trade and communication. The colony attracted a notably diverse mix of settlers: Puritans in the east, Quakers in the west, Dutch in the north, and Scots elsewhere. During the Revolution, New Jersey earned a different sort of distinction - Washington crossed the Delaware into it on Christmas night 1776, and the ensuing Battle of Trenton was one of the pivotal moments that kept the Continental Army alive during its worst winter.

Pennsylvania

William Penn received 45,000 square miles of land in 1681 as payment for a debt King Charles II owed his late father, the admiral Sir William Penn. The younger Penn was a Quaker, which in 17th-century England was a problematic thing to be - Quakers rejected church hierarchy, refused to doff their hats to social superiors, and believed in the direct experience of God without priests as intermediaries. Penn had spent time in the Tower of London for his beliefs. He intended his new colony to be a “holy experiment” - a place of genuine religious freedom and peaceful relations with Indigenous peoples.

Penn negotiated land purchases with the Lenape rather than simply claiming their territory, a policy unusual enough that his colony became famous for it. He wrote Pennsylvania’s Frame of Government in 1682, guaranteeing liberty of conscience to all believers in God. The results were remarkable: people poured in from all over Europe - Germans, Welsh, Irish, Scots-Irish, Dutch - lured by the cheap land and the tolerance. Philadelphia, laid out in a grid Penn designed himself, became the largest city in colonial British America by the mid-18th century. It was where the Continental Congress met, where the Declaration of Independence was signed, and where the Constitution was drafted. Pennsylvania did not accidentally become the crucible of American democracy; it was designed that way.

Georgia

Georgia was the youngest of the thirteen and, at least initially, the strangest. Founded in 1732 by a group of philanthropists led by James Oglethorpe, it was conceived as a refuge for England’s worthy poor, including debtors released from prison - and as a buffer zone between South Carolina’s rice plantations and Spanish Florida. Oglethorpe also hoped to build a colony based on small farms rather than large plantations, and he initially prohibited both slavery and the holding of large land grants.

That social experiment lasted about twenty years. By the 1750s, Georgia’s planters had successfully lobbied to overturn the prohibition on slavery, and the colony began to resemble its Carolina neighbors. Still, Georgia’s late start gave it a different character. It was smaller, more recently settled, and geographically closer to active conflict with Spain - Oglethorpe himself led a successful defense against a Spanish invasion at the Battle of Bloody Marsh in 1742. When the Revolution came, Georgia was by far the least populated of the thirteen colonies, with roughly 33,000 inhabitants. Persuading it to send delegates to Philadelphia at all required considerable effort. It was, as someone once observed, a colony that barely made it in time.