Colonial era

Most American colonists worked on small farms. In the southern colonies of Virginia. North Carolina and South Carolina, landowners carved large tobacco and rice plantations out of fertile river basins. These were worked by blacks under the system of slavery, which had evolved slowly since 1619 or by free Englishmen who contracted to work without pay for several years in return for their passage to America.

By 1770, several small but growing urban centers had emerged, each supporting newspapers, shops, merchants and craftsmen. Philadelphia, with 28,000 inhabitants, was the largest city, followed by New York, Boston and Charleston, South Carolina. Unlike most other nations, the United States never had a feudal aristocracy. Land was plentiful and labor was scarce in colonial America, and every free man had an opportunity to achieve economic independence, if not prosperity.

All of the colonies shared a tradition of representative government. The English king appointed many of the colonial governors, but they all had to rule in cooperation with an elected assembly. Voting was restricted to landowning white males, but most white males owned enough property to vote. Britain could not exercise direct control over her American colonies. London was too far away and the colonists were too independent-minded.

By 1733. English settlers had occupied 13 colonies along the Atlantic coast, from New Hampshire in the north to Georgia in the south. The French controlled Canada and Louisiana, which included the entire Mississippi watershed—a vast empire with few people. Between 1689 and 1815. France and Britain fought several wars, and North America was drawn into every one of them. By 1756 England and France were fighting the Seven Years' War, known in America as the French and Indian War. William Pitt, the British prime minister, invested soldiers and money in North America and won an empire. British forces captured the Canadian strone points of Louisburg (1758), Quebec (1759) and Montreal (1760). The Peace of Pans. signed in 1763. gave Britain title to Canada and all of North America east of the Mississippi River.

Britain's victory led directly to a conflict with its American colonies. To prevent fighting with the Native Americans, known as Indians to the Europeans, a royal proclamation denied colonists the right to settle west of the Appalachian mountains. The British government began punishing smugglers and charged new taxes on sugar, coffee, textiles and other imported goods. The Quartering Act forced the colonies to house and feed British soldiers: and with the passage of the Stamp Act, special tax stamps had to be attached to all newspapers, pamphlets, legal documents and licenses.

Americans also have always insisted on exercising some control over the system of taxation which supports their government. Colonial Americans insisted that they could be taxed only by their own colonial assemblies. In 1765, representatives from nine colonies met as the "Stamp Act Congress" and spoke out against the new tax. Merchants refused to sell British goods, mobs threatened stamp distributors and most colonists simply refused to use the stamps. The British Parliament was forced to repeal the Stamp Act, but it enforced the Quartering Act, enacted taxes on tea and other goods and sent customs officers to Boston to collect those tariffs. Again the colonists refused to obey, so British soldiers were sent to Boston.

Tensions eased when Lord North, the new British chancellor of the exchequer, removed all the new taxes except that on tea. In 1773 a group of patriots responded to the tea tax by staging the "Boston Tea Party": Disguised as Indians, they boarded British merchant ships and tossed 342 crates of tea into Boston harbor. Parliament then passed the "Intolerable Acts": The independence of the Massachusetts colonial government was sharply curtailed, and more British soldiers were sent to the port of Boston, which was now closed to shipping. In September 1774, the First Continental Congress, a meeting of colonial leaders opposed to what they perceived to be British oppression in the colonies, met in Philadelphia. These leaders urged Americans to disobey the Intolerable Acts and to boycott British trade. Colonists began to organize militias and to collect and store weapons and ammunition.