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The 13 colonies had a degree of self-governance and active local elections, [a] and they resisted London's demands for more control over them. The French and Indian War (1754–1763) against France and its Indian allies led to growing tensions between Britain and the 13 colonies. During the 1750s, the colonies began collaborating with one ...
The thirteen colonies were all founded with royal authorization, and authority continued to flow from the monarch as colonial governments exercised authority in the king's name. [8] A colony's precise relationship to the Crown depended on whether it was a corporate colony , proprietary colony or royal colony as defined in its colonial charter .
In the Southern Colonies, which relied most heavily on slave labor, the slaves supported vast plantation economies lorded over by increasingly wealthy elites. [77] By 1775, slaves made up one-fifth of the population of the Thirteen Colonies but less than ten percent of the population of the Middle Colonies and New England Colonies. [78]
During the American colonial period a freeman was a person who was not a slave. The term originated in 12th-century Europe. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a man had to be a member of the Church to be a freeman; in neighboring Plymouth Colony a man did not need to be a member of the Church, but he had to be elected to this privilege by the General Court.
The Continental Army was the army of the United Colonies representing the Thirteen Colonies and later the United States during the American Revolutionary War. It was formed on June 14, 1775, by a resolution passed by the Second Continental Congress , meeting in Philadelphia after the war's outbreak.
Since 1718, transportation to the American colonies had been a penalty for various offences in Britain, with approximately one thousand convicts transported per year. [73] Forced to find an alternative location after the loss of the Thirteen Colonies in 1783, the British government looked for an alternative, eventually turning to Australia. [74]
Thus free wage labor was more common for Europeans in the colonies. [14] Indentured persons were numerically important mostly in the region from Virginia north to New Jersey. Other colonies saw far fewer of them. The total number of European immigrants to all 13 colonies before 1775 was 500,000–550,000; of these, 55,000 were involuntary ...
It was composed of several colonies: Acadia, Canada, Newfoundland, Louisiana, Île-Royale (present-day Cape Breton Island), and Île Saint Jean (present-day Prince Edward Island). These colonies came under British or Spanish control after the French and Indian War, though France briefly re-acquired a portion of Louisiana in 1800. The United ...