The Thirteen Colonies were a group of British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America during the 17th and 18th centuries. Grievances against the imperial government led the 13 colonies to begin uniting in 1774, and expelling British officials by 1775. Assembled at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, they appointed George Washington as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army to fight the American Revolutionary War. In 1776, Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence as the United States of America. Defeating British armies with French help, the Thirteen Colonies gained sovereignty with the Treaty of Paris in 1783.
The British colonization of the Americas is the history of establishment of control, settlement, and colonization of the continents of the Americas by England, Scotland, and, after 1707, Great Britain. Colonization efforts began in the late 16th century with failed attempts by England to establish permanent colonies in the North. The first of the permanent English colonies in the Americas was established in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Colonies were established in North America, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. Though most British colonies in the Americas eventually gained independence, some colonies have remained under Britain's jurisdiction as British Overseas Territories.
Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore was an English politician, peer and lawyer who was the first proprietor of Maryland. Born in Kent in 1605, he inherited the proprietorship after the death of his father, George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, for whom it had been intended. Calvert proceeded to establish and manage the Province of Maryland as a proprietary colony for English Catholics from his English country house of Kiplin Hall in North Yorkshire.
The Colony of Virginia was a British, colonial settlement in North America between 1606 and 1776.
This section of the timeline of United States history concerns events from before the lead up to the American Revolution.
The institution of slavery in the European colonies in North America, which eventually became part of the United States of America, developed due to a combination of factors. Primarily, the labor demands for establishing and maintaining European colonies resulted in the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery existed in every European colony in the Americas during the early modern period, and both Africans and indigenous peoples were targets of enslavement by Europeans during the era.
The colonial history of the United States covers the period of European colonization of North America from the early 16th century until the incorporation of the Thirteen Colonies into the United States in 1776 during the Revolutionary War. In the late 16th century, England, France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic launched major colonization expeditions in North America. The death rate was very high among early immigrants, and some early attempts disappeared altogether, such as the English Lost Colony of Roanoke. Nevertheless, successful colonies were established within several decades.
The Province of Georgia was one of the Southern Colonies in colonial-era British America. In 1775 it was the last of the Thirteen Colonies to support the American Revolution.
The Province of Maryland was an English and later British colony in North America from 1634 until 1776, when the province was one of the Thirteen Colonies that joined in supporting the American Revolution against Great Britain. In 1781, Maryland was the 13th signatory to the Articles of Confederation. The province's first settlement and capital was in St. Mary's City, located at the southern end of St. Mary's County, a peninsula in the Chesapeake Bay bordered by four tidal rivers.
The slave codes were laws relating to slavery and enslaved people, specifically regarding the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas.
William Claiborne also, spelled Cleyburne was an English pioneer, surveyor, and an early settler in the colonies/provinces of Virginia and Maryland and around the Chesapeake Bay. Claiborne became a wealthy merchant and planter, as well as a major political figure in the mid-Atlantic colonies, and the founder of one of the First Families of Virginia. He featured in disputes between the colonists of Virginia and the later settling of Maryland, partly because of his earlier trading post on Kent Island in the mid-way of the Chesapeake Bay, which provoked the first naval military battles in North American waters. Claiborne repeatedly attempted and failed to regain Kent Island from the Maryland Calverts, sometimes by force of arms, after its inclusion in the lands that were granted by a 1632 Royal Charter to the Calvert family. Kent Island had become Maryland territory after the surrounding lands were granted to Sir George Calvert, first Baron and Lord Baltimore (1579–1632) by the reigning King of England, Charles I.
The tobacco colonies were those that lined the sea-level coastal region of English North America known as Tidewater, extending from a small part of Delaware south through Maryland and Virginia into the Albemarle Sound region of North Carolina. During the seventeenth century, the European demand for tobacco increased more than tenfold. This increased demand called for a greater supply of tobacco, and as a result, tobacco became the staple crop of the Chesapeake Bay Region.
British America comprised the colonial territories of the English Empire, and the successor British Empire, in the Americas from 1607 to 1783. These colonies were formally known as British America and the British West Indies immediately prior to thirteen of the colonies seceding in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) and forming the United States of America.
The Chesapeake Colonies were the Colony and Dominion of Virginia, later the Commonwealth of Virginia, and Province of Maryland, later Maryland, both colonies located in British America and centered on the Chesapeake Bay.
Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800, is a book written by historian Allan Kulikoff. Published in 1986, it is the first major study that synthesized the historiography of the colonial Chesapeake region of the United States. Tobacco and Slaves is a neo-Marxist study that explains the creation of a racial caste system in the tobacco-growing regions of Maryland and Virginia and the origins of southern slave society. Kulikoff uses statistics compiled from colonial court and church records, tobacco sales, and land surveys to conclude that economic, political, and social developments in the 18th-century Chesapeake established the foundations of economics, politics, and society in the 19th-century South.
During the British colonization of North America, the Thirteen Colonies provided England with an outlet for surplus population as well as a new market. The colonies exported naval stores, fur, lumber and tobacco to Britain, and food for the British sugar plantations in the Caribbean. The culture of the Southern and Chesapeake Colonies was different from that of the Northern and Middle Colonies and from that of their common origin in the Kingdom of Great Britain.
The situation of the Catholic Church in the Thirteen Colonies was characterized by an extensive religious persecution originating from Protestant sects, which would barely allow religious toleration to Catholics living on American territory. Nonetheless, Catholics were a part of colonial history from the beginning, especially in Maryland, a colony founded by Catholics, and Rhode Island, a colony founded explicitly for religious toleration. The situation was complicated greatly by the evolving role of the English Crown, which acted as both Supreme Governor of the Church of England and the Head of State of the thirteen colonial governments in almost all periods of colonial rule.
Then Province of Maryland had been a British / English colony since 1632, when Sir George Calvert, first Baron of Baltimore and Lord Baltimore (1579-1632), received a charter and grant from King Charles I of England and first created a haven for English Roman Catholics in the New World, with his son, Cecilius Calvert (1605-1675), the second Lord Baltimore equipping and sending over the first colonists to the Chesapeake Bay region in March 1634. The first signs of rebellion against the mother country occurred in 1765, when the tax collector Zachariah Hood was injured while landing at the second provincial capital of Annapolis docks, arguably the first violent resistance to British taxation in the colonies. After a decade of bitter argument and internal discord, Maryland declared itself a sovereign state in 1776. The province was one of the Thirteen Colonies of British America to declare independence from Great Britain and joined the others in signing a collective Declaration of Independence that summer in the Second Continental Congress in nearby Philadelphia. Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton signed on Maryland's behalf.
The Protestant Revolution, also known Coode's Rebellion after one of its leaders, John Coode, took place in the summer of 1689 in the English Province of Maryland when Puritans, by then a substantial majority in the colony, revolted against the proprietary government led by the Catholic Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore.
