Thirteen Colonies: Rival Ventures Forced Together by the Intolerable Acts

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The colonies that became the United States began as unrelated ventures with clashing goals. Jamestown, founded in 1607 by the London Company, nearly failed until it turned to tobacco, a crop that exhausted soil and demanded ever more land and labor. Puritans and Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620 and Massachusetts Bay built covenant communities, then banished minister Roger Williams, who obtained land from the Narragansett sachem Canonicus and founded Providence Plantations in 1636 on liberty of conscience. New Netherland and Swedish posts on the Delaware began as fur trading outposts, and William Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1681 as a Quaker refuge. Population grew from about 2,000 in 1625 to nearly 2.4 million by 1775.

Slavery was legal in all 13 colonies, with about 287,000 Africans imported over 160 years. Under mercantilism and the Navigation Acts smuggling flourished, and in 1761 James Otis challenged writs of assistance, prompting John Adams to write that the child Independence was born. The French and Indian War of 1754 to 1763 threw militias together and trained George Washington, but its debt led Parliament to the Sugar Act, Stamp Act and Townshend Acts. After the Tea Act and the Boston Tea Party, the Intolerable Acts closed Boston's port and revoked the Massachusetts charter, uniting the colonies behind the First Continental Congress, Lexington and Concord, and the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

• Colonial medicine relied on humoral theory and bloodletting.
• By 1776 about 90 percent of the white population worked as farmers.
• Cheap land meant 50 to 80 percent of white men could vote in local elections.
• The Stamp Act taxed newspapers, legal documents and playing cards, payable only in British currency.
• The Tea Act actually lowered tea prices to bail out the East India Company.