British America

British America collectively refers to various colonies of Great Britain and its predecessors states in the Americas prior to the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War in 1783. The British monarchy of the Kingdom of England and Kingdom of Scotland—later named the Kingdom of Great Britain, of the British Isles and Western Europe—governed many colonies in the Americas beginning in 1585.

From 1607, numerous permanent English settlements were made, ultimately reaching from Hudson Bay, to the Mississippi River and the Caribbean Sea. Much of these territories were occupied by indigenous peoples, whose populations declined due to epidemics, wars, and massacres. In the Atlantic slave trade, England and other European empires shipped Africans to the Americas for labor in their colonies. Slavery became essential to colonial production, as on Barbados, Jamaica, and other sugar islands.

Colonial projects expanded. In 1664, England took the New Netherland colony from the Dutch Republic. In the 1680s, Britain and France began frequent wars over colonies and trade, including their overlapping territorial claims in British America and New France, and relations with the Iroquois. In Queen Anne's War (1702–1713), the British took Newfoundland and the Hudson Bay area from the French. In the French and Indian War (1754–1763)—the North American theatre of the Seven Years' War—the British won the eastern half of modern-day Canada and the eastern Mississippi valley from New France, and the Floridas from New Spain.

In the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), thirteen of these British colonies rebelled against the Crown and formed the United States of America (U.S.), an independent country of thirteen states. In the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended the war, Britain recognized the U.S. as an independent country, and ceded to it the British territories directly east of the Mississippi River. The continental territories in North America which the British retained are collectively referred to as "British North America", but the term was only used after the 1839 Durham Report was published.

Background

Native American societies

Native Americans were present in southern New England by around 9500 BCE. They might have settled in modern Illinois in as early as 5000 BCE, and in the Ohio River Valley in as early as 350 BCE. In the Hopewellian period from 200 BCE to 500 CE, numerous Native American societies formed around New England due to ideal agricultural conditions. Major groups of this area include the Algonquian, Mohicans, Susquehannock, and Wyandot.

Around 1570 CE, in modern-day New York state, five native tribes—the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca peoples—formed a confederation ruled through participatory democracy, known as the Iroquois Confederacy. It was highly efficient at governing the region, and played an important part in the politics of later British and French colonies.

European exploration and colonization

Around 1000 CE, two settlements on the modern Canadian island of Newfoundland were established by Norse Viking explorers, but were soon abandoned. The next known European settlement in North America occurred some 500 years later. In 1492, a Spanish expedition led by Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean, on an island whose identity is disputed. Christopher's brother, Bartholomew Columbus, founded the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola in 1496, the first European colony since the Norse's. In 1526, Spain founded the San Miguel de Gauldape colony in either modern Georgia or the Carolinas. It lasted for a few months.

In 1534, France explored the Gulf of St. Lawrence, starting fur trade with the natives, and eventually what became their colony New France. In 1559, Spain founded a settlement at modern Pensacola, Florida, which was abandoned by 1561. In 1570, Spanish Jesuits founded the Ajacán Mission at Chesapeake Bay in modern Virginia, but they were killed by the local Powhatan people. In 1589 or 1599, a French colony was founded at Sable Island in Nova Scotia, but the colony had failed by 1603; another French colony at Saint Croix Island in modern Maine also existed from 1604 to 1607. In 1604, near the Gulf of St. Lawrence, France started a new colony, later named Quebec.

History

16th century

Roanoke Colony

In 1585, the English began their first settlement in North America, the Roanoke Colony. Its initial form only lasted until 1586 due to conflict with the local Native Americans. In 1587, around 115 colonists led by Governor John White settled back at Roanoke. White went back on a ship to England to get supplies for the colony, but his return was delayed by English's conflict with the Spanish Armada. In August 1590, White returned to the colony, which had been abandoned. Left behind was an inscription on a post that said "CROATOAN" and a carving into a tree that said "CRO". Where the colonists went to in those years is considered a mystery by some. However, " Croatoan" was an island south of Roanoke where Native Americans lived.

17th century

A number of English colonies were established in America between 1607 and 1670 by individuals and companies whose investors expected to reap rewards from their speculation. They were granted commercial charters by Kings James I, Charles I, and Charles II, and by the Parliament of Great Britain. Later, most colonies were founded, or converted to, royal colonies.

Jamestown Colony and the Colony of Virginia

On 6 December 1606, three ships—the ''Discovery'', ''Godspeed'', and '' Susan Constant''—left England to start a colony on the James River upstream from Chesapeake Bay. The settlement, known as the Jamestown Colony, was the first permanent English settlement in North America. It invested into by the Virginia Company English trading company. The site fit criteria given by the Virginia Company: it was inland and surrounded by water on three sides, which made it defensible against a potential Spanish naval attack; it was not inhabited by local Native Americans; and the water around the shore was deep enough so the English ships could be tied at the shoreline.

Jamestown, established on May 14, 1607, was the start of the Virginia Colony, and was the colony's capital until 1699. Edward Maria Wingfield was made the colony's first president, and governed with six council members. The colonists suffered from diseases, famines, and wars with the Powhatan. Some Powhatan helped the colonists, and without them, the colony likely would have failed. In 1612, Englishman John Rolfe arrived in Jamestown, and introduced tobacco farming there. Tobacco made the colony profitable for the Virginia Company. In 1619, Virginia governor George Yeardley introduced a representative legislative assembly to the government. The town expanded in the 1620s.

Popham Colony

In August 1607, 100 English settlers, men and boys, landed at present-day Phippsburg, Maine, with the goal of establishing the Popham Colony, building a fort and ships there. However, as they arrived in August, they came too late to plant crops, and when they started running out of food, some of them returned to England. The colony's leader, George Popham, died in February 1608. His successor, Raleigh Gilbert, learned that he had inherited his father's estate in England, and returned home in autumn 1608. The other colonists followed him back.

Anglo-Powhatan Wars

Thirty Powhatan tribes were organized under the Powhatan Confederacy, led by chief Powhatan. Chief Powhatan initially thought the English could be good allies and help defend them from other native tribes and the Spanish. Relations worsened when the English demanded the Powhatan give them more land to grow tobacco. In three wars, the Powhatan lost more land: the first from 1610 to 1614, the second from 1622 to 1626, and the third from 1644 to 1646. The Powhatan were subject to more lifestyle restrictions placed upon them by the English. The third war ended when chief Powhatan's successor, Opechanacanough, was captured and killed by Necotowance—who became the new successor. However, Necotowance signed a peace treaty with the English which effectively ended the confederacy. The Powhatan lost more land to the English over the next decades.

Bermuda settlement

In 1511, the island of "Bermudas", later named Bermuda, was present on a Spanish map, possibly having been spotted as early as 1503. In 1609, 150 English people traveling on the '' Sea Venture'', a Virginia Company ship on course to Jamestown, were shipwrecked on Bermuda by a hurricane. At the time, the English named it the "Somers Isles" after the travelers' leader, George Somers. This started a permanent English settlement in Bermuda. Most of them continued onto Jamestown, leaving three people behind on Bermuda until a Virginia Company charter in 1612 brought 60 more people to the island. The Virginia Company governed Bermuda until 1684.

Plymouth Colony and Massachusetts Bay Colony

In 1620, a hundred European Pilgrims, men and women, sailed to New England, establishing the permanent Plymouth Colony in modern Massachusetts. Forty of them were a part of the English Separatist Church, a radical faction of Puritan Protestants; they had moved from England to the Dutch Republic more than a decade prior, and then went to America seeking religious freedom. The first Pilgrim ship, the ''Mayflower'', landed at Plymouth Rock in December. More than half of the colonists died in the first winter, but they ultimately made a thriving, mostly self-sufficient colony. They also made peace treaties with the local Native American tribes, and in autumn 1621, the Pilgrims and Wampanoag shared a harvest feast which was the origin of the annual American holiday, Thanksgiving. Three other European ships traveled to Plymouth soon after: the ''Fortune'' in 1621, and the ''Anne'' and the ''Little James'' in 1622. All adult males on the Mayflower signed the Mayflower Compact, which wrote the first set of laws for the colony, which was later named the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Province of New Hampshire

In the 1620s, the Crown gave English Captain John Mason and others a series of grants in the region of modern-day New Hampshire. On the establishment in 1623 of a trading and fishing settlement in the region, the modern borders of New Hampshire contained about 3,000 Native Americans. In 1629, a grant established the name New Hampshire for the region between the Piscataqua River and, to its south, the Merrimack River. The main English settlements were the towns of Exeter, Dover (originally "Bristol"), and Portsmouth (originally "Piscataqua" and then "Strawberry Bank"). From 1641 to 1679, the Massachusetts Bay Colony administered New Hampshire, until the landowning descendants of John Mason got into a conflict with Massachusetts for territorial and religious reasons. Massachusetts gave up their lands to become its own royal province, the Province of New Hampshire.

Slaves and indentured servants

From the 16th to 19th centuries, in the Atlantic slave trade, European powers—the Dutch Republic, England, France, Portugal, and Spain—transported 10 to 12 million Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to work as slaves in the Americas. In 1619, a group of twenty Africans were landed in Virginia, the first African-Americans. They were either slaves, those forced to work against their will and without pay; or indentured servants, those indebted to an employer for a limited time—the latter includes those who consented to the work or not. Both were true in this instance, as the group was forced to work and without pay and later freed. Some European Americans were also indentured servants in English America.

In 1641, Massachusetts became the first English colony in North America to legalize slavery. Virginia legalized it in 1661. More restrictive slave laws in the colonies were codified, and the amount of African slaves increased, especially in the 1660s. ''Britannica'' writes: "the development of the belief that fricanswere an “inferior” race with a “ heathen” culture made it easier for whites to rationalize the enslavement of Black people. Enslaved Africans were put to work clearing and cultivating the farmlands of the New World." In total, 430,000 Africans were brought to the future territories of the United States.

Province of Maryland

In 1632, Englishman George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore was granted a charter by English king Charles I to proprietary rights to an area east of the Potomac River—to be a home for Roman Catholics facing repression in England—in exchange for a share of the income made from the land. Before George Calvert could develop the land, he died, and his son Cecilius Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore was given the charter. Cecilius officially established the Province of Maryland, named after Charles I's queen consort Henrietta Maria. In March 1634, Cecilius' younger brother Leonard Calvert landed the founding expedition of Maryland, a permanent settlement, at St. Clement's Island on the Potomac. This carefully chosen expedition of English Protestants and Catholics arrived at the island on the ships ''The Ark'' and the ''Dove''. The Marylanders learned from the mistakes of the Virginians by establishing trading posts and farms and making peace with the local Native Americans. In 1639, Maryland received African slaves.

Pequot War

The Pequot War from 1636 to 1638 was between the Pequot people and English colonists with their Native American allies in New England. In the 1620s, the Pequot used "diplomacy, coercion, intermarriage, and warfare" to dominate the other natives in the Long Island—Connecticut River complex, in order to control the local fur and wampum trades. They also allied with the Dutch. The other native tribes sided with the English colonists when as they became more powerful and established the Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut colonies.

The Pequot War's immediate cause was the murder of two English traders, Captain John Stone and John Oldham, allegedly by the Pequots' allies, the Western Niantic people. In 1636, Massachusetts Bay Colony governor Henry Vane sent John Endecott on an expedition to Block Island to demand the Western Niantic to surrender the traders' murderers. There, Endecott burned the Western Niantic people's villages, and then moved to a Pequot village where he did the same. The Pequot raided English settlements in retaliation. The tribes which were dominated by the Pequot sided with the English as the Pequot tribe was destroyed. Of the around 3,000 Pequot who lived in the region before the war, only 200 were alive after it. Many of these deaths occurred on May 26, 1637, in the Mystic massacre, when an English militia, along with members of the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes, set fire to the Pequot Fort near the Mystic River, killing 700 Pequot people.

Province of Carolina

In 1629, Charles I of England made a grant for the lands below the Colony of Virginia—later known as the Carolinas—but the area was not populated by the English for decades. In the 1650s, English farmers and traders from Virginia moved south into the Albemarle Sound region of the modern Carolinas, and in 1663, English king Charles II made a grant in the region that officially established the Province of Carolina. English proprietors established a government in the area, but its authority was unrecognized by settlers in the area. In 1712, the area's administration was split into two governments, the provinces of North Carolina and South Carolina. The borders of the two colonies were finalized in 1735.

Colonial administration

A state department in London known as the Southern Department governed all the colonies beginning in 1660 along with a committee of the Privy Council, called the Board of Trade and Plantations. In 1768, Parliament created a specific state department for America, but it was disbanded in 1782 when the Home Office took responsibility for the remaining possessions of British North America in Eastern Canada, the Floridas, and the West Indies.

Province of New York

In 1624, the Dutch West India Company, a chartered company of the Dutch Republic, founded the colony of New Netherland, which included the territory of modern New York City, as well as parts of New Jersey, Long Island, and Connecticut. The colony's capital was New Amsterdam, which became New York City. In 1650, New Netherland seized the lands of the nearby Swedish colony, New Sweden.

In 1664, an English naval squadron under Colonel Richard Nicolls threatened the Dutch to give up New Amsterdam. The Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant wanted to resist the English, but he was not popular enough to be supported in that. He surrendered the city on February 9, 1664, and the English renamed it "New York" soon after. The English and Dutch lived peacefully there. The city was returned to the Dutch in 1673, before going back to the English in 1674.

Province of Pennsylvania

In 1681, a charter signed by Charles II of England gave all unoccupied lands in the region of the former New Netherland colony to William Penn; the king was paying off a debt owed to Penn's father, Admiral William Penn. The charter was named after Admiral Penn, and included a word for "woodlands", "sylvania": the Province of Pennsylvania. The son William Penn was a Quaker—someone from the Society of Friends in England—and planned to make the colony a home to fellow Quakers. Before Penn left for the colony, his cousin William Markham established Penn's claim to, and the borders of, the area of modern-day Philadelphia.In 1682, Penn arrived in Pennsylvania with a governmental body named the General Assembly, who adopted the Frame of Government of Pennsylvania that guaranteed "freedom of conscience" in the colony. The local Native Americans were given peaceful treatment, which created good relations between them and the colony. William Penn returned to England in 1684, leaving behind a successful colony.

King Philip's War

King Philip's War, in New England from 1675 to 1676, was between some Native American tribes (the Narragansett, Nashaway, Nipmuc, Podunk, and Wampanoag peoples, as well as the Wabanaki Confederacy) and English colonists with their own native allies (the Mohawk, Mohegan, and Pequot). Opposition to the English was led by Wampanoag chief Metacom

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