From First Peoples to 13 States: The Complete Origin Story
Long before there was a United States, there were thousands of years of indigenous civilization, European exploration, colonial struggle, and revolution. This is the complete story of how America came to be, from the first peoples to the birth of the republic.
The First Peoples
The land that would become the United States was not empty when Europeans arrived. It had been home to human beings for at least 15,000 years, and possibly much longer. Archaeological evidence suggests the first peoples migrated from Asia across the Bering Land Bridge during the last Ice Age, spreading gradually southward and eastward across the continent over thousands of years. By the time European explorers arrived in the late 1400s, North America was home to millions of people living in hundreds of distinct nations, speaking hundreds of different languages, and organized into a vast range of political, social, and economic systems.
These were not simple or primitive societies. Across the continent, indigenous peoples had developed sophisticated agriculture, extensive trade networks, complex governance systems, monumental architecture, astronomy, medicine, and rich artistic and spiritual traditions. The Mississippian city of Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis, had a population of perhaps 20,000 people at its peak around 1100 CE, larger than London at the same time. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy in the Northeast had developed a sophisticated system of representative governance centuries before Europeans arrived.
How long people have been here keeps moving further back. The older "Clovis first" model, which placed the earliest arrivals around 13,000 years ago, has been overturned by sites such as Monte Verde in Chile, dated to roughly 14,500 years ago, and by fossilized human footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico that the U.S. Geological Survey and National Park Service dated in 2021 to between about 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. Many archaeologists now think the first peoples moved south along the Pacific coast as well as through an inland ice-free corridor. The languages spoken at contact fell into dozens of unrelated families, among them Algic, Iroquoian, Siouan, Uto-Aztecan, and Na-Dene, a diversity comparable to that of the entire Old World.
Ways of life varied as widely as the land itself. Peoples of the Pacific Northwest built cedar-plank houses and carved monumental art along a coast rich in salmon. Ancestral Puebloan communities in the Southwest raised multistory stone towns such as Mesa Verde and linked Chaco Canyon to outlying settlements by a network of engineered roads. Across the Eastern Woodlands, farmers planted the interdependent "Three Sisters" of maize, beans, and squash, and peoples throughout the continent used controlled fire to clear underbrush, improve hunting, and shape the forests that Europeans would later mistake for untouched wilderness. Estimates of the population living in the area of the present-day United States at contact commonly range from about two million to seven million or more.
Major Indigenous Civilizations and Peoples
The Haudenosaunee, meaning 'people of the longhouse,' united five nations, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, under a founding tradition called the Great Law of Peace, said to have been carried to the warring nations by a figure known as the Peacemaker and by Hiawatha. The Tuscarora, pushed out of the Carolinas, joined around 1722 to make the Six Nations. Scholars still debate the founding date: an oral tradition tied to a total solar eclipse points some researchers to 1142 CE, while many historians place it closer to 1450. The confederacy's homeland stretched across what is now upstate New York, from the Hudson to the Genesee.
Government ran through a Grand Council of 50 chiefs, called sachems, who met at the Onondaga 'central fire' and decided matters by consensus rather than majority vote. The system was matrilineal: clan mothers chose the men who sat on the council and could remove a chief who failed his people. This gave Haudenosaunee women a formal, structural role in political power at a time when women could not vote or hold office anywhere in Europe or its colonies.
Whether the confederacy shaped the U.S. Constitution is contested. In 1744 the Onondaga leader Canasatego urged the colonies at the Lancaster treaty conference to bind themselves together as the Six Nations had; Benjamin Franklin, who printed the treaty proceedings, cited the Iroquois example in 1751 when he argued for colonial union. In 1988 Congress passed Concurrent Resolution 331 acknowledging the confederacy's influence on the framers. Many historians, including Jack Rakove, caution that the documentary evidence for direct borrowing into the 1787 text is thin, and that European sources like Montesquieu carried far more weight in the convention.
At contact the confederacy was a major military and diplomatic power. It controlled the Mohawk Valley corridor and much of the fur trade, and both France and Britain competed for its alliance, with the British link formalized as the Covenant Chain. During the Beaver Wars of the 1640s to 1701 the Haudenosaunee expanded at the expense of the Huron, Erie, and Susquehannock. The Revolution split the confederacy: four nations sided with Britain, the Oneida and Tuscarora with the Americans. The 1779 Sullivan Expedition burned roughly 40 Haudenosaunee towns, and the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua set boundaries the Six Nations still cite today.
'Algonquian' names a language family, not a single nation. Dozens of distinct peoples who spoke related languages lived along the coast from the Canadian Maritimes to North Carolina, exactly the ground the thirteen colonies would occupy. In the Northeast they included the Wampanoag, Massachusett, Narragansett, Pequot, Mohegan, and Abenaki; in the mid-Atlantic, the Lenape of the Delaware Valley and the Powhatan paramount chiefdom of tidewater Virginia. Hundreds of thousands of people lived in this coastal zone when Europeans arrived.
The Powhatan chiefdom was the largest political unit the Jamestown settlers met. Under the paramount chief Wahunsenacawh, whom the English called Powhatan, roughly 30 tributary groups and an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people occupied a territory called Tsenacommacah. His daughter, known to history as Pocahontas, married the colonist John Rolfe in 1614, producing a fragile peace that collapsed in 1622 when Wahunsenacawh's successor Opechancanough launched a coordinated attack that killed about a third of the Virginia colonists in a single morning.
Disease arrived before most settlers did. An epidemic that swept coastal New England from 1616 to 1619, spread by earlier European fishing and trading contact, killed an estimated 75 to 90 percent of the Wampanoag living on the coast. When the Mayflower passengers landed in 1620 they built Plymouth on the cleared fields of Patuxet, a Wampanoag village emptied by the outbreak. Tisquantum, remembered as Squanto, was a Patuxet man who had been kidnapped years earlier and returned to find his community gone.
Sustained war followed settlement. The Pequot War of 1636 to 1638 turned on the Mystic massacre of May 1637, in which English forces and their Narragansett and Mohegan allies killed an estimated 400 to 700 Pequot and sold survivors into slavery, and ended with the Treaty of Hartford, which tried to erase the Pequot name. King Philip's War of 1675 to 1676, led by the Wampanoag sachem Metacom, devastated dozens of English towns but ended Native political independence in southern New England, with thousands killed, executed, or shipped to the Caribbean as slaves.
The southeastern interior, where the southern colonies would push inland, was home to large agricultural nations: the Cherokee, who called themselves the Aniyunwiya and occupied the southern Appalachians across present-day Tennessee, western North Carolina, northern Georgia, and Alabama; the Muscogee, or Creek, Confederacy of Georgia and Alabama; and the Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Catawba. Anglo-Americans would later group the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole under the label 'Five Civilized Tribes,' a term reflecting settler judgments about assimilation rather than the nations' own view of themselves.
Cherokee society was organized into seven matrilineal clans, with descent and clan membership passing through the mother, and towns divided their governance between a 'white' peace organization and a 'red' war organization. The population may have exceeded 20,000 before eighteenth-century epidemics; a smallpox outbreak in 1738 and 1739 is estimated to have killed between a quarter and a half of the Cherokee people in a matter of months.
These nations were deeply tied into the colonial economy through the Charleston deerskin trade, and warfare with settlers was recurring, including the Anglo-Cherokee War of 1758 to 1761, which burned many Cherokee towns. In the early nineteenth century the Cherokee Nation adopted a written constitution in 1827 modeled on the United States' own, and Sequoyah's syllabary, completed around 1821, made the nation broadly literate in its own language and supported the bilingual Cherokee Phoenix newspaper from 1828.
Legal victories did not prevent removal. In Worcester v. Georgia in 1832 the Supreme Court held that Georgia's laws had no force within Cherokee territory, but the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the fraudulently obtained 1835 Treaty of New Echota drove the forced march west in 1838 and 1839. An estimated 4,000 of roughly 16,000 Cherokee died on what became known as the Trail of Tears; the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole were removed under the same federal policy.
The Mississippian culture was a mound-building, maize-farming society that spread across the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys and much of the Southeast between roughly 800 and 1600 CE. It was organized into chiefdoms, connected by long-distance trade in copper, marine shell, and mica, and is known archaeologically for flat-topped platform mounds arranged around open plazas and for a shared body of religious art that scholars call the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex.
Its largest center was Cahokia, on the Mississippi floodplain opposite present-day St. Louis, near Collinsville, Illinois. At its height between about 1050 and 1200 CE the city covered roughly six square miles, held around 120 earthen mounds, and had an estimated population of 10,000 to 20,000 people. That made it larger than London at the same date, and no city in what is now the United States would match its population again until Philadelphia in the 1700s.
Its centerpiece, Monks Mound, rises about 100 feet in four terraces and covers roughly 14 acres at its base, making it the largest prehistoric earthwork in the Americas north of Mexico, built entirely from earth carried by hand in woven baskets. Cahokians also erected a series of large timber circles, nicknamed 'Woodhenge,' that aligned with the solstices and equinoxes, and excavations at Mound 72 uncovered mass burials that archaeologists interpret as ritual sacrifice.
Cahokia was largely abandoned by about 1350. Archaeologists debate the causes, which likely combined deforestation, repeated flooding of the surrounding bottomland, climate shifts, and political breakdown, with little evidence that warfare was the main driver. The site was empty when Europeans reached the region, feeding a later myth of a thinly used continent, even though descendant Mississippian peoples such as the Natchez were still building and using mounds into the eighteenth century. Cahokia is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
European Exploration and Early Contact
Sustained European contact with the Americas began in 1492 when Christopher Columbus, sailing for the Crown of Castile, reached the Caribbean. He made four voyages but never set foot in what is now the continental United States, making landfall instead in the Bahamas, the Greater Antilles, and the coasts of Central and South America. In 1494 the Treaty of Tordesillas divided the non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal along a line in the Atlantic, a division other European powers, including England and France, would simply ignore.
What followed is what the historian Alfred Crosby named the Columbian Exchange: a two-way transfer of crops, animals, and microbes. Wheat, rice, horses, cattle, and pigs crossed to the Americas, while maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cacao, and tobacco crossed to Europe, Africa, and Asia, reshaping diets and populations worldwide. The potato alone is credited with helping drive later population growth across northern Europe.
The exchange of disease was catastrophic and one-sided. Smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus, to which Native populations had no acquired immunity, moved along trade routes and often ran ahead of Europeans themselves. Estimates of the pre-contact population of the Americas range widely, but a 2019 study led by researchers at University College London put it near 60 million in 1492 and estimated a roughly 90 percent decline, about 56 million deaths, by 1600, a loss so vast that the regrowth of abandoned farmland may have pulled enough carbon from the atmosphere to cool the global climate.
This collapse, not European numbers or technology alone, is central to how small colonial footholds later expanded. Depopulation emptied villages and cleared fields that arriving settlers described as wilderness or as providentially vacated for them. The Massachusetts Bay governor John Winthrop explicitly read the die-off among coastal peoples as God making "room" for the Puritans. The "empty" continent that colonization narratives assumed was in large part a recently emptied one.
Spain was the dominant European power in the early Americas. After overrunning the Caribbean, then Mexico under Hernán Cortés in 1519 to 1521 and Peru under Francisco Pizarro in the 1530s, Spanish forces turned north. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine, Florida, on September 8, 1565, and about twelve days later captured a nearby French Huguenot outpost, Fort Caroline. St. Augustine is the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the present-day United States, established 42 years before Jamestown.
Spanish expeditions, called entradas, pushed deep into the interior long before English settlement. Juan Ponce de León reached Florida in 1513. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca survived the wreck of the Narváez expedition and walked from the Gulf Coast across Texas and the Southwest between 1528 and 1536. Hernando de Soto's expedition of 1539 to 1542 cut across the Southeast, spread disease through Mississippian chiefdoms, reached the Mississippi River, and left de Soto dead on its banks.
In the Southwest, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado searched from 1540 to 1542 for the fabled 'Seven Cities of Cíbola,' reaching the Zuni pueblos, the rim of the Grand Canyon, and the plains of Kansas. Permanent colonization of New Mexico began with Juan de Oñate in 1598, whose brutal reprisal after the Acoma revolt included mutilations and enslavement, and Santa Fe was founded around 1610, making it the oldest state capital in the country.
Spain's imprint outlasted its empire. Horses introduced by the Spanish, and dispersed widely after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, transformed Plains nations such as the Comanche and Lakota into mounted buffalo hunters. Spanish missions, the coerced-labor encomienda system, and a permanent layer of place names, Florida, Colorado, California, San Antonio, Los Angeles, shaped the Southwest and West for centuries, over land that makes up roughly a quarter of the modern United States.
France entered the contest for North America when Giovanni da Verrazzano charted the Atlantic coast for the French crown in 1524 and Jacques Cartier sailed into the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1534, reaching the site of Montreal the following year. France's approach differed sharply from England's: it was built on trade and alliance rather than mass settlement. New France held only about 3,000 European colonists in 1663 and roughly 70,000 by 1760, against more than a million and a half people in the British colonies.
Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec in 1608 and allied with the Huron, Algonquin, and Montagnais peoples. In 1609 he joined them on a raid against the Mohawk, an act that set the Haudenosaunee Confederacy against the French for the better part of a century and pushed it toward the Dutch and later the English.
French missionaries and fur traders, the coureurs de bois, opened the interior. Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet explored the upper Mississippi in 1673, and René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, reached the river's mouth in 1682 and claimed the entire watershed as 'Louisiana' for Louis XIV. A thin chain of forts and towns eventually ran from Montreal through Detroit, founded in 1701, to Kaskaskia and New Orleans, founded in 1718.
French control of the Ohio Valley boxed in the British colonies and helped ignite the French and Indian War of 1754 to 1763. In the 1763 Treaty of Paris that ended it, France ceded Canada and all its territory east of the Mississippi to Britain, having already given Louisiana west of the river to Spain in the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau of 1762, erasing French North America from the map. French language, civil law, and Catholic institutions still persist in Quebec and Louisiana.
The Dutch claim began with an Englishman. In September 1609 the Dutch East India Company's hired navigator Henry Hudson sailed the ship Halve Maen up the river that now bears his name, as far as present-day Albany, while searching for a northwest passage to Asia. His reports of dense beaver populations gave the Netherlands a commercial reason to return.
The Dutch West India Company organized the colony of New Netherland in 1621, built Fort Orange at Albany in 1624, and founded New Amsterdam on Manhattan the next year. Director Peter Minuit's 1626 acquisition of Manhattan from the Lenape, traditionally valued at 60 guilders of trade goods, is documented in a single surviving letter, and the Dutch and Lenape almost certainly understood the transaction in very different terms, one as a permanent sale, the other as shared use.
New Amsterdam was run for profit rather than religion, and it was strikingly diverse for its size. A visiting priest reported 18 languages spoken there in 1643, and the population included Walloons, Germans, Scandinavians, a group of Sephardic Jewish refugees who arrived in 1654, and enslaved Africans held by the company, some of whom were granted a conditional 'half-freedom.' Director Peter Stuyvesant, in office from 1647, repeatedly clashed with residents over religious tolerance and demands for self-government.
In August 1664 an English fleet dispatched by James, Duke of York, arrived off Manhattan. Stuyvesant wanted to resist, but the town's citizens forced a surrender without a shot, and the colony was renamed New York. The Dutch briefly retook it in 1673 before ceding it for good in 1674. The Dutch legacy survives in place names such as Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx, in everyday words like cookie and boss, and in families including the Roosevelts and Van Burens.
New Sweden was launched by the New Sweden Company, backed by the Swedish crown and by Dutch investors that included Peter Minuit, the former director of New Netherland. In March 1638 its expedition landed at a natural rock wharf on the Delaware River and built Fort Christina, named for Sweden's reigning queen, then a child of 11, on the site of present-day Wilmington, Delaware.
At its height the colony claimed both banks of the Delaware from around Wilmington upriver toward the Schuylkill, with outposts including Fort Nya Elfsborg in New Jersey and Fort Nya Göteborg on Tinicum Island in Pennsylvania, which became the capital under Governor Johan Printz from 1643 to 1653. The European population never exceeded roughly 400 people, most of them Swedes and Finns.
The colony's most lasting contribution was architectural. Finnish and Swedish settlers built with horizontal stacked logs, the technique that became the archetypal American frontier log cabin and was later carried west by Scots-Irish and German settlers. Holy Trinity, the 'Old Swedes' Church in Wilmington, consecrated in 1699, is among the oldest churches still in regular use in the United States.
New Sweden ended without a battle. In 1655 Peter Stuyvesant led a Dutch force of several hundred men that took the colony's forts and folded the territory into New Netherland. Nine years later the English seized the whole Delaware region. The Swedish and Finnish colonists stayed on, kept their Lutheran congregations, and were absorbed into William Penn's Pennsylvania and the Lower Counties, the future Delaware, after 1681.
England's first sustained colonization effort rested on a 1584 patent from Queen Elizabeth I to Sir Walter Raleigh. A 1585 military colony on Roanoke Island, in the Outer Banks of present-day North Carolina, under Ralph Lane, quickly alienated the neighboring Secotan and Roanoke peoples, killed the leader Wingina, and abandoned the site in 1586 aboard Francis Drake's passing fleet.
A second attempt in 1587 was meant to be a permanent civilian settlement on the Chesapeake, but the ships' pilot left the roughly 115 colonists at Roanoke instead. Among them was the governor John White's granddaughter, Virginia Dare, born on August 18, 1587, the first English child born in the Americas. White sailed back to England for supplies within weeks of her birth.
War with Spain, including the 1588 Armada campaign, kept White from returning until August 1590. He found the settlement carefully dismantled, with no sign of violence, the word 'CROATOAN' carved on a post and 'CRO' on a tree. That was a prearranged signal pointing to Croatoan Island, home of a friendly people, but a storm drove White's ships away before he could search, and he never came back.
The leading explanations are that the colonists assimilated with the Croatoan or moved inland with other groups, or that they died in a drought, tree-ring data shows 1587 to 1589 was the worst dry spell in the region in 800 years, or disease. Later Jamestown-era reports collected secondhand accounts of survivors living among Native communities. The failure made English investors wary, and permanent English settlement waited until the joint-stock Virginia Company reached Jamestown in 1607.
What Gave England the "Right" to Colonize?
The legal basis for European colonization rested on what is now called the Doctrine of Discovery. Its roots lie in a series of fifteenth-century papal bulls: Dum Diversas in 1452 and Romanus Pontifex in 1455 authorized the Portuguese Crown to subdue and enslave Saracens, pagans, and other "enemies of Christ," and Inter Caetera in 1493 drew Spain's line of claim across the Atlantic. Protestant England rejected the pope's authority but kept the underlying premise that Christian nations could acquire sovereignty over lands held by non-Christians.
England added its own twist. It claimed title by "discovery" made real through settlement and the "improvement" of land, and colonists invoked the idea of vacuum domicilium, John Winthrop's phrase, arguing that Native peoples who did not farm in the European manner or hold land as individual property had only a "natural" and not a "civil" right to it. Royal charters, from the Virginia Company's in 1606 to the Massachusetts Bay charter of 1629, granted English subjects the right to settle and govern with no mention of the consent of the people already there.
That premise passed directly into American law. In Johnson v. M'Intosh in 1823, Chief Justice John Marshall held that European discovery gave the discovering sovereign, and the United States as its successor, exclusive title, leaving Native nations only a right of "occupancy" that the federal government alone could extinguish. Marshall built on the same reasoning in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia in 1831, describing tribes as "domestic dependent nations."
Johnson v. M'Intosh has never been overruled. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg invoked the discovery doctrine in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation in 2005, and the Court's 2023 decision in Haaland v. Brackeen left the broader framework of federal Indian law intact. Separately, on March 30, 2023, the Vatican formally repudiated the "Doctrine of Discovery" as no part of Catholic teaching, a symbolic step with no effect on United States law.
What Is a Colony?
A colony is a territory settled by people from another country that remains under the political control of that country. The settlers bring their home country's laws, language, and customs, but they remain subjects of the parent nation, not citizens of the land they inhabit. The parent country, called the metropole or mother country, claims ownership of the territory and uses it primarily to extract wealth, whether through trade, taxation, natural resources, or agricultural production.
England's colonies in North America were established under royal charters, legal documents granted by the king authorizing specific individuals, companies, or groups to settle and govern a defined territory in the king's name. The charter spelled out what the colonists could and could not do, who held authority over them, and what they owed to the Crown. Without a charter, a settlement had no legal standing under English law.
The economic logic behind the colonies was mercantilism, the idea that a nation's wealth was measured in gold and in a favorable balance of trade. Parliament's Navigation Acts, beginning in 1651 and expanded in 1660 and 1663, required that goods moving to or from the colonies travel in English or colonial ships and that key colonial exports such as tobacco, sugar, and rice pass through an English port first. The colonies were meant to supply raw materials and buy English manufactures, not to compete with them.
In practice, the colonies developed considerable self-governance over time, partly because Britain was far away and often distracted by wars and politics at home. By the mid-1700s, every colony had an elected assembly that controlled local taxation and spending, a period Edmund Burke later called "salutary neglect." This habit of running their own affairs is what made Parliament's attempts to tighten control and enforce the trade laws after 1763 feel so explosive to the colonists.
Where Did the Colony Names Come From?
The names of the thirteen colonies, which became the names of the first thirteen states without change, came from four rough sources: indigenous words, English place names, royal dedications, and honors to individuals. Most colonies were named by whoever issued the founding charter or led the first settlement, often long before anyone had a clear picture of the land being named.
The namers were a small group: reigning monarchs, the courtiers and companies who received charters, and the first governors. Elizabeth I's court produced Virginia; Charles II produced the Carolinas and, through his brother, New York; the Calvert and Penn families named the colonies they were granted to govern.
Names also shifted with power. New Amsterdam became New York when England took it in 1664; the single Province of Carolina split into North and South in 1712; and as late as 2020, Rhode Island's voters removed "and Providence Plantations" from the state's formal name.
Unlike the states admitted later, whose names were often chosen deliberately from rivers, Spanish and French terms, or Native words, the original thirteen carried their colonial names straight into statehood, so the map of the eastern seaboard still records the priorities of seventeenth-century English politics.
Several colony names came straight from the Algonquian languages spoken along the coast. Massachusetts takes its name from the Massachusett people, and means roughly 'at the great hill' or 'near the range of hills,' pointing to the Blue Hills southwest of Boston; the name appears on John Smith's 1616 map of New England and was carried into the 1629 Bay Colony charter.
Connecticut comes from a Mohegan-Pequot word usually written 'Quinnetukut,' meaning 'beside the long tidal river,' the Connecticut River, at 410 miles the longest in New England. The extra letters are an English spelling habit; the middle 'c' is silent.
The same borrowing runs through the rivers, bays, and regions of the middle and southern colonies, from the Rappahannock, Potomac, and Chesapeake in Virginia to Roanoke in Carolina, and through place names like Manhattan, a Lenape word. Across the country as a whole, about half of all U.S. state names derive from Native languages.
The pattern reflects how the English learned the land, from Native guides, traders, and existing trails and village sites. Colonists frequently kept the indigenous name for a river or district even while renaming the settlements on it after English towns or patrons, so the map still preserves a layer of Native geography beneath the English political names laid over it.
Flattering the Crown was a reliable way to secure or keep a charter, so many colonies were named for the monarch. Virginia, first applied around 1584 to the whole stretch of coast England claimed, honored Elizabeth I, the unmarried 'Virgin Queen.' Georgia was named for George II, who granted its charter on June 9, 1732, making it the last of the thirteen.
Maryland, in the 1632 charter to the Calvert family, was named for Henrietta Maria, the Catholic queen of Charles I, a choice that quietly signaled the colony's Catholic leadership while staying safely royal. The Carolinas take their name from Carolus, the Latin form of Charles: first used under a 1629 grant from Charles I and revived in the 1663 grant from Charles II to the eight Lords Proprietors.
New York was named for James, Duke of York, the future James II and brother of Charles II, who received the captured Dutch colony in 1664. Even New Jersey honored the Crown at one remove: it was named for the Isle of Jersey, which the proprietor Sir George Carteret had held for the royalists during the English Civil War.
Naming a colony for the king or a royal patron tied its legitimacy to the throne and made the grant harder to challenge. It also produced a map on which the political history of the Stuart dynasty, its marriages, its brothers, its restorations, is written across the eastern seaboard.
Some colonists simply reused the names of home. New Hampshire was named by Captain John Mason in his 1629 land grant after Hampshire, the English county where he had lived, though Mason himself never crossed the Atlantic.
New York carried a double reference, to the northern English city of York as well as to the Duke of York's title. Early towns across New England took transplanted names outright: Boston from Lincolnshire, Cambridge, Plymouth, and Connecticut's Hartford (from Hertford) and Windsor.
Delaware is the exception that came from a person rather than a place. Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr and the first governor of Virginia, had his title attached to the bay by an English captain in 1610, then to the river, and finally to the colony and state. The name is ultimately Norman French.
The impulse to import English names expressed a wish to recreate a familiar landscape in an unfamiliar place, and to signal that the new settlements were extensions of England rather than something wholly new.
Pennsylvania was named by Charles II in the 1681 charter for William Penn's late father, Admiral Sir William Penn, to whom the Crown had owed a debt of about 16,000 pounds. William Penn, a Quaker who had been jailed for his faith, objected that 'Penn's Woods' looked like vanity and reportedly offered the under secretaries twenty guineas to change it; he had wanted 'New Wales' or simply 'Sylvania.' The king refused.
Delaware, as noted, honored Lord De La Warr. Rhode Island's full colonial name, 'Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,' joined Roger Williams's mainland settlement of Providence with Aquidneck Island; 'Rhode Island' itself may descend from the Dutch 'Roodt Eylandt,' or red island, a name the explorer Adriaen Block used around 1614 for its red clay.
Naming a colony for an individual mattered most in the proprietary colonies, such as Pennsylvania and Maryland, where a named family rather than the Crown held the governing rights, which then passed to that family's heirs.
These names have proven durable, but not fixed: Rhode Island's voters removed 'and Providence Plantations' from the state's official name by referendum in 2020, citing the word's associations with slavery.
The simplest naming method was to put 'New' in front of a familiar European name. Captain John Smith coined 'New England' as a regional label on his 1616 map, replacing the older 'North Virginia,' and New Hampshire, New York, and New Jersey all followed the same formula.
The habit was empire-wide. France had New France, Spain had New Spain, the Netherlands New Netherland, and Sweden New Sweden, each reflecting a mental model of the colony as a transplanted branch of the home country rather than a distinct place.
The names that stuck were overwhelmingly English. New Amsterdam became New York in 1664, and although the Dutch briefly renamed it 'New Orange' during their 1673 reoccupation, it reverted within a year.
That the surviving 'New' names are English, from Maine to the Carolinas, is itself a record of which empire ultimately controlled the Atlantic seaboard by the eighteenth century.
How the 13 Colonies Were Founded
Each colony was founded under a specific type of authority granted by the English Crown, and that authority determined who appointed the governor, who wrote the laws, and to whom the colonists could appeal when they had a grievance. Understanding it is essential to understanding where the states that replaced the colonies got their own legitimacy.
The three forms were royal, proprietary, and charter. Very few colonies stayed in one category. Most began as company ventures or proprietary grants and were converted to royal control after a crisis: Virginia in 1624 after the Company's collapse, the Carolinas by 1729, Georgia in 1752. By 1776, eight of the thirteen were royal colonies, three were proprietary, and only two remained self-governing charter colonies.
The type mattered most at the top. In a royal colony the king named the governor and council; in a proprietary colony a family such as the Penns or Calverts did; in a charter colony the voters themselves elected the governor. But regardless of type, every colony had developed an elected lower house of assembly by the eighteenth century, and those assemblies, controlling taxes and salaries, were the seedbed of American self-government.
The charter colonies were so self-governing that their charters served as state constitutions after independence. Connecticut kept its 1662 royal charter as its governing document until 1818, and Rhode Island kept its 1663 charter until 1843.
Royal Colony
Owned and governed directly by the Crown. The king appointed the governor and council. Eight colonies were royal by 1776: Virginia, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.
Proprietary Colony
A land grant from the king to one person or family who governed it as they chose. The proprietor appointed the governor. Three remained proprietary in 1776: Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.
Charter Colony
Granted to a company or group that governed itself under a royal charter, the most independent form. Two remained charter colonies in 1776: Connecticut and Rhode Island, which elected their own governors.
New England Colonies
Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire
The New England colonies were founded chiefly by Puritan and Separatist dissenters seeking to build a godly society free of the Church of England. Plymouth's settlers had separated from that church entirely; the far larger Massachusetts Bay group meant to purify it from within. Religion, not profit, was the organizing purpose, and church membership defined who could vote.
Government grew from the congregation. Settlement was organized in compact towns around a meetinghouse, and the town meeting, in which male residents debated and voted on local affairs, became the basic unit of political life, still used in parts of New England today. This produced an unusually broad experience of self-rule.
The colonies also cooperated early. In 1643 Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven formed the New England Confederation for mutual defense against Native nations, the Dutch, and the French, the first attempt at a union among English colonies. In 1686 the Crown forcibly merged the New England colonies into the Dominion of New England under Governor Edmund Andros; colonists overthrew him in 1689 on news of England's Glorious Revolution.
The land was poor for large-scale farming, so the region turned to fishing, whaling, shipbuilding, and trade. New England merchants grew wealthy in the Atlantic economy, including the trade that carried rum, enslaved people, and sugar between New England, West Africa, and the Caribbean. Slavery was legal throughout colonial New England, though enslaved people were a smaller share of the population than farther south.
Massachusetts began as two colonies. Plymouth was founded in 1620 by about 102 Mayflower passengers, roughly half of them Separatists who had already fled England for Leiden in the Netherlands. Before landing they signed the Mayflower Compact on November 11, 1620, agreeing to make and obey 'just and equal laws' of their own, an early act of self-government. About half of them died in the first winter.
The far larger Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded in 1630 when the Puritan-led Massachusetts Bay Company sent roughly 700 settlers under John Winthrop; the 'Great Migration' brought some 20,000 English colonists by 1640. The company's charter did not name a place to hold its meetings, so the colonists carried the charter itself to America and governed under it directly, an unusual degree of independence.
Only male church members, called freemen, could vote, and the colony enforced conformity harshly: it banished Roger Williams in 1635 and Anne Hutchinson in 1637, hanged four Quakers between 1659 and 1661, and executed 19 people in the 1692 Salem witch trials. A new royal charter in 1691 absorbed Plymouth and replaced the religious voting requirement with a property one.
Massachusetts was the center of resistance to Britain: the Stamp Act riots of 1765, the Boston Massacre of 1770, the Tea Party of 1773, and the first shots at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775 all happened there, and the 1774 Coercive Acts were aimed squarely at it. John Adams drafted the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, the oldest written constitution still in force anywhere in the world.
Connecticut was founded in 1636 when the Puritan minister Thomas Hooker led about 100 members of his congregation overland from Newtown, now Cambridge, Massachusetts, to found Hartford, seeking better farmland and freedom from the Bay Colony's leadership.
In January 1639, after a Hooker sermon arguing that 'the foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people,' the towns of Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield adopted the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, often described as the first written constitution in the Western tradition and the source of the state's nickname, the Constitution State.
A separate, stricter settlement, the New Haven Colony, was founded in 1638 under the minister John Davenport and ran its own government until Connecticut absorbed it in 1664.
In 1662 John Winthrop the Younger obtained a royal charter from Charles II so generous in its grant of self-government that Connecticut kept using it as its state constitution until 1818. When a royal governor demanded its surrender in 1687, tradition holds that colonists hid the document in the hollow of the 'Charter Oak.'
Rhode Island was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams after Massachusetts Bay banished him for teaching that the civil government had no authority over religious belief and that colonists could not rightly take Native land without fair purchase. Sheltered through the winter by the Narragansett, he bought land from them and founded Providence.
Other exiles followed. Anne Hutchinson and William Coddington founded Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island in 1638; Newport and Samuel Gorton's Warwick came soon after. Williams secured a parliamentary patent uniting the towns in 1644.
The colony became the most religiously tolerant in English America. Its 1663 royal charter guaranteed 'full liberty in religious concernments,' the first colonial charter to do so, and Newport welcomed Baptists, Quakers, and, from 1658, Jewish families, whose Touro Synagogue of 1763 is the oldest surviving synagogue in the country.
That same independence made Rhode Island a holdout: it refused to send delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention and was the last of the thirteen to ratify the Constitution, on May 29, 1790, by a vote of 34 to 32, only after Congress threatened to treat it as a foreign nation. It used its 1663 charter as a state constitution until 1843.
New Hampshire began as a commercial land grant rather than a religious refuge. In 1622 the Council for New England granted the land between the Merrimack and Kennebec rivers to John Mason and Ferdinando Gorges, and a 1629 division gave Mason the portion he named New Hampshire. The first settlements, at Odiorne's Point in 1623, then Dover, Portsmouth, and Exeter, were built by fishermen and traders.
Massachusetts Bay claimed and governed the towns from 1641. New Hampshire was separated into its own royal province in 1679, one of the earliest colonies placed directly under the Crown, though in practice Massachusetts governors often administered both.
The heirs of John Mason pressed land claims against New Hampshire settlers for the better part of a century, a persistent source of litigation and local resentment.
New Hampshire moved early in the Revolution: in December 1774 a crowd seized powder and cannon from Fort William and Mary at New Castle, months before Lexington, and in January 1776 it adopted the first fully independent state constitution, six months ahead of the Declaration. Its 1784 constitution is still in effect.
Middle Colonies
New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware
The Middle Colonies were the most ethnically and religiously diverse in British North America. New Netherland had been polyglot from the start, and Pennsylvania and the Jerseys added Quakers, German Lutherans and pietists, Scots-Irish Presbyterians, Welsh, Huguenots, and Sephardic Jews. No single church dominated, and the founding documents of Pennsylvania and West Jersey guaranteed broad toleration.
This was the "breadbasket" region. Fertile soil and navigable rivers made it a major exporter of wheat, flour, and other grain to New England, the West Indies, and southern Europe, alongside ironworks, milling, and craft manufacturing.
The Middle Colonies also held more enslaved people than New England, concentrated in New York City and in rural households in northern New Jersey and the Hudson Valley. New York had one of the largest urban enslaved populations in the mainland colonies, and its 1712 and 1741 slave "conspiracy" trials led to dozens of executions.
Philadelphia and New York City were the two largest cities in the colonies and among the busiest ports in British America. Their location midway along the seaboard made the region the natural meeting ground for the Continental Congresses and, later, the Constitutional Convention.
New York began as the Dutch colony of New Netherland, chartered to the Dutch West India Company in 1621, with Fort Orange built at Albany in 1624 and New Amsterdam on Manhattan the next year. Director Peter Minuit's 1626 acquisition of Manhattan from the Lenape is documented in a single 1626 letter that values the goods exchanged at 60 guilders.
It was a commercial, unusually diverse colony: a visiting priest counted 18 languages spoken in New Amsterdam by 1643, and residents included Walloons, Germans, Scandinavians, enslaved Africans held by the company, and, from 1654, Sephardic Jewish refugees. Director Peter Stuyvesant resisted demands for religious tolerance, and the 1657 Flushing Remonstrance protested his ban on Quaker worship.
In August 1664 an English squadron sent by James, Duke of York, took the colony without a fight, offering generous terms that let Dutch residents keep their property and worship. The Dutch retook it briefly in 1673 and 1674. An elected assembly followed with the 'Charter of Liberties' in 1683.
New York City, the largest port after Philadelphia, had a large Loyalist population and was held by the British for almost the entire Revolutionary War. New York was the 11th state to ratify the Constitution, on July 26, 1788, by 30 to 27, after the Federalist Papers campaign and news that ratification was already assured, and it served as the first national capital in 1789 and 1790.
When the Duke of York received New Netherland in 1664, he immediately granted the land between the Hudson and Delaware rivers to Sir George Carteret and Lord John Berkeley, who named it New Jersey for Carteret's home island. Their 'Concessions and Agreements' promised settlers an elected assembly and religious liberty.
The proprietorship soon split. Berkeley sold West Jersey in 1674, which came under Quaker control and adopted a strikingly democratic frame of government in 1677; Carteret's East Jersey later passed to a group of 24 proprietors that included William Penn. The two Jerseys had separate governments until Queen Anne reunited them as a single royal colony in 1702.
New Jersey shared a royal governor with New York until 1738 and had no college of its own until the College of New Jersey, later Princeton, was chartered in 1746.
Its position between New York and Philadelphia made it the 'Crossroads of the Revolution,' the site of Trenton in December 1776, Princeton in January 1777, Monmouth in 1778, and hundreds of smaller engagements. Its 1776 constitution allowed some property-owning women and free Black men to vote until the legislature restricted the franchise to white men in 1807.
Charles II granted William Penn the Pennsylvania charter in March 1681 to settle a debt of about 16,000 pounds the Crown had owed Penn's father. Penn, a Quaker who had been jailed for his beliefs, planned the colony as a 'Holy Experiment' in religious liberty and self-rule, and recruited settlers across England, Wales, Ireland, and the German Rhineland.
Penn laid out Philadelphia in 1682 as a gridded 'greene country towne' between two rivers, made land purchases and a treaty of friendship with the Lenape leader Tamanend, and issued a Frame of Government with an elected assembly and toleration for all residents who professed belief in God.
The colony grew fast and prosperous. Philadelphia became the largest city in British North America, roughly 40,000 people by 1776, while German 'Pennsylvania Dutch' and Scots-Irish settlers filled the backcountry. The 1701 Charter of Privileges affirmed the assembly's supremacy and let the Lower Counties, the future Delaware, form their own legislature.
Philadelphia hosted the First and Second Continental Congresses and the 1787 Constitutional Convention, and served as the national capital from 1790 to 1800. Penn's descendants kept proprietary governing rights until the Revolution, when the state bought them out in 1779.
European settlement of Delaware began with Sweden. Fort Christina, built in 1638 at present-day Wilmington, was the capital of New Sweden. The Dutch conquered the colony in 1655, and the English took it from the Dutch in 1664.
The land was folded into William Penn's 1682 grant as the 'Three Lower Counties on the Delaware,' New Castle, Kent, and Sussex, giving otherwise landlocked Pennsylvania an outlet to the sea.
The Lower Counties' population, many of them Swedes, Finns, and Anglicans rather than Quakers, resented governance from Philadelphia. Penn's 1701 Charter of Privileges let them elect their own assembly, which first met at New Castle in 1704, though they continued to share Pennsylvania's governor until 1776.
Delaware declared itself a separate state in June 1776 and, on December 7, 1787, became the first state to ratify the United States Constitution, doing so unanimously in just five days, which is why it is nicknamed 'The First State.'
Southern Colonies
Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia
The Southern Colonies were founded mainly for profit, and their economies rested on cash crops grown for export: tobacco in the Chesapeake, rice and indigo in the Carolina and Georgia Low Country. These crops rewarded large landholdings and demanded heavy, sustained labor.
Early Virginia met that demand with English indentured servants, working under the "headright" system that granted 50 acres of land for each person whose passage a planter paid. After Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, in which poor former servants took up arms, planters shifted decisively toward enslaved Africans held for life, and colonial law hardened slavery into a permanent, inherited, racial status.
By the time of the Revolution, enslaved people were roughly 40 percent of the population in Virginia and even more in South Carolina, where they were a majority. The southern economy, and much of the wealth of the wider British Atlantic, depended on their forced labor.
Settlement was rural and dispersed, with few towns and a weak local church presence outside the established Church of England. Politics was dominated by a planter gentry that controlled the county courts and the colonial assemblies, the class that produced Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and the Pinckneys.
Virginia held the first permanent English settlement in North America: Jamestown, founded on May 14, 1607 by about 104 men and boys sent by the joint-stock Virginia Company of London under a 1606 charter from James I. The marshy, disease-ridden site nearly failed, and the 'Starving Time' winter of 1609 to 1610 cut the population from roughly 500 to about 60.
Tobacco rescued the colony. John Rolfe's introduction of a milder West Indian strain in 1612 gave Virginia an export crop, and shipments rose from a few thousand pounds in 1615 to millions of pounds a year by the 1620s, driving demand for land and labor.
Two events in 1619 shaped the country that followed: the first meeting of the House of Burgesses on July 30, the first elected legislature in English America, and the arrival at Point Comfort of 'twenty and odd' enslaved Africans taken from a Portuguese slave ship, the documented start of African slavery in the English mainland colonies.
After the 1622 Powhatan attack and years of heavy mortality, the Crown revoked the Company's charter in 1624, making Virginia the first royal colony. Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 pushed planters toward racialized lifetime slavery. Virginia was the most populous colony and produced Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and George Mason.
Maryland was founded as a refuge for English Catholics, a persecuted minority. George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, a former secretary of state who had converted to Catholicism, sought the charter but died in April 1632, weeks before it passed. His son Cecil Calvert received it in June 1632 and governed as an absentee proprietor who never crossed the Atlantic; his brother Leonard led the first roughly 150 settlers, who landed in March 1634.
The charter gave the Calverts near-royal powers: they could grant land for a fixed rent, appoint officials, and make laws with the assembly's consent, which made Maryland the model for the proprietary colony.
Catholics were a minority even within Maryland. To protect them, the assembly passed the Maryland Toleration Act in 1649, guaranteeing free exercise to all Trinitarian Christians, an early religious-liberty law, though it was repealed during a Puritan takeover from 1654 to 1658 and again after 1689, when Maryland briefly became a royal colony and the Church of England was established.
Proprietary rule returned to the Calverts in 1715 after the 4th Lord Baltimore conformed to the Church of England, and lasted until the Revolution. The 1767 Mason-Dixon Line settled an 80-year border dispute with Pennsylvania and later became the symbolic divide between free and slave states.
North Carolina began as part of a single 'Province of Carolina' that Charles II granted in 1663 to eight Lords Proprietors who had backed his restoration to the throne. The elaborate Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina of 1669, associated with the philosopher John Locke, envisioned a landed aristocracy and was never fully put into practice.
The northern Albemarle Sound region was settled slowly by small farmers drifting south from Virginia. It had poor harbors, a reputation for defiance of authority, seen in Culpeper's Rebellion of 1677, and became a haven for pirates, including Blackbeard, killed off the coast in 1718.
The Tuscarora War of 1711 to 1713 devastated the colony, and the practical impossibility of governing so large a province as one unit led to a formal division into North and South Carolina in 1712.
The proprietors sold their rights back to the Crown in 1729, making North Carolina a royal colony. Backcountry anger at corrupt officials fueled the Regulator movement, crushed at Alamance in 1771. In April 1776 the Halifax Resolves made North Carolina the first colony to authorize its delegates in Congress to vote for independence.
The southern half of the Carolina grant developed faster and along different lines, beginning with the founding of Charles Town, later Charleston, in 1670 by settlers organized largely from the English sugar colony of Barbados, who brought the West Indian model of plantations worked by enslaved labor with them.
The economy turned on rice, from the 1690s, and indigo, from the 1740s, both labor-intensive crops. Planters imported enslaved Africans in large numbers, drawing deliberately on rice-growing regions of West Africa for agricultural knowledge. By about 1720 enslaved people were a majority of the population, and roughly two-thirds by the middle of the century.
That demography produced both extreme wealth, Charleston was the richest city in the mainland colonies, and deep fear of revolt. The Stono Rebellion of 1739, the largest slave uprising in the colonies, led to the severe Negro Act of 1740. The colony also fought a devastating war with the Yamasee from 1715 to 1717.
South Carolina came under royal government after colonists overthrew the proprietors' governor in 1719, and the proprietors sold their rights to the Crown in 1729. Its low-country planter elite dominated its politics. It was the 8th state to ratify the Constitution, on May 23, 1788, and at the Philadelphia convention its delegates were among the most forceful defenders of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade.
Georgia was the last of the thirteen colonies, chartered by George II on June 9, 1732, to a board of 21 Trustees led by the social reformer and member of Parliament James Oglethorpe. It had two aims: to shield the Carolinas from Spanish Florida, and to give England's 'worthy poor' a fresh start, though in the end few actual debtors settled there.
The Trustees ran the colony from London on idealistic and tightly controlled lines: they banned slavery, hard liquor, lawyers, and large landholdings, and limited settlers to inalienable 50-acre grants. Oglethorpe founded Savannah in 1733 on a planned grid and negotiated with the Yamacraw leader Tomochichi.
Oglethorpe's forces turned back a Spanish invasion at the Battle of Bloody Marsh on St. Simons Island in 1742, securing Britain's southern frontier.
The restrictions collapsed under pressure from settlers who wanted South Carolina-style plantations. Slavery was legalized in 1751, and in 1752 the Trustees surrendered the charter, making Georgia a royal colony. It grew quickly afterward and became the 4th state to ratify the Constitution, on January 2, 1788, motivated in part by the need for federal defense against the Creek.
How 13 Colonies Became a Revolution
For most of their history, the thirteen colonies were not thinking about independence. They thought of themselves as English subjects with the rights of Englishmen, proud of the British Empire and its constitutional traditions. What turned loyal subjects into revolutionaries was a series of British policy decisions, made after the French and Indian War ended in 1763, that the colonists believed violated their fundamental rights.
Their core constitutional claim, drawn from the 1689 English Bill of Rights and from thinkers such as John Locke, was that they could not be taxed or governed without the consent of their own elected representatives. Parliament, in which the colonies held no seats, could regulate the trade of the empire, they argued, but could not levy internal taxes on them or override the assemblies they did elect.
The quarrel was also about money and enforcement. Britain emerged from the war with a doubled debt, chose to keep a standing army of roughly 10,000 troops in North America, and began enforcing long-ignored trade laws through vice-admiralty courts that sat without juries. Slow communication across the Atlantic meant each side repeatedly misjudged the other's intentions and hardened its position.
The transformation took just eleven years, from the Stamp Act of 1765 to the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was not inevitable. At every step, there were colonists who remained loyal to the Crown, and many who wanted reform rather than independence. The revolution was a contested political process, not a unanimous uprising.
The Path to Revolution, Step by Step
The French and Indian War was the North American theater of a global conflict, the Seven Years' War. It opened in 1754 with a backcountry skirmish in the Ohio Valley involving a 22-year-old Virginia officer named George Washington, and pitted Britain and most of its colonists against France and the majority of Native nations for control of the continental interior.
In 1754 delegates from seven colonies met at the Albany Congress to coordinate defense and relations with the Iroquois. Benjamin Franklin's Albany Plan of Union, a proposal for a common colonial government with a president-general and a grand council, came out of that meeting. Every colonial assembly rejected it as surrendering too much independence, and British officials thought it granted the colonies too much.
Britain won decisively. The 1763 Treaty of Paris transferred all of French Canada and the entire territory east of the Mississippi to Britain, along with Spanish Florida, leaving Britain the dominant European power in North America.
Victory nearly doubled Britain's national debt, to roughly 133 million pounds, and left a far larger territory to garrison and govern. Ministers in London, noting that colonists paid a small fraction of the per-person taxes borne in Britain, concluded that the colonies should help fund their own defense. That reasonable-sounding conclusion set the whole crisis in motion.
King George III issued the Proclamation of 1763 on October 7, partly in reaction to Pontiac's War, a coordinated Native uprising that in the summer of 1763 captured or besieged nearly every British fort west of the Appalachians.
The Proclamation drew a boundary line along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains and barred colonial settlement or private land purchase west of it, reserving that country for Native nations under the Crown's supervision.
Colonists were angered, especially Virginia land speculators, Washington among them, and war veterans who had been promised western land grants for their service. Many simply ignored the line and moved west.
More significant than the land itself was the precedent. London had made a sweeping decision about colonial settlement and land without consulting a single colonial assembly, signaling that it viewed the colonies as subordinate territory rather than as self-governing communities.
Parliament passed the Stamp Act in March 1765. It required a purchased revenue stamp on nearly every printed item in the colonies, newspapers, pamphlets, legal documents, licenses, even playing cards, and it was the first direct internal tax Parliament had ever imposed on the colonies, as opposed to duties on trade.
Resistance was immediate and, for the first time, coordinated. The Virginia House of Burgesses passed Patrick Henry's defiant Stamp Act Resolves, and a Stamp Act Congress with delegates from nine colonies met in New York in October 1765, the first intercolonial political body since the Albany Congress. Crowds calling themselves the Sons of Liberty forced stamp distributors to resign, and merchants adopted non-importation agreements.
The slogan 'no taxation without representation' captured the constitutional argument: Englishmen could be taxed only by their own elected representatives, and the colonies sent no members to Parliament. British officials replied with the theory of 'virtual representation,' the claim that Parliament represented every subject of the empire whether they voted for it or not.
Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in March 1766, mainly because British merchants were hurt by the colonial boycotts. On the very same day it passed the Declaratory Act, asserting its authority to make laws binding the colonies 'in all cases whatsoever,' so the core disagreement was postponed, not settled.
In 1767 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townshend, placed new duties on colonial imports of glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea, and set up a Board of Customs Commissioners in Boston with broad powers to search premises under general warrants known as writs of assistance.
The colonies revived non-importation, and by 1769 imports from Britain had fallen by roughly half in the largest ports. John Dickinson's 'Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,' reprinted in nearly every colonial newspaper, argued that the duties were unconstitutional because their purpose was to raise revenue rather than to regulate trade.
Britain sent regular troops to occupy Boston in 1768. Friction between soldiers and residents boiled over on March 5, 1770, when a squad fired into a jeering crowd and killed five people, among them Crispus Attucks, a dockworker of African and Native descent. Paul Revere's engraving spread the image of a 'massacre'; John Adams defended the soldiers at trial, and most were acquitted.
Later in 1770 Parliament repealed every Townshend duty except the one on tea, which it deliberately kept to preserve the principle that it could tax the colonies. An uneasy quiet held for about three years.
The Tea Act of May 1773 imposed no new tax. It allowed the financially troubled East India Company to ship tea directly to the colonies, undercutting both smugglers and legitimate colonial merchants, while leaving the existing Townshend tea duty in place. Colonists saw a trap: buying the cheap tea would concede Parliament's right to tax them.
In most ports the Company's local agents were pressured into resigning, or the tea ships were turned back. In Boston, Governor Thomas Hutchinson, whose sons were among the consignees, refused to let three loaded ships leave the harbor without unloading.
On the night of December 16, 1773, roughly 100 men, some lightly disguised as Mohawks, boarded the ships and dumped 342 chests of tea, about 92,000 pounds of it, worth on the order of 10,000 pounds sterling, into the water. The action was disciplined and destroyed nothing else.
It was a public, unmistakable rejection of Parliament's authority, and it pushed the crisis past the point of compromise. Benjamin Franklin, then in London, condemned it as an 'act of violent injustice' and offered to repay the Company; the British government wanted punishment instead. The taxes behind the protest, and how the new nation later learned to tax itself, are covered in the history of American taxes.
In the spring of 1774 Parliament passed four Coercive Acts to punish Massachusetts. The Boston Port Act closed the harbor until the tea was paid for; the Massachusetts Government Act made the council appointed rather than elected and banned most town meetings; the Administration of Justice Act let trials of royal officials be moved to Britain; and a new Quartering Act eased the housing of troops. Colonists added the unrelated Quebec Act, which extended Quebec to the Ohio River and tolerated Catholicism, as a fifth 'Intolerable Act.'
The Massachusetts Government Act frightened the other colonies most, because it showed that Parliament believed it could revoke any colonial charter at will. Towns across the colonies sent food and money to blockaded Boston.
Twelve colonies, all except Georgia, sent 56 delegates to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in September and October 1774. It endorsed the militant Suffolk Resolves, issued a Declaration and Resolves listing colonial rights, and created the Continental Association, a binding boycott of British trade enforced by elected local committees.
Congress agreed to meet again in May 1775 if nothing changed. The enforcement committees, which policed the boycott and punished violators, were already functioning as a parallel government in many communities well before the first shots.
On the night of April 18, 1775, General Thomas Gage sent about 700 regulars out of Boston to seize militia arms and gunpowder stored at Concord. Riders including Paul Revere and William Dawes carried the warning across the countryside.
At dawn on April 19 the British advance guard found roughly 70 militiamen drawn up on Lexington Green. A shot rang out, no one has ever established from which side, and the regulars killed eight men and wounded ten.
At the North Bridge in Concord, hundreds of gathering militia forced the British column to turn back. The retreat to Boston became a running fight along nearly 20 miles of road, with militia firing from behind walls and trees; the British suffered about 273 casualties, the colonists about 95.
Within days some 15,000 New England militia had ringed Boston, beginning a siege that lasted almost a year. When the Second Continental Congress convened in May 1775 it faced a war already underway, and it soon adopted the New England army as the Continental Army and named George Washington its commander.
For most of 1775 Congress still described the war as a defense of English rights, but opinion moved fast. Thomas Paine's pamphlet 'Common Sense,' published in January 1776, sold well over 100,000 copies and argued plainly for an independent republic, and word arrived that the king had proclaimed the colonies in rebellion, that Parliament had banned their trade in the Prohibitory Act of December 1775, and that Britain had hired German auxiliary troops.
On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia moved 'that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.' Congress named a Committee of Five, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston, to prepare a justification while the delegates debated.
Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776, with 12 colonies in favor and New York abstaining until its legislature approved. John Adams thought July 2 would be the date Americans celebrated; instead it is July 4, the day Congress adopted the final wording of the Declaration.
Jefferson's text grounded the break not in the fine points of English law but in a universal claim: that all men are created equal and hold unalienable rights, that governments exist to secure those rights and draw their 'just powers from the consent of the governed,' and that a people may alter or abolish a government that fails them. Most delegates signed the engrossed copy on August 2, 1776.
The Declaration of Independence: A New Theory of Authority
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government..."The Declaration was not just a list of grievances. It was a revolutionary philosophical statement. By grounding the colonies' authority to govern themselves in the natural rights of the people rather than in royal charters or parliamentary grants, Jefferson and the Continental Congress fundamentally changed the basis of political legitimacy. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, not from the authority of a monarch.
Most of the document is far more concrete: a list of 27 charges against King George III. Framing the abuses as the personal acts of the king, rather than of Parliament, let Congress justify a complete break with the British state. A passage in Jefferson's draft that blamed the king for the Atlantic slave trade was struck out at the insistence of South Carolina and Georgia and of northern shipping interests.
The ideas were not entirely new. Jefferson drew on Locke, on George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights adopted weeks earlier, and on Scottish Enlightenment writers. What was new was setting them at the head of a nation's founding act. The claim that "all men are created equal" sat alongside slavery and the exclusion of women and the poor, a contradiction that abolitionists, and later the women's suffrage and civil rights movements, would use the Declaration itself to attack.
The principle had immediate practical consequences. It meant the colonies did not need the king's permission to govern themselves. It meant each colony, now calling itself a state, derived its authority from its own people. And it set the theoretical foundation on which the Constitution and its "We the People" preamble would later be built.
How Colonies Became States
The transformation from colony to state was not automatic. Each colony had to dissolve its old government, assert its independence from Britain, and establish a new one on a new theoretical foundation. The Continental Congress urged the colonies to do this in May 1776, before the Declaration of Independence was even signed. Most did so through their provincial congresses or sitting legislatures; a few, such as Delaware and Pennsylvania in 1776, used conventions elected specifically to write a new fundamental law.
This process was genuinely revolutionary. Colonial governments had derived their authority from royal charters granted by the king. State governments derived their authority from the people of the state, expressed through a written constitution. The shift from royal grant to popular consent was not merely procedural; it was a complete reconception of where government power comes from.
Two colonies, Connecticut and Rhode Island, had such liberal royal charters that they simply struck references to the king and used their existing charters as state constitutions for decades. The rest had to build from scratch.
The new state constitutions of 1776 to 1780 became a laboratory. Most sharply limited the governor, whom colonists associated with royal tyranny, and vested power in the legislature; Pennsylvania went furthest, abolishing the governorship entirely. Their weaknesses, especially weak executives and legislative overreach, were studied closely by the men who wrote the federal Constitution a decade later, and the order in which the states ratified that document, from Delaware in December 1787 to Rhode Island in May 1790, is the order still used to number them today.
Each Colony's Transition to Statehood
First to ratify the Constitution, earning the nickname The First State. Delaware's convention voted unanimously to ratify in just five days.
Delaware had shared Pennsylvania's proprietary governor, appointed by William Penn and his heirs, since the 1680s, only gaining its own separate colonial assembly in 1704. It became fully independent of Pennsylvania when it adopted its own state constitution in September 1776.
That 1776 constitution was one of the first written by a convention elected specifically for the purpose, a procedure the other states and later the federal framers would adopt, and it prohibited the further importation of enslaved people into the state.
As the least populous of the thirteen, Delaware was a firm supporter of equal representation for each state in the Senate, the arrangement that most protected small states, and its delegates at Philadelphia were instructed not to agree to any departure from one state, one vote.
Pennsylvania's 1776 constitution was among the most radical of the era, creating a unicameral legislature with no governor and requiring legislative sessions to be public. It was replaced by a more conventional constitution in 1790.
Pennsylvania's capital, Philadelphia, hosted both Continental Congresses as well as the 1787 Constitutional Convention, making it the functional capital of the emerging United States even before it briefly became the official capital from 1790 to 1800.
Pennsylvania was the first large state to ratify, on December 12, 1787, by a vote of 46 to 23, but Anti-Federalists charged that the Federalist majority had rushed the convention and had even hauled absent members into the hall by force to make a quorum.
The 1776 frame's unusual features, a plural executive instead of a governor, a single-chamber legislature with one-year terms, and a 'Council of Censors' that met every seven years to judge whether officials had overstepped, drew wide comment in Europe and sharp criticism from John Adams before conservatives replaced it with a governor and a two-house legislature in 1790.
New Jersey's 1776 constitution notably allowed all inhabitants worth 50 pounds to vote, which some interpreted to include women and free Black residents. Women voted in New Jersey until 1807 when the legislature explicitly restricted the franchise to white men.
New Jersey hosted the pivotal battles of Trenton and Princeton in the winter of 1776 to 1777, victories that revived the Continental Army's morale after a string of defeats had brought it to the brink of collapse.
The state convention ratified unanimously on December 18, 1787, in about a week. Having suffered badly from wartime requisitions and from New York's tariffs on goods passing through New Jersey to market, the state strongly favored a national government that could regulate trade, and it backed the equal-vote Senate.
The 1776 constitution had been drafted hurriedly as royal government collapsed and even contained a clause voiding it if the colonies reconciled with Britain; it was never submitted to the voters and, heavily amended, lasted until 1844.
Georgia ratified quickly, in part because it feared Spanish attack from Florida and needed federal military protection.
Georgia was the last of the thirteen colonies to be founded, chartered in 1732 by King George II to a board of Trustees led by James Oglethorpe, who envisioned it partly as a military buffer against Spanish Florida and partly as a fresh start for imprisoned debtors from England.
The convention ratified unanimously, 26 to 0, on January 2, 1788. With a small free population, a large enslaved one, and a frontier exposed to both the Creek Nation and Spanish Florida, Georgia wanted the defense that only a national government could organize.
Georgia's own 1777 constitution set up a single-chamber legislature and divided the old colonial parishes into eight counties; it was replaced in 1789 by a two-house frame closely modeled on the new federal Constitution.
Connecticut's liberal royal charter was so well-suited to self-governance that the state simply removed references to the king and used it as the basis of state government for over 40 years after independence.
Connecticut's 1639 Fundamental Orders, an early framework of colonial self-government written decades before the Revolution, are one reason the state is nicknamed 'The Constitution State' today.
The convention ratified 128 to 40 on January 9, 1788. Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut had devised the Great Compromise that gave every state an equal Senate vote, so the state's delegation strongly defended the result at home.
Wedged between New York and Massachusetts, both of which taxed goods moving through Connecticut, the state had a concrete economic stake in a central government that could regulate commerce and end interstate tariffs.
Massachusetts's 1780 constitution, drafted primarily by John Adams, is the oldest functioning written constitution in the world. Massachusetts ratified the federal Constitution with the condition that a Bill of Rights be added, a compromise that influenced other states.
Massachusetts ratified by a narrow 187-to-168 vote after a bruising convention, and its recommended list of rights amendments became a direct model that Madison drew on when he drafted what became the Bill of Rights in 1789.
Ratification was genuinely in doubt. Many delegates were farmers sympathetic to Shays' Rebellion of 1786 and 1787, and the popular leaders John Hancock and Samuel Adams stayed noncommittal until a bargain to recommend amendments, and reportedly to support Hancock for high national office, brought them over.
This 'Massachusetts Compromise,' ratify now and recommend a bill of rights afterward, became the formula that later allowed Virginia, New York, and others to ratify without a prior second convention.
Maryland was the 7th state to ratify the Constitution, acting when only six states had done so and nine were needed.
Maryland was founded in 1632 as a proprietary colony granted to the Calvert family, and it became an early haven for English Catholics fleeing religious persecution, a purpose reflected later in its 1649 Toleration Act, one of the first religious-tolerance laws in the colonies.
In the end the convention voted to ratify comfortably, 63 to 11, on April 26, 1788, and signed the ratification on April 28. The state's leading opponent, Luther Martin, had walked out of the Philadelphia convention and campaigned hard against the document, but was beaten decisively at home.
Maryland's own 1776 constitution was among the most conservative of the founding era, with high property qualifications for office, an indirectly elected senate, and a governor chosen by the legislature; it remained in force until 1851.
South Carolina was among the first to establish a new government, doing so even before the Declaration of Independence. Its convention wrote a temporary constitution in March 1776 and a more permanent one in 1778.
By the mid-1700s, enslaved Africans made up a majority of South Carolina's population, concentrated on rice and indigo plantations along the coast, a demographic reality that shaped the colony's economy and politics for generations.
The convention ratified 149 to 73 on May 23, 1788. Support was concentrated in the wealthy slaveholding low country, which was heavily overrepresented in the convention, while the up-country backcountry was largely opposed.
John Rutledge and the two Pinckneys had led the fight at Philadelphia to win a 20-year bar on ending the slave trade and a fugitive-slave clause, so the low-country elite regarded the Constitution as safe for slavery and ratified with confidence.
New Hampshire was the first colony to establish an independent government, doing so in January 1776, six months before the Declaration. Its ratification on June 21, 1788 was the ninth and final vote needed to put the Constitution into effect.
New Hampshire's 1776 constitution was drafted so quickly, in response to the collapse of royal government, that it left the design of a more permanent frame of government for later. The state adopted a fuller constitution in 1784 that remains in effect today, one of the oldest still in force anywhere in the world.
The convention first met in February 1788 and found a majority opposed; Federalists arranged an adjournment to June to lobby wavering delegates, after which it ratified 57 to 47.
Because it was the ninth state, under Article VII of the Constitution New Hampshire's vote, not the larger votes still pending in Virginia and New York, is the one that legally brought the new government into being.
Virginia's ratification was far from certain. Patrick Henry led fierce opposition, arguing the Constitution gave too much power to the federal government. Virginia ratified by a narrow margin of 89 to 79 votes, with recommended amendments attached.
Virginia's own 1776 Declaration of Rights, drafted chiefly by George Mason, was one of the direct models Madison used when writing the federal Bill of Rights, and the state's ratifying convention recommended 40 additional amendments of its own.
The June 1788 convention was the era's greatest debate: Henry, George Mason, and James Monroe against James Madison, John Marshall, and Edmund Randolph, with George Washington's known support hanging over the room. As the largest and most populous state, Virginia was almost impossible to leave out of the union.
Virginia's delegates believed they were casting the decisive ninth vote; word that New Hampshire had ratified four days earlier reached Richmond only afterward. The convention's recommended amendments, drawn largely from Mason's 1776 Declaration of Rights, were the single biggest source for the Bill of Rights.
New York's ratification was critical because it was the seat of the existing government and a major commercial state. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay wrote the Federalist Papers specifically to persuade New York. It ratified by a close 30 to 27 margin.
New York City served as the first capital of the United States under the new Constitution, and George Washington took the oath of office there at Federal Hall on Wall Street on April 30, 1789.
The convention met at Poughkeepsie in June 1788 with roughly two-thirds of its delegates elected as Anti-Federalists loyal to Governor George Clinton. Alexander Hamilton and John Jay wore the opposition down over several weeks, helped by news that ten states had already ratified and that New York City might leave the state to join the union on its own.
The 30-to-27 vote of July 26, 1788 was among the narrowest of any state's (only Rhode Island's 34-32 vote in May 1790 was closer), and it was paired with a circular letter urging a second general convention to consider amendments, a proposal Madison feared and that ultimately came to nothing.
North Carolina initially rejected the Constitution in August 1788, demanding a Bill of Rights first. It ratified only after Congress proposed the Bill of Rights amendments in September 1789.
Between its 1788 rejection and its 1789 ratification, North Carolina functioned for more than a year as an independent republic outside the new federal union, one of only two original states, alongside Rhode Island, to spend significant time outside the Constitution after their sister states had already ratified it.
The first convention, at Hillsborough in August 1788, took an unusual middle course, voting 184 to 84 to 'neither ratify nor reject' the Constitution while it waited to see whether amendments would be added.
After the first federal Congress sent the Bill of Rights to the states in September 1789, a second convention at Fayetteville ratified 194 to 77 on November 21, 1789, by which time Washington had been president for seven months.
Rhode Island was the most resistant of all, refusing to send delegates to the Constitutional Convention and initially refusing to hold a ratification vote. It only ratified by two votes in May 1790, more than a year after Washington's inauguration, after Congress threatened to treat it as a foreign nation for trade purposes.
Ironically, Rhode Island had been the first colony to formally renounce allegiance to King George III, doing so on May 4, 1776, two full months before the national Declaration of Independence, making its later reluctance to join the new federal union a striking reversal.
In March 1788 Rhode Island held a statewide popular referendum on the Constitution, the only state to do so; Federalists boycotted the polls and it was rejected by roughly 2,700 votes to 240.
Only after the new federal government began taxing Rhode Island's goods as if they were foreign imports, and after Providence and Newport threatened to secede from the state and join the union separately, did a convention narrowly ratify, 34 to 32, on May 29, 1790.
From 13 States to One Nation
Winning independence from Britain proved easier than building a working national government afterward. The thirteen states behaved as thirteen small sovereign countries, jealous of their independence, weighed down by war debt, and with little reason to trust one another.
There was no national money anyone trusted. Congress had printed roughly 240 million "Continental" paper dollars to pay for the war, and by 1781 the currency had collapsed to less than a cent on the dollar, giving American English the phrase "not worth a Continental." Each state issued its own money and set its own tariffs.
The Articles of Confederation, drafted during the war and finally in force in 1781, created a "firm league of friendship" among the states but deliberately withheld from Congress the powers to tax, to regulate trade, and to enforce its own decisions. The memory of British central authority was still raw.
By the mid-1780s the results were plain: an empty treasury, ignored treaties, trade wars between states, and an armed rebellion in Massachusetts the national government could not address. How the states built something stronger out of that failure is the story of the Constitutional Convention, taken up on the next page in this series.
The Articles of Confederation: First Attempt
The Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation on November 15, 1777, and they were ratified by all thirteen states by March 1, 1781. The Articles created a "firm league of friendship" among the states, but they were deliberately weak. The memory of British tyranny was fresh, and the states were deeply suspicious of centralized power.
Because they functioned as the country's first written frame of government, the Articles are worth understanding on their own terms: what they set up, why that design failed within a few years, and the handful of lasting achievements that outlived them.
Ratification took more than three years because Maryland refused to approve the Articles until states with claims to western lands, especially Virginia, agreed to give those lands to the national government. Maryland finally ratified in February 1781, and the Articles took effect on March 1.
Under the Articles, each state had a single vote in Congress regardless of its population, major decisions required the votes of nine of the thirteen states, and any amendment required the approval of every state. The founders' choice of a republic page explains how the Constitution changed that design.
A committee headed by John Dickinson began drafting the Articles of Confederation in 1776. Congress adopted them on November 15, 1777, but they did not take effect until March 1, 1781, when delegates from the last holdout state, Maryland, signed them after its legislature approved ratification that February. The delay was over western land: Maryland refused to sign until states such as Virginia agreed to hand their claims to territory beyond the Appalachians to the common government.
The entire national government was a single body, the Confederation Congress, in which each state delegation cast one vote regardless of its population or how many delegates it sent. There was no president or separate executive branch and no federal court system; Congress conducted business through committees and, later, a handful of single-headed departments.
Congress's powers were genuine but narrow. It could declare war and make peace, conduct foreign relations, coin money, run the post office, manage dealings with Native nations, and arbitrate disputes between states. Anything touching individual citizens, taxes, courts, ordinary law, was left entirely to the states.
The procedural locks were the fatal detail. Important measures required the agreement of 9 of the 13 states, and any change to the Articles themselves needed the unanimous consent of all 13 state legislatures, which made meaningful reform almost impossible.
Congress had no power to tax. It could 'requisition' money from the states in proportion to their land values, but could not compel payment, and from 1781 to 1786 the states together paid only a fraction of what was asked. The government could not keep up interest payments on its Revolutionary War debt, at home or abroad.
Congress had no power over commerce. States levied tariffs on one another's goods and cut their own trade deals; New York taxed firewood arriving from Connecticut and vegetables from New Jersey. Congress could sign commercial treaties but could not make the states honor them, so Britain and other trading powers had little reason to negotiate seriously.
Congress had no way to enforce anything. It commanded no army of its own and no courts that could reach individuals. When Shays' Rebellion, an armed rising of debt-burdened farmers, shut down courts across western Massachusetts in the winter of 1786 and 1787, the national government could only look on while Massachusetts raised a privately financed militia to put it down.
The unanimity rule blocked every fix. Amendments to grant Congress a modest 5 percent duty on imports were proposed in 1781 and again in 1783; the first was defeated by Rhode Island alone, the second by New York. By 1786 many leading figures had concluded the Articles could not be repaired and would have to be replaced.
The Confederation held the country together through the end of the war and produced one clear triumph: the 1783 Treaty of Paris, negotiated by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay, in which Britain recognized American independence and ceded all the land east of the Mississippi and south of the Great Lakes.
The Land Ordinance of 1785 created the rectangular survey system, six-mile-square townships divided into 36 lots of 640 acres, that still governs property lines and roads across most of the country west of the original states, and it set aside one lot in every township to support public schools.
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was the Confederation's most consequential law. It established a government for the territory north of the Ohio River, guaranteed settlers rights such as jury trial and freedom of worship, banned slavery in that territory, and promised that new states would join 'on an equal footing with the original States.'
That equal-footing principle, that the union would grow by admitting equal partners rather than governing subordinate colonies, was carried forward by the acts of Congress admitting each new state and later by Supreme Court decisions, and it shaped the admission of all 37 later states. The Confederation was too weak to survive, but several of its statutes outlived it by two centuries.
The Crisis That Forced a New Constitution
By 1786, the situation was critical. The national government was broke, foreign nations were ignoring American treaty obligations, states were fighting economic wars with each other, and an armed rebellion in Massachusetts had exposed the government's inability to maintain order. A group of nationalist politicians, led by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, had been pushing for a stronger central government. The crisis gave them their opening.
In September 1786, twelve delegates from five states met at a tavern in Annapolis, Maryland, ostensibly to discuss interstate commerce problems. Too few states were represented to accomplish anything, but Alexander Hamilton wrote a report calling for a broader convention the following May in Philadelphia to address the fundamental defects in the national government. The Confederation Congress reluctantly endorsed the idea.
Shays' Rebellion sealed the argument. From August 1786 into early 1787, as many as 2,000 armed men, most of them indebted farmers and war veterans, closed courthouses across western Massachusetts to stop foreclosure proceedings. George Washington, in retirement at Mount Vernon, wrote that the country was "fast verging to anarchy," and his decision to attend the Philadelphia meeting gave it a credibility no other gathering could claim.
The Confederation Congress endorsed the convention on February 21, 1787, but restricted it to "the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation." The 55 delegates who gathered that May would set that instruction aside almost at once, close their doors to the public, and begin drafting an entirely new plan of government.