98 Fun Facts About Thirteen Colonies

Which was the first of the thirteen colonies to be established?

Jamestown was founded in 1607 by the London Company; Georgia, the last, came in 1732.

Which colony, chartered in 1732, completed the thirteen?

Georgia was planted on land that Spain also claimed, partly so that its settlers could shield South Carolina from attack out of Spanish Florida.

How many of the thirteen colonies were traditionally grouped as New England colonies?

New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Connecticut; the Middle Colonies also numbered four and the South five.

Which of these was one of the Middle Colonies?

New Jersey lay in the most mixed region of British America, where settlers came from so many nations and churches that no single faith could dominate.

The Middle Colonies were established on the land of which former European colony?

Richard Nicolls captured lightly defended New Amsterdam in 1664 and the rest of the Dutch colony quickly followed.

Which monarch granted charters to the Plymouth Company and London Company in 1606?

James I chartered both companies in 1606; the London Company's settlers named Jamestown for him, while the Plymouth Company's northern outpost at Sagadahoc was abandoned within about a year.

Which cash crop, pioneered by John Rolfe, saved England's struggling first permanent American colony?

Tobacco rescued the colony: in 1612 Rolfe swapped the bitter local leaf for sweeter Spanish seed, giving the settlers their first product that sold well in England.

Who received the 1632 charter for the Province of Maryland?

Lord Baltimore here was Cecil Calvert: his father George, who had sought the grant as a refuge for Catholics, died two months before it was sealed, so the son sent his brother Leonard to govern.

On what ship did the Pilgrims sail to America in 1620?

The Mayflower was meant to sail with the Speedwell, but the smaller ship proved so leaky that it was twice forced back to port, and all 102 passengers crossed on one vessel.

Before sailing for America, the Pilgrims had first moved to which country?

They were Puritan separatists who wanted physical distance from a Church of England they saw as corrupted.

Who founded Providence Plantations in 1636 after being banished from Massachusetts Bay?

Roger Williams had angered the Puritan leaders by arguing that the king's patent was worthless and only purchase from the Native owners gave title; he bought his new settlement's land from the Narragansett.

Which woman, banished from Massachusetts Bay for her religious teaching, helped found Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island in 1638?

Anne Hutchinson was tried in 1637 for holding meetings that criticised the colony's ministers; banished, she and her followers settled on Aquidneck the following year.

Which Quaker founded a colony in 1681 and named its capital for 'brotherly love'?

William Penn proposed calling the land Sylvania, Latin for woods; the king changed it to Pennsylvania in honour of the founder's late father, Admiral Sir William Penn.

Which member of Parliament founded a southern colony for England's poor?

James Oglethorpe led the first settlers ashore himself in 1733; his fellow trustees banned both slavery and rum, but after years of complaints from settlers both bans had been lifted by 1751.

Oglethorpe's colony was meant as an alternative to what English institution?

The trustees' charter was dated June 9, 1732; they gave it up in 1752.

Which Dutch colonial director is credited with buying Manhattan from the Lenape in 1626?

Peter Minuit paid in trade goods, not coin: the earliest record, a 1626 letter by Pieter Schaghen, says the island was bought 'for the value of 60 guilders'.

Which country's 1638 Delaware Valley colony named its fort for Queen Christina?

Sweden's settlers, a mix of Swedes and Finns, named Fort Christina for their child queen; the Dutch besieged the fort and absorbed the colony in 1655.

Which English commander captured New Amsterdam in 1664?

The 1667 Treaty of Breda confirmed English control; the Dutch gave up their claim for good at Westminster in 1674.

What did the Dutch rename New York City when they briefly recaptured it in 1673?

New Orange honoured the Prince of Orange, the Dutch leader of the day; the name lasted barely a year, because a peace treaty handed the city back to England in 1674.

The two Jerseys, East and West, were reunited as one province in which year?

Both had been created in 1674 from lands that were formerly part of New York.

Which king granted Carolina in 1663 to eight nobles who had helped restore him to the throne?

Charles II rewarded eight loyal supporters with the grant; their colonists founded Charles Town, now Charleston, in 1670, naming it for him, and moved it to its present site in 1680.

In what year did the king make North and South Carolina separate crown colonies?

The province had been split into two proprietary colonies in 1712 after years of feuding among the proprietors' heirs.

Which English settlement was found deserted in 1590, with 'CROATOAN' carved on a post?

Roanoke Colony's governor John White sailed home for supplies in 1587 and was kept away for three years by the war with the Spanish Armada; he returned to find the hundred-odd settlers gone.

Which king merged the New England colonies into a single dominion, shortly before losing his own throne?

James II wanted one obedient government in place of several self-governing colonies; the Dominion of New England, set up in 1686, fell apart in 1689, months after he lost his crown.

Legend says Hartford colonists hid their charter from Governor Andros in 1687 inside what?

Hollow oak, the legend goes: the candles blew out during a tense meeting with the governor, and when they were relit the charter was gone, hidden in the tree later revered as the Charter Oak.

Which present-day state was governed as part of Massachusetts until 1820?

Maine voted to leave Massachusetts and entered the Union in 1820 as a free state, paired with slave-holding Missouri under the Missouri Compromise.

About how many people lived in the thirteen colonies on the eve of the American Revolution?

2.5 million is the Census Bureau's estimate for July 1776; Benjamin Franklin had reckoned in 1751 that cheap land let colonists marry young and at least double their numbers every 25 years.

By 1770, the thirteen colonies produced what share of the British Empire's economic output?

More than 90 percent of colonists were farmers, yet Philadelphia, New York and Boston each topped 16,000 people by 1760.

Under which economic doctrine did Britain require its colonies to trade mainly inside the British Empire?

Mercantilism treated colonies as suppliers of raw materials and captive buyers of finished goods; the Navigation Acts enforced it, and colonists answered with widespread smuggling.

Which 1754 gathering saw Benjamin Franklin propose a unified colonial government?

The Albany Congress adopted Franklin's plan of union, but the colonial assemblies rejected it; his 'Join, or Die' snake cartoon was published to rally support for the idea.

The French and Indian War was the American theater of which European conflict?

The Seven Years' War is counted in Europe from the declaration of war in 1756, but the fighting had begun two years earlier in the American backcountry and spread from there.

What did colonists call the 1740s War of the Austrian Succession?

King George's War saw some 4,000 New Englanders capture the French fortress of Louisbourg in 1745, only for Britain to hand it back to France at the peace three years later.

Britain's 1739 war with Spain is named for which body part Captain Robert Jenkins said a Spaniard cut off?

Ear: Jenkins said a Spanish coast guard captain sliced it off in 1731 while searching his ship; in 1738 opposition politicians in London used the story to push for war.

The 1763 Treaty of Paris gave Britain French territory east of which river?

The Mississippi became the border because France had already secretly promised Louisiana, west of the river, to Spain, along with the port of New Orleans.

The Royal Proclamation of 1763 barred settlement west of which mountains?

The Appalachians became the edge of legal settlement in 1763, months after Pontiac's War broke out, with the land beyond reserved for Native nations; treaties such as Fort Stanwix in 1768 soon moved the line west.

Which act of 1764, a year before the Stamp Act, opened Britain's drive to raise revenue from the colonies?

The Sugar Act actually halved the old duty on foreign molasses, but unlike the widely evaded earlier tax it was meant to be collected, with accused smugglers tried in courts that had no juries.

The Stamp Act of 1765 taxed newspapers and what else?

Official documents such as legal and trade papers had to carry a paid stamp, as did playing cards and even dice; protest was so fierce that Parliament repealed the act the following year.

The 1773 Tea Act cut taxes on tea sold by which trading firm?

The East India Company was failing and sitting on a huge surplus of tea; the act let it undersell smuggled Dutch tea, but buying it meant paying Parliament's duty, so Bostonians dumped the cargo in the harbour.

Which 1774 laws greatly restricted self-government in Massachusetts?

The Intolerable Acts, as colonists called them, closed Boston's port and put Massachusetts under men appointed by the Crown; the other colonies answered by calling the First Continental Congress.

Which general was sent to serve as Governor of Massachusetts in 1774?

Thomas Gage, already commander of British forces in America, set out to seize the colonists' military stores; the troops he sent to Concord in April 1775 met militia at Lexington, and the war began.

How many colonies sent representatives to the First Continental Congress in 1774?

Georgia held out until the Second Continental Congress the following year.

Which Patriot lawyer defended the British soldiers tried for the Boston Massacre in 1770?

John Adams won acquittals for six of the eight soldiers; the other two were convicted only of manslaughter and escaped the gallows with a brand on the thumb.

Who, as president of the Continental Congress, was the first to sign the Declaration of Independence?

John Hancock signed first, with a bold signature centred below the text; it was so flamboyant that 'John Hancock' became an American byword for any signature.

How many colonial colleges were chartered before the Revolution?

Seven became Ivy League schools; William & Mary and Queen's College (Rutgers) later went public.

Which of the nine colonial colleges was the only one located in the South?

William & Mary was planned as early as 1618, before any college had opened in the colonies, but setbacks delayed its royal charter until 1693.

In which two colonies did colonists, rather than London, elect the governor?

Connecticut and Rhode Island held royal charters that let voters choose their own governors; Connecticut prized its charter so much that it served as the state constitution until 1818.

Which Boston lawyer argued in 1761 that Writs of Assistance violated colonists' rights?

James Otis argued that such open-ended search warrants were void even if Parliament allowed them; the court ruled against him, but a spectator wrote that 'then and there the child Independence was born'.

Which religious revival swept the colonies in the 1740s?

The First Great Awakening made a celebrity of the English preacher George Whitefield, who toured the colonies drawing huge crowds; Benjamin Franklin admired his oratory and printed his sermons.

Which 22-year-old officer led the 1754 ambush at Jumonville Glen that opened the French and Indian War?

George Washington struck first, but the French hit back within weeks and he marched out of Fort Necessity in defeat on July 4, 1754.

Which pirate blockaded the port of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1718 and was killed months later at Ocracoke Inlet?

Blackbeard, whose real name was Edward Teach, is said to have tied lit fuses under his hat to frighten his enemies.

Which language did the Pennsylvania Dutch, who largely came from the Palatinate, bring to colonial America?

German was their language: the name is variously explained as an old English use of 'Dutch' for such speakers or an echo of 'Deitsch', their own word for themselves.

Which fish, carved in wood and hung in the Massachusetts State House, drove colonial New England's fishing trade?

Cod fishing was the first industry Europeans practised in Massachusetts, and the carving, nearly five feet long and known as the Sacred Cod, hangs over the state's lawmakers.

At the Boston Tea Party of 1773, some protesters disguised themselves as warriors of which Native nation?

Mohawk dress was a symbolic choice: it showed the protesters identified with America rather than with their status as British subjects.

Which daughter of the paramount chief Powhatan married the English planter John Rolfe in 1614?

Pocahontas was baptized as Rebecca, travelled to London in 1616, and died at Gravesend the following year before she could sail home.

Which Jamestown leader warned idle colonists that "he that will not work shall not eat"?

John Smith borrowed the line from the Bible's Second Thessalonians after he was elected president of the settlement's council in September 1608.

Which Patuxet man, kidnapped and sold in Spain in 1614, later taught Plymouth's settlers to fertilize their crops?

Squanto made it home in 1619 only to find he was the last of the Patuxet: an epidemic had wiped out his village while he was away.

Giles Corey was pressed to death under stones in 1692 during which Massachusetts town's witch trials?

Salem's courts found thirty people guilty of witchcraft and hanged nineteen of them; Corey died under the weights because he refused to enter a plea.

Which college, the oldest in the United States, was named for a minister who left it his 400-volume library?

Harvard was founded in 1636 and took its name three years later from a Puritan preacher who had died of tuberculosis after barely a year in Massachusetts.

Which city overtook Boston by the 1750s as the largest in British America and later hosted both Continental Congresses?

Philadelphia hosted the first Congress in Carpenters' Hall in 1774 and the second in the Pennsylvania State House, now known as Independence Hall.

Which orator is credited with crying "Give me liberty, or give me death!" in a Richmond church in March 1775?

Patrick Henry's words were not written down until 1817, when a biographer pieced the speech together from the memories of elderly witnesses.

Which Boston silversmith made a midnight ride in April 1775 to warn that British regulars were on the march?

Paul Revere never shouted "The British are coming!": his mission depended on secrecy, and most Massachusetts colonists still considered themselves British.

Which king, the target of 27 grievances in the Declaration of Independence, lost Britain its thirteen American colonies?

George III stayed on the throne for more than 59 years in all, a longer reign than any British king before or since.

Which pamphlet by Thomas Paine, published anonymously in January 1776, urged the colonies to declare independence?

Common Sense became an immediate sensation and was read aloud in taverns, though its author had lived in America for only fourteen months.

Maryland was founded in the 1630s as a haven for which persecuted English religious minority?

Catholics also inspired the name: Maryland honours the devoutly Catholic queen of the day, wife of the king who granted the charter.

Which English navigator, hired by Dutch merchants in 1609, explored the river past Manhattan that now bears his name?

Henry Hudson was really looking for a passage to Asia; two years later a mutinous crew cast him adrift in northern Canada and he was never seen again.

Which state, claimed by colonial New York, ran itself as an independent republic from 1777 until statehood in 1791?

Vermont, the 14th state, spent those years issuing its own coinage and running its own postal service.

Which frontiersman blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky in 1775?

Daniel Boone cut the trail with about 35 axmen for a land speculator's Transylvania Company, opening a pathway for westward migration.

On which Massachusetts town's green were the first shots of the Revolutionary War fired at sunrise on April 19, 1775?

Lexington saw about 80 militiamen stand in ranks before the British regulars; eight of them were killed before the column marched on towards Concord.

Which Ivy League university was founded by royal charter in 1754 under the name King's College?

Columbia took its patriotic new name in 1784, once the Revolution had made a royal title unwelcome; it began on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhattan.

Which yearly publication did Benjamin Franklin issue from 1732 to 1758, selling as many as 10,000 copies a year?

Poor Richard's Almanack is chiefly remembered for its proverbs about industry and frugality, many of which live on in American English.

Which 1775 battle above Charlestown is tied to the order "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes"?

Bunker Hill gave the battle its name, yet most of the fighting took place on neighbouring Breed's Hill, and the famous order itself is probably a legend.

Which Massachusetts Bay governor is credited with the 1630 sermon that pictured the colony as "a city upon a hill"?

John Winthrop led the first large wave of colonists from England in 1630 and served as governor for 12 of the colony's first 20 years.

Which governor of Plymouth Colony for some 30 years chronicled its early days in the journal "Of Plymouth Plantation"?

William Bradford's manuscript vanished while British troops occupied Boston, resurfaced in the Bishop of London's library, and came home only in 1897.

Which Dutch governor, who walked on a silver-studded wooden leg, surrendered New Amsterdam to the English in 1664?

Peter Stuyvesant wanted to resist, but the colony's settlers refused to fight, forcing him to hand it over without a battle.

Which planter led a 1676 uprising of frontier settlers whose forces burned Jamestown to the ground?

Nathaniel Bacon died of dysentery only weeks after the fire, and without its leader the rebel army collapsed.

Which elected chamber first met in a Jamestown church in 1619 as part of the Americas' first representative legislature?

The House of Burgesses had a shaky start: illness among its members cut the first session short within a week.

Which war that began in 1675, named for the English nickname of the sachem Metacom, destroyed twelve New England towns?

King Philip's War is considered by many the deadliest in colonial American history; by its end Metacom's people and their allies were almost completely destroyed.

Which Native people, led by the sachem Massasoit, made a peace treaty with the Plymouth colonists in March 1621?

The Wampanoag had been badly weakened by epidemics, and Massasoit wanted allies against the neighbouring Narragansett.

Which word did John White find carved on a post in 1590 when he returned to his vanished colony?

Croatoan was the name of a nearby island, and White took the carving to mean that his colonists had simply moved there.

Which English trade laws, first passed under the Commonwealth in 1651, shaped colonial commerce until repealed in 1849?

The Navigation Acts shut foreign ships out of colonial trade and remained the basis of British overseas commerce for nearly 200 years.

Which 1767 laws taxed glass, lead, paint and paper until a 1770 repeal left only the duty on tea?

The Townshend Acts were named for the Chancellor of the Exchequer who proposed them and then died suddenly in September 1767, leaving others to face the colonial boycotts.

Which sailor and whaler is traditionally regarded as the first person killed in the Boston Massacre of 1770?

Crispus Attucks lay in state at Faneuil Hall before he and the other victims were buried together in the Granary Burying Ground.

Which clandestine group, active against the Stamp Act from 1765, rallied beneath a large elm tree in Boston?

The Sons of Liberty turned their elm into a symbol known as the Liberty Tree, and Loyalists cut it down for firewood in August 1775.

Which dye crop did the young planter Eliza Lucas turn into a leading South Carolina export in the 1740s?

Indigo took Eliza Lucas three years of persistence and many failed attempts before she proved it could be grown and processed in the colony.

Which preacher delivered the sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" at Enfield in July 1741?

Jonathan Edwards likened human efforts to escape hell to a spider's web trying to stop a falling rock, and listeners moaned and cried out before he had finished.

Which enslaved Boston poet's 1773 book made her the first African-American author of a published volume of poetry?

Phillis Wheatley was named after the slave ship that carried her from West Africa to Boston when she was seven or eight years old.

Which boundary, surveyed between 1763 and 1767 to end a border conflict, separates Pennsylvania from Maryland?

The Mason–Dixon line was drawn by two English astronomers, hired after the quarrel over the border had turned violent in what became known as Cresap's War.

Under which colonial land scheme did planters receive 50 acres for each settler whose Atlantic passage they paid?

Headright grants went to whoever paid the fare, so indentured labourers who finished their terms had little opportunity to get land of their own.

Which New York printer's acquittal on a libel charge in 1735 made him a symbol of freedom of the press?

John Peter Zenger spent more than eight months in prison before his lawyers persuaded the jury that truth is a defence against libel.

Which Puritan minister, at odds with John Cotton over voting rights, left Massachusetts in 1636 to help found Hartford?

Thomas Hooker went on to preach in his new town that "the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people."

Which 1739 slave uprising in South Carolina, with rebels bound for Spanish Florida, was British North America's largest?

The Stono Rebellion frightened the colony's lawmakers into passing the Negro Act of 1740, which restricted the freedoms of the enslaved and paused new imports.

Which philosopher, then secretary to the Earl of Shaftesbury, helped draft Carolina's Fundamental Constitutions of 1669?

John Locke worked on a plan that would have given Carolina a hereditary nobility with invented titles such as landgrave and cassique; it was never ratified.

Which July 1775 appeal from the Second Continental Congress made a final attempt to avoid war with Great Britain?

The Olive Branch Petition got nowhere: the king refused to read it and that August proclaimed the colonists to be traitors.

Which volume, produced at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1640, was the first ever printed in British North America?

A Bay Psalm Book first edition, one of only eleven known to survive, sold at auction in 2013 for $14.2 million, at the time a record for a printed book.

Which caption ran beneath the 1754 cartoon of a snake cut into eight pieces, attributed to Benjamin Franklin?

Join, or Die drew on a superstition that a snake cut in pieces would come back to life if the pieces were put together before sunset.

Which disease did Cotton Mather fight in 1721 with inoculation, a technique he learned from the enslaved Onesimus?

Smallpox struck Boston that year, and Mather and the physician Zabdiel Boylston treated hundreds of people in the colonies' earliest experiment with public inoculation.

Which colony, named for an English county, became the first to set up its own independent government, in January 1776?

New Hampshire adopted its own constitution on January 5, 1776, almost six months before the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence.

Which city grew up at the forks of the Ohio, where British troops seized the ruins of France's Fort Duquesne in 1758?

Pittsburgh was named by the Scottish general John Forbes for the statesman William Pitt, and Forbes probably pronounced it much like Edinburgh.