Colonies & Settlement

Portrait by Artist to Come


QUICK FACTS
  • Compared to the West Indies, British North America was economically trivial in the 18th century. In 1773, for example, British imports from Jamaica alone were five times more valuable than those from all of the North American colonies combined.
CONTENTS

     

Territories

  • Kentucky County
  • New Hampshire Grants (Vermont Republic)

What ultimately convinced Americans that they must revolt in 1776 was not that they were naturally and inevitably republican, for if that were truly the case evolution, not revolution, would have been the eventual solution. Rather it was the pervasive fear that they were not predestined to be a virtuous and egalitarian people that in the last analysis drove them into revolution in 1776. It was this fear and not their confidence in the peculiarity of their character that made them so readily and so remarkably responsive to Thomas Paine’s warning that the time for independence was at hand and that delay would be disastrous. By 1776 it had become increasingly evident that if they were to remain the kind of people they wanted to be they must become free of Britain.

Gordon S. Wood
The Creation of the American Republic, 1776—1787 (1969)