Guided Reading Life in the American Colonies Answer Key

Traditionally, when nosotros tell the story of "Colonial America," we are talking about the English language colonies along the Eastern seaboard. That story is incomplete–by the fourth dimension Englishmen had begun to establish colonies in earnest, there were plenty of French, Spanish, Dutch and even Russian colonial outposts on the American continent–but the story of those 13 colonies (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia) is an of import ane. It was those colonies that came together to grade the The states.

READ More: 13 Facts Well-nigh the 13 Colonies

The original 13 colonies of North America in 1776, at the United states of america Declaration of Independence.

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English Colonial Expansion

Sixteenth-century England was a tumultuous place. Considering they could make more money from selling wool than from selling food, many of the nation'southward landowners were converting farmers' fields into pastures for sheep. This led to a food shortage; at the same time, many agricultural workers lost their jobs.

The 16th century was likewise the age of mercantilism, an extremely competitive economical philosophy that pushed European nations to larn equally many colonies as they could. Equally a result, for the virtually part, the English language colonies in North America were business organisation ventures. They provided an outlet for England's surplus population and (in some cases) more than religious freedom than England did, merely their primary purpose was to brand money for their sponsors.

READ MORE: 13 Everyday Objects of Colonial America

The Tobacco Colonies

In 1606, King James I divided the Atlantic seaboard in ii, giving the southern half to the London Company (later on the Virginia Company) and the northern one-half to the Plymouth Visitor.

The commencement English settlement in North America had actually been established some xx years before, in 1587, when a grouping of colonists (91 men, 17 women and 9 children) led by Sir Walter Raleigh settled on the isle of Roanoke. Mysteriously, by 1590 the Roanoke colony had vanished entirely. Historians still do non know what became of its inhabitants.

In 1606, just a few months after James I issued its charter, the London Company sent 144 men to Virginia on 3 ships: the Godspeed, the Discovery and the Susan Constant. They reached the Chesapeake Bay in the spring of 1607 and headed about 60 miles upward the James River, where they built a settlement they called Jamestown.

The Jamestown colonists had a rough fourth dimension of information technology: They were so busy looking for gilded and other exportable resource that they could barely feed themselves. It was not until 1616, when Virginia'due south settlers learned how to grow tobacco, that information technology seemed the colony might survive. The first enslaved African arrived in Virginia in 1619.

READ MORE: What Was Life Like in Jamestown?

In 1632, the English crown granted most 12 million acres of land at the elevation of the Chesapeake Bay to Cecilius Calvert, the 2d Lord Baltimore. This colony, named Maryland afterwards the queen, was like to Virginia in many ways. Its landowners produced tobacco on large plantations that depended on the labor of indentured servants and (later) enslaved workers.

Just unlike Virginia'southward founders, Lord Baltimore was a Catholic, and he hoped that his colony would be a refuge for his persecuted coreligionists. Maryland became known for its policy of religious toleration for all.

The New England Colonies

The beginning English emigrants to what would become the New England colonies were a pocket-sized group of Puritan separatists, later called the Pilgrims, who arrived in Plymouth in 1620 to institute Plymouth Colony. X years later, a wealthy syndicate known equally the Massachusetts Bay Company sent a much larger (and more than liberal) group of Puritans to establish some other Massachusetts settlement. With the help of local natives, the colonists soon got the hang of farming, angling and hunting, and Massachusetts prospered.

READ More than: What's the Difference Between Puritans and Pilgrims?

As the Massachusetts settlements expanded, they generated new colonies in New England. Puritans who idea that Massachusetts was not pious enough formed the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven (the two combined in 1665). Meanwhile, Puritans who thought that Massachusetts was besides restrictive formed the colony of Rhode Island, where anybody–including Jewish people–enjoyed complete "freedom in religious concernments." To the north of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a scattering of adventurous settlers formed the colony of New Hampshire.

The Middle Colonies

In 1664, King Charles II gave the territory between New England and Virginia, much of which was already occupied by Dutch traders and landowners chosen patroons, to his brother James, the Knuckles of York. The English before long absorbed Dutch New Netherland and renamed it New York.

Most of the Dutch people (as well every bit the Belgian Flemings and Walloons, French Huguenots, Scandinavians and Germans) who were living there stayed put. This fabricated New York one of the most diverse and prosperous colonies in the New Earth.

In 1680, the male monarch granted 45,000 square miles of land west of the Delaware River to William Penn, a Quaker who owned large swaths of land in Ireland. Penn'south N American holdings became the colony of "Penn's Woods," or Pennsylvania.

Lured by the fertile soil and the religious toleration that Penn promised, people migrated in that location from all over Europe. Like their Puritan counterparts in New England, well-nigh of these emigrants paid their ain fashion to the colonies–they were not indentured servants–and had enough coin to plant themselves when they arrived. As a upshot, Pennsylvania presently became a prosperous and relatively egalitarian identify.

The Southern Colonies

By contrast, the Carolina colony, a territory that stretched south from Virginia to Florida and due west to the Pacific Ocean, was much less cosmopolitan. In its northern half, hardscrabble farmers eked out a living. In its southern half, planters presided over vast estates that produced corn, lumber, beefiness and pork, and–starting in the 1690s–rice.

These Carolinians had shut ties to the English planter colony on the Caribbean island of Barbados, which relied heavily on African slave labor, and many were involved in the slave trade themselves. Every bit a consequence, slavery played an important function in the evolution of the Carolina colony. (It split into North Carolina and Due south Carolina in 1729.)

In 1732, inspired by the demand to build a buffer between South Carolina and the Spanish settlements in Florida, the Englishman James Oglethorpe established the Georgia colony. In many ways, Georgia's development mirrored South Carolina'southward.

The Revolutionary War and the Treaty of Paris

In 1700, there were about 250,000 European settlers and enslaved Africans in North America's English colonies. By 1775, on the eve of revolution, in that location were an estimated 2.5 million. The colonists did non accept much in common, but they were able to band together and fight for their independence.

The American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) was sparked afterward American colonists chafed over issues like taxation without representation, embodied by laws like The Stamp Human action and The Townshend Acts. Mounting tensions came to a caput during the Battles of Lexington and Hold on April xix, 1775, when the "shot heard round the world" was fired.

READ MORE: 7 Events That Enraged Colonists and Led to the American Revolution

Information technology was not without warning; the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770 and the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773 showed the colonists' increasing dissatisfaction with British rule in the colonies.

The Declaration of Independence, issued on July 4, 1776, enumerated the reasons the Founding Fathers felt compelled to break from the rule of King George 3 and parliament to start a new nation. In September of that twelvemonth, the Continental Congress alleged the "United Colonies" of America to exist the "United states of america of America."

French republic joined the war on the side of the colonists in 1778, helping the Continental Army conquer the British at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. The Treaty of Paris ending the American Revolution and granting the 13 original colonies independence was signed on September 3, 1783.

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Source: https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/thirteen-colonies

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