Thirteen Colonies

The **Thirteen Colonies** was a collection of colonies owned by the Kingdom of England and Great Britain, with its first colony at Virginia. The Thirteen Colonies were a major source of income for the British crown, as they provided sugar, coffee, cotton, and tobacco to Britain. In 1776, the United States declared independence and after the American Revolutionary War's end in 1783, the colonies became independent as the United States of America. This lasted form 1607 to 1776.

## History

In 1607, Christopher Newport arrived in present-day Virginia with a fleet of ships carrying settlers, naming a bay in the area "Cape Henry" and establishing a colony called "Jamestown" in the honor of King James I of England.

The English expanded their territory against the Powhatan Confederacy from 1607 to 1622, and they also formed new colonies in the north at Plymouth in 1624 and other parts of the Massachusetts Bay. By 1667, the colonies of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, and Delaware were in English hands. In 1667, during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, New York and New Jersey (part of New Amsterdam) were inducted into the English nation after conquest from the United Provinces.

In 1700, the Thirteen Colonies were a protectorate of Britain who supplied them with cotton, coffee, sugar, tobacco, and furs that made Britain very wealthy. However, they came into conflict with the Iroquois Confederacy of Michigan and the northern parts of Ohio and New York, and the British had to ship armies to the Americas to recapture lost lands. The Iroquois later became allies of the British as the French took over Iroquois lands, and from 1700 to 1763, there were the French and Indian Wars: Queen Anne's War, King George's War, and the French and Indian War. The Thirteen Colonies were the battleground from 1754 to 1759 during the French and Indian War, when the war shifted north to French Canada. The French were later defeated in Canada and by 1763, Britain was in possession of not only their pre-war possession of Rupert's Land, but also Montagnais, New France, and Upper Canada.

In the aftermath of the war, the colonies were taxed to repay the British war effort costs. This caused opposition from the people of the colonies, who were taxed without any representatives in the British Parliament. They formed the Continental Congress and had their own pro-independence movements such as the Sons of Liberty, and in 1770 British troops gunned down five colonists who assaulted a British soldier, Hugh Montgomery. The colonists dumped tea into Boston harbor in 1773 during the Boston Tea Party, another act of protest. In 1775, a clash at Lexington resulted in the American Revolutionary War, and the colonists and British fought each other. On 4 July 1776 the colonies decided that they did not fight for representation in the British government, but independence; they formed the United States. Loyalists in the south were crushed by war's end in 1783, and Britain retained only their colonies in Canada and the Caribbean; they lost all of the Thirteen Colonies, the Ohio Territory, and Florida to the Americans and Spanish.