The British North American Colonies (1607–1754)

Core Idea

Beginning with Jamestown in 1607, English settlers founded colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America that grew into the thirteen colonies by 1732. The colonies differed by region: the Chesapeake and southern colonies grew tobacco and rice with indentured and then enslaved labor, New England was settled largely by Puritan families seeking a godly society, and the middle colonies were more ethnically and religiously mixed. Colonists built elected assemblies and a habit of self-government, while wars and disease pushed Native nations from their lands. Britain regulated colonial trade under mercantilist laws but, for long periods, enforced them loosely.

How It's Best Learned

Compare the three regions in a table: who settled, why, what they produced, what labor they used and how they treated Native peoples. Read short primary sources such as the Mayflower Compact and John Winthrop's "city upon a hill" sermon. Trace how slavery became fixed in law in Virginia over the 1600s, and link colonial self-government to the later crisis with Britain.

Common Misconceptions

• Most colonists came to America for religious freedom. (Religion drove the Pilgrim and Puritan migrations to New England, but most early settlers, especially in the Chesapeake, came for land and profit, many as indentured servants.)
• The Puritans founded Massachusetts to create religious freedom for everyone. (They sought freedom to practice their own faith and enforced it; dissenters such as Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were banished.)
• Slavery was fully formed in the colonies from 1619. (Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, but the colony's laws defining lifelong, inherited, race-based slavery developed over the following decades, especially after 1660.)

Explainer

When you studied the Age of Exploration, you saw Spain build an empire in the Americas on silver and conquest. England came later and differently. Its first lasting colony, Jamestown in Virginia, was founded in 1607 by the Virginia Company, a joint-stock company whose investors hoped for profit. The early years were disastrous, with hunger, disease and conflict with the Powhatan peoples. The colony survived because of tobacco, which John Rolfe began growing around 1612. In 1619 Virginia's settlers met in the House of Burgesses, the first elected assembly in English America, and in the same year the first recorded Africans arrived in the colony.

Tobacco needed many workers. At first planters used indentured servants, poor English people who worked for several years in exchange for passage. Over the 1600s, and especially after Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 exposed tensions with poor white settlers, planters turned more to enslaved Africans. Virginia's laws gradually defined slavery as lifelong, inherited and based on race.

New England began differently. In 1620 the Pilgrims, religious Separatists, landed at Plymouth after signing the Mayflower Compact. From 1630 thousands of Puritans settled Massachusetts Bay under John Winthrop, who hoped they would be "as a city upon a hill." They came as families, built towns around churches, and valued literacy so people could read the Bible. They did not tolerate dissent, and exiles such as Roger Williams founded Rhode Island.

The middle colonies were more mixed. England took New Netherland from the Dutch in 1664 and renamed it New York. William Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1681 as a refuge for Quakers that welcomed other faiths. Farther south, Carolina grew rice with enslaved labor, and Georgia, founded in 1732, completed the thirteen colonies.

Native nations resisted the spread of settlement in wars such as King Philip's War of 1675–1676, but disease and warfare steadily reduced their land. Britain treated the colonies as part of a mercantile system, passing Navigation Acts to channel trade through England. Enforcement was often loose, and colonial assemblies grew used to running their own affairs. That habit set the stage for conflict when Britain tightened control after 1763.