The Thirteen Colonies: A Unique Combination

The thirteen American colonies that would ultimately make up the fledgling United States were quite diverse. They were founded at different times, were settled by populations with different demographics, religious beliefs, and class structures, and had a wide range of climates and terrain. However, the American colonies did share several characteristics that led to their separating from their mother country, England.

The colonies were a varied lot, with different origins, demographics, and to some extent governance (though the fact that they were all subjects of the Crown meant that their laws and procedures were more alike than different). The New England colonies, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, were settled by people who sought religious freedom and independence from persecution. Their primary religions were Puritan, Lutheran, and Catholic. There were very few slaves in this region, even up until the Revolution. The economy of New England was primarily small manufacture, such as textiles, fishing, and farming. The mid-Atlantic colonies, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware, and New Jersey, were settled by a mixture of “ordinary” Englishmen and those who were seeking religious freedom; this region was more strongly Catholic than New England, though Protestantism was widespread. Their economies were a mixture of mercantile, manufacturing, maritime, and agricultural. Slaves and slavery during the American Revolution were common, in the cities as well as the country, but not nearly so much as in the South. That region consisted of Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia; the last was formed explicitly as a slave colony. This was a predominantly agricultural region, with a large and historically increasing slave population. Its religious makeup was a mixture of Catholic and Protestant, with the Lutheran and Baptist faiths gaining prominence in later years. All the colonies shared the characteristics of being maritime societies (every colony had at least a part of the Atlantic coastline or frontage on inland bays) and subjects of England.

The American Revolution is widely seen as having come about because England ruled the colonials not as British subjects but, rather, as second-class citizens. The mother country could override any laws or statutes colonial legislatures passed. Pauline Maier notes, “their legal authority emanated from a capital an ocean away, where the colonists had no integral voice in the formation of policy, and governmental decisions were based largely on the reports of “Kings Men” (sic) who sought above all to promote the King’s interests” (5). While the colonists were subject to royal decree, they did not enjoy all the attendant rights of British subjects. The most critical exclusion was the right to representation in the British Parliament. The rallying cry, “No taxation without representation!” reflected the view that the colonists were entitled to a voice in the process whereby they were taxed and governed. This was a rather new experience for British colonial administrative authorities.

During the pre-Revolutionary period, England had already created and administered a worldwide empire. In America, however, unlike in most of its other colonies, colonists considered themselves to be British subjects and expected that they would be treated as such. They therefore greatly resented the fact that the mother country imposed the duties of British subjects on them without granting the attendant rights. James Otis articulated this concept eloquently: “Every British Subject born on the continent of America, or in any other of the British dominions, is by the law of God and nature, by the common law, and by act of parliament, (exclusive of all charters from the crown) entitled to all the natural, essential, inherent and inseparable rights of our fellow subjects in Great-Britain” (74). By contrast, Britain ruled its Asian and African colonies with a heavy hand, making no bones about its regard of the natives as primitives who were simply labor to be exploited. In those colonies, there was a strongly unequal relationship, particularly technologically, between the masters and the ruled. In colonial America, there were no such perceptions of inferiority on the part of the Crown’s subjects. Americans expected to be treated as equals to native Englanders and became very angry when they weren’t.

Much of that perception has to do with the process of the formation of the colonies. While there were substantial native populations present when the colonies were founded, by the mid-eighteenth century, the Indian nations had largely been destroyed or rendered powerless by disease, warfare, and deliberate genocide. Thus, the American colonies’ populations were comprised largely of settlers; the colonies were formed not so much by shiploads of soldiers debarking and pointing guns at the natives (as was usually the case in Britain’s and others’ African and Asian colonies), but by merchant ships carrying anxious immigrants from Britain, clutching tightly their entire worldly goods and hoping for the best. Every immigrant to the colonies had to endure a long, arduous, potentially dangerous, and expensive journey to get there. The expense explains why so many became indentured servants; it was the only way they could pay for passage: “In its simplest form, an indentured servant was a person obligated to serve a master for a period of years, generally four to seven years. In return for this service, the master often paid the indentured person’s fare to America” (Higginbotham 392). Coming to America (for freemen and for servants) represented an investment and a substantial one at that. It also was a great risk to pull up one’s roots and come to an unknown land. Certainly, a person who had spent a significant portion of his personal wealth, or who had obligated himself to be someone’s servant for the better part of a decade, would have felt a sense of ownership of his own destiny and of the very land he now inhabited. To be told that one was no more than a second-class citizen of the British Empire, with fewer rights than that of full British subjects, was intolerable for many of America’s self-made and independent-minded inhabitants.

Interestingly, the cultures of indentured servitude and slavery—which existed side-by-side in colonial America—may have contributed to the American revolutionary spirit. These institutions were regarded as a given and widely accepted by the American colonists. Yet, it could easily be argued that the social stratification resulting from these institutions (British subject—colonial—servant—slave) underscored the difference between the colonials and their British masters. Such a perception of inequality would have served as a unifying force between colonies as diverse as Puritan-founded Massachusetts and slave-plantation Georgia. In addition, as Barbara J. Fields notes, “Indentured servants served longer terms in Virginia than their English counterparts and enjoyed less dignity and less protection in law and custom. They could be bought and sold like livestock,” (102). Thus, even indentured servants would have felt that they were being treated unfairly in comparison to the treatment they would have received in England; as a result, at the end of their servitude, they would have been highly motivated to advance their social standing. In that era, everyone felt that they had a given and prescribed place in the social order. Many felt that they had the right to be full British subjects and had been “demoted” to “colonials.” Servants were servants and slaves were slaves, but the category of “colonial” was an artificial creation and many felt that the distinction shouldn’t have been drawn.

In addition to the prevailing social order, imposed in part by British custom, British policy toward the colonies had a further unifying effect. The phenomenon of a common enemy unifying diverse peoples and populations is common throughout history. Whatever differences the colonials may have had with one another, they were all being mistreated by the British in one fashion or another. Heavy-handed British policies during the immediate pre-Revolutionary period reinforced this perception, particularly in the realms of taxation and customs duties. The most famous example of this is the Stamp Act, which led to the Boston Tea Party and was a rallying point about which the nascent rebellion coalesced. The major role of British taxation policies in fomenting the Revolution cannot be overstressed. In his comprehensive review of colonial taxation policies, Alvin Rabushka notes, “From the founding to the Revolution, taxes were uppermost among the concerns of the colonists. Colonial politics were governed more by disputes over taxes and how they would be spent than all other matters,” (1). As noted earlier, American colonials expected to be treated as equals. They were therefore outraged by a succession of unfair tax policies, especially during the period 1765-1776, which seemed designed to plunder them without any corresponding benefit conferred. The perception of unfair taxation and mistreatment by the British served as a unifying force among colonies and colonials who otherwise had little in common.

A further commonality of the “American experience” was that the colonies had to be built from scratch, as it were. Just about everyone who arrived in the colonies, especially in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, had to hack an existence out of the land; it was only by the latter half of the eighteenth century that there was any real degree of urbanization or infrastructure. Even the prosperous merchant who crossed the Atlantic with everything he would need to set up shop in America faced huge challenges in becoming successful. In short, everyone was pretty much on his own; a result was that there was a much smaller class and social divide between the merchant and the agricultural classes in America than in England. This condition fostered a spirit of independence and self-reliance that is still both a feature and a trope of American society today. Unfortunately for their British masters, people with this mindset made for fractious and rebellious colonists, especially since their rulers were an ocean away. Eric Foner noted in his examination of the concept of American freedom that “Already, Americans were speaking of their country as a place where ‘individuals of all nations’ were transformed into a new people, ‘melted into a new race of men’” (39). This shows that the concept of being American as opposed to English (or Virginian, or Pennsylvanian) was starting to take hold. Certainly, the colonials felt that their experiences and lives were substantially different from that of those who had remained in the mother country. While class divides in England meant that many of its inhabitants had very little in common, in America, whether you were a shopkeeper, a yeoman farmer, or a merchant, you had something in common with all other Americans: the American experience and common American values.

The American colonies were unique in their combination of characteristics, a combination that formed a direct causal link to rebellion and independence. These included the British treating America as a resource colony rather than an extension of the motherland; the resultant treatment of the colonists as second-class rather than full-fledged British citizens; the investments that the colonists made simply to get there and the resulting feelings of entitlement; the highly stratified, largely artificial class structure of the colonies; the British policies of taxation without representation; and the self-reliant nature of those colonists who had settled in America. The superior, even condescending attitude of the British toward a proud and self-reliant people made the loss of its American colonies inevitable.

Works Cited

Fields, Barbara Jeanne. "Slavery, race and ideology in the United States of America." New Left Review 181.1 (1990).

Foner, Eric. The story of American freedom. WW Norton & Company, 1999.

Higginbotham, A. Leon. In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process. The Colonial Period. Vol. 608. Oxford University Press, 1980.

Maier, Pauline. From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776. WW Norton & Company, 1991.

Otis, James, and Dana, Richard. The rights of the British colonies asserted and proved. Edes and Gill, 1764.

Rabushka, Alvin. Taxation in colonial America. Princeton University Press, 2010.