With the help of colonial printers and newspapers, these inter-colonial activities and concerns were shared and led to calls for protection of the colonists' "Rights as Englishmen", especially the principle of "no taxation without representation".

It was a private venture, financed by a group of English Lords Proprietors who obtained a Royal Charter to the Carolinas in 1663, hoping that a new colony in the south would become profitable like Jamestown.

It also served as the base for extensive trade with the English colonies, and many products from New England and Virginia were carried to Europe on Dutch ships.

The Dutch also engaged in the burgeoning Atlantic slave trade, bringing some enslaved Africans to the English colonies in North America, although many more were sent to Barbados and Brazil.

Large numbers of Dutch remained in the colony, dominating the rural areas between Manhattan and Albany, while people from New England started moving in as well as immigrants from Germany.

He was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony over theological disagreements; he founded the settlement based on an egalitarian constitution, providing for majority rule "in civil things" and "liberty of conscience" in religious matters.

However, Massachusetts Bay attempted to seize the land and put it under their own authority, so Gorton travelled to London to gain a charter from the King.

Other colonists settled to the north, mingling with adventurers and profit-oriented settlers to establish more religiously diverse colonies in New Hampshire and Maine.

[30] In the 1730s, Parliamentarian James Oglethorpe proposed that the area south of the Carolinas be colonized with the "worthy poor" of England to provide an alternative to the overcrowded debtors' prisons.

America had an advantage in natural resources and established its own thriving shipbuilding industry, and many American merchants engaged in the transatlantic trade.

Hundreds of North Americans volunteered for Admiral Edward Vernon's assault on Cartagena de Indias, a Spanish city in South America.

[50] In the Treaty of Paris (1763), France formally ceded to Britain the eastern part of its vast North American empire, having secretly given to Spain the territory of Louisiana west of the Mississippi River the previous year.

[61] In response, the colonies formed bodies of elected representatives known as Provincial Congresses, and colonists began to boycott imported British merchandise.

Massachusetts Governor Thomas Gage feared a confrontation with the colonists; he requested reinforcements from Britain, but the British government was not willing to pay for the expense of stationing tens of thousands of soldiers in the Thirteen Colonies.

It raised an army to fight the British and named George Washington its commander, made treaties, declared independence, and recommended that the colonies write constitutions and become states,[64] later enumerated in the 1777 Articles of Confederation.

The Second Continental Congress charged the Committee of Five, including John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman, with authoring the Declaration of Independence.

: 104 On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted and issued the Declaration as a letter of grievances to King George III; With the help chiefly of France, they defeated the British in the American Revolutionary War.

First, the statutes defined slavery as a lifetime condition, distinguishing it from servitude and other forms of unfree status, which lasted only for a term of years.

"According to Patricia Bonomi, "early Americans in all sections lived not in a spiritual desert but in a world where religion formed a key component of their mental landscape.

[84] Most Catholics were English Recusants, Germans, Irish, or blacks; half lived in Maryland, with large populations also in New York and Pennsylvania.

Aspiring physicians and lawyers typically learned as apprentices to an established practitioner, although some young men went to medical schools in Scotland.

However, scholarship after that time was heavily influenced by the "Imperial school" led by Herbert L. Osgood, George Louis Beer, Charles McLean Andrews, and Lawrence H. Gipson.

According to historian Donald Radcliffe: The right to vote had always been extraordinarily widespread—at least among adult white males--even before the country gained its independence....Enfranchisement varied greatly by location.

Election day brought in all the men from the countryside to the county seat or town center to make merry, politick, shake hands with the grandees, meet old friends, and hear the speeches—all the while toasting, eating, treating, tippling, and gambling.

New York and Rhode Island developed long-lasting two-faction systems that held together for years at the colony level, but they did not reach into local affairs.

[100] Mercantilism meant that the government and the merchants became partners with the goal of increasing political power and private wealth, to the exclusion of other empires.

The government protected its merchants—and kept others out—by trade barriers, regulations, and subsidies to domestic industries in order to maximize exports from and minimize imports to the realm.

Several of the other colonies evinced a certain degree of sympathy with the Patriot cause, but their geographical isolation and the dominance of British naval power precluded any effective participation.

[108] The Imperial School included such historians as Herbert L. Osgood, George Louis Beer, Charles M. Andrews, and Lawrence Gipson.

Since the 1960s, the mainstream of historiography has emphasized the growth of American consciousness and nationalism and the colonial republican value-system, in opposition to the aristocratic viewpoint of British leaders.