How many colony are there

Skip to content. Image Rhode Island Charter All 13 of the British North American colonies were granted a contract, called a charter, from the King of England allowing its people to stay there. Painting from North Wind Picture Archives. Twitter Facebook Pinterest Google Classroom. Encyclopedic Entry Vocabulary. Media Credits The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.

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Augustine, Florida. French traders were in Nova Scotia. But the continent still belonged to Native Americans. The settlers stayed for a year. Then they went home. A second group arrived in , but they mysteriously disappeared. Later, another group settled in Jamestown, Virginia. The colony faced great difficulties, but it was successful. Over the next century, the English established 13 colonies.

By nearly 2 million Europeans lived in the American colonies. Still others came from Africa. Most of the Africans were transported to America as slaves.

Most people in England were farmers. A few nobles owned the land. They rented plots to small farmers. But England was changing. Landowners made more money raising sheep than renting to farmers. Farmers were turned out of their homes. For them, America was the only opportunity. Others came to the colonies in search of religious freedom.

In Europe each nation had an official state church. Everybody had to attend the church. Those who refused were sometimes sent to prison. Religious dissenters voyaged to America to practice their own religion. In King James of England gave two companies the right to settle the Atlantic coast. The Virginia Company of London was assigned to Virginia. The Plymouth Company got New England. In three Virginia Company ships set sail. They anchored off a marshy island, where colonists built a settlement called Jamestown.

The colony struggled against disease, famine, and hostile Indians. Historians still do not know what became of its inhabitants. In , just a few months after James I issued its charter, the London Company sent men to Virginia on three ships: the Godspeed, the Discovery and the Susan Constant. They reached the Chesapeake Bay in the spring of and headed about 60 miles up the James River, where they built a settlement they called Jamestown.

The Jamestown colonists had a rough time of it: They were so busy looking for gold and other exportable resources that they could barely feed themselves. The first enslaved African arrived in Virginia in In , the English crown granted about 12 million acres of land at the top of the Chesapeake Bay to Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore. This colony, named Maryland after the queen, was similar to Virginia in many ways. Its landowners produced tobacco on large plantations that depended on the labor of indentured servants and later enslaved workers.

Maryland became known for its policy of religious toleration for all. The first English emigrants to what would become the New England colonies were a small group of Puritan separatists, later called the Pilgrims, who arrived in Plymouth in to found Plymouth Colony.

Ten years later, a wealthy syndicate known as the Massachusetts Bay Company sent a much larger and more liberal group of Puritans to establish another Massachusetts settlement. With the help of local natives, the colonists soon got the hang of farming, fishing and hunting, and Massachusetts prospered. As the Massachusetts settlements expanded, they generated new colonies in New England. Puritans who thought that Massachusetts was not pious enough formed the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven the two combined in In , King Charles II gave the territory between New England and Virginia, much of which was already occupied by Dutch traders and landowners called patroons, to his brother James, the Duke of York.

This made New York one of the most diverse and prosperous colonies in the New World. In , the king granted 45, square miles of land west of the Delaware River to William Penn, a Quaker who owned large swaths of land in Ireland. Lured by the fertile soil and the religious toleration that Penn promised, people migrated there from all over Europe.

As the colonies were established throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the population grew immensely, starting at just 2, people and growing to over 2 million. During this time, many American Indians were also displaced. The colonies all had similar constitutions, legal systems and political systems in place. Most o the leaders were Protestant men that spoke English. Tensions began to rise between the British and the colonists during the French and Indian War.

After the war was over, tensions only grew heavier. The British were left with a large amount of debt after the war, so leaders increased taxes and control over the colonies.