In 1763 most people in British North America would have called themselves loyal and lucky Britons. Their king had just won a world war, their trade was booming, and they enjoyed what they saw as the freest constitution on earth. Thirteen years later many of the same people declared independence. This course follows that turn, the war that made it real, and the new nation that came out of it. The first task is to see the colonies as they were before anyone dreamed of breaking away.

Thirteen different colonies

The colonies were founded over more than a century, from Virginia at Jamestown in 1607 to Georgia in 1732. They grew astonishingly fast. Benjamin Franklin noticed in 1751 that the colonial population seemed to double about every twenty five years, and by 1775 about 2.5 million people lived in the thirteen colonies, roughly a third as many as in England and Wales. About half a million of them were enslaved Africans and their descendants, and Native nations still held most of the land west of the coastal settlements.

The colonies were not alike. New England was a land of towns, small farms, fishing fleets and Congregational churches descended from the Puritans. The middle colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware were the most mixed, home to Quakers, Germans, Dutch, Scots Irish Presbyterians and Jews, with busy ports at Philadelphia and New York. The southern colonies grew tobacco in the Chesapeake and rice and indigo in South Carolina, and their wealth rested on slavery. In South Carolina enslaved people were a majority.

Self-government inside an empire

Each colony had a governor, most of them appointed by the crown, and an elected assembly. The Virginia House of Burgesses, which first met in 1619, was the oldest elected assembly in English America. Over the decades the assemblies won control of local taxes and often of the governor's own salary, which gave them real power. Owning land was easier than in Britain, so a much larger share of white men could vote, though women, enslaved people and most of the poor could not.

The empire tied this world together through trade. Under the theory later called mercantilism, colonies existed to enrich the mother country. The Navigation Acts, passed from 1651 onward, required colonial trade to travel in English or colonial ships, and certain goods such as tobacco could be sold only to England. In practice London enforced many rules lightly, and smuggling was common. The British statesman Edmund Burke later praised this as a policy of "salutary neglect," Britain's loose enforcement of its trade laws, which he believed had let the colonies flourish and stay loyal.

The war that changed everything

From 1754 Britain and France fought for control of North America in what colonists called the French and Indian War, part of the wider Seven Years' War. A young Virginia officer named George Washington helped start it in a skirmish in the Ohio country. Britain won spectacularly. In the Treaty of Paris of 1763 France gave up Canada and its lands east of the Mississippi, and Spain handed over Florida.

Victory came at a price. Britain's national debt had nearly doubled, to roughly £130 million, much of it spent defending North America. Ministers in London reasoned that the colonists had gained the most from the war, that taxpayers in Britain already paid far more per head, and that the colonies should share the cost of the soldiers now guarding them. To most British politicians this seemed obvious and fair.

The frontier made the cost worse. With France gone, British commanders cut back the customary gifts and trade that had kept Native alliances alive, and Native nations around the Great Lakes feared a flood of settlers. In 1763 an Ottawa leader named Pontiac joined a broad coalition that attacked British forts across the region. Pontiac's War convinced London that the frontier needed troops and limits. The Proclamation of 1763 forbade colonial settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains, and about ten thousand regular soldiers stayed in America.

Worked example: one line on a map, three views

Picture the Proclamation line as three groups saw it. To ministers in London it was cheap peacekeeping: holding settlers back would prevent more costly wars with Native nations and keep colonists near the coast, where they could be governed and taxed. To Shawnee and Delaware towns in the Ohio valley it was a promise worth testing, since it recognized, at least on paper, that the land beyond the mountains was theirs. To Virginia planters and land speculators it was an insult. Washington, who had claims in the west, wrote privately in 1767 that he could never see the Proclamation "in any other light ... than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians." Each view was reasonable from where its holders stood. Notice what the line reveals: the empire now had to balance the interests of colonists, Native peoples and British taxpayers at once, and any choice would anger someone. The next level shows what happened when London tried to make the colonists pay.