100 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?

James Oglethorpe and fellow trustees secured the royal charter on June 9, 1732.

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?

The Middle Colonies were New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, carved from the former Dutch New Netherland.

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 king granted charters to the Plymouth Company and London Company in 1606?

The London Company's Jamestown survived; the Plymouth Company's Popham Colony on the Kennebec River lasted barely a year.

Jamestown survived its brutal early years by turning to which cash crop?

The London Virginia Company had been looking for gold and found little; disease and starvation killed many early settlers.

Who received the 1632 charter for the Province of Maryland?

Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, got it from Charles I; his father had been a prominent Catholic official who encouraged Catholic emigration.

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

On arrival they drew up the Mayflower Compact binding themselves into a single community, with William Bradford as their main leader.

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?

He preached religious tolerance and separation of church and state, settling on land provided by the Narragansett sachem Canonicus.

What is the modern name of the island where Anne Hutchinson's group settled in 1637?

Portsmouth and Newport grew there; together with Providence and Warwick they were united by royal charter in 1663.

Which Quaker founded Pennsylvania as a proprietary colony in 1681?

Philadelphia became the largest city in the colonies, with about 30,000 people and an excellent port.

Which parliamentarian proposed a southern colony for England's "worthy poor"?

He hoped for a utopian colony that banned slavery, but it stayed sparsely populated and became a crown colony in 1752.

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.

Who purchased Manhattan from the Lenape in 1626 and founded New Amsterdam?

He later led former Dutch West India Company men in founding New Sweden in the Delaware Valley in 1638.

Which country planted a colony in the Delaware Valley in 1638?

It was conquered by the Dutch in 1655 while Sweden was busy with the Second Northern War.

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.

Which 1674 agreement ended the Dutch colonial presence in America?

The Dutch had briefly retaken parts of New Netherland during the Third Anglo-Dutch War.

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.

Charleston, South Carolina, was originally named for which king?

The Lords Proprietors got their Carolina charter in 1663, but the settlement was not established until 1670.

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 failed settlement, established in 1585, was found abandoned in 1590?

Carolina was the second attempted English settlement south of Virginia; Roanoke was the first.

Which king consolidated the New England colonies into a single dominion in 1685?

Governor Edmund Andros was overthrown and the Dominion of New England dissolved in 1689 after the Glorious Revolution.

Which governor ran the short-lived Dominion of New England?

New York, West Jersey and East Jersey were added to the dominion in 1688, a year before it collapsed.

Maine remained part of Massachusetts until it achieved statehood in which year?

New Hampshire, by contrast, was given its own separate charter back in 1679.

Roughly what was the colonial population on the eve of the American Revolution?

It had grown from about 2,000 in 1625, largely displacing Native Americans along the way.

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.

What economic policy had Britain run its colonies under for its own benefit?

Trade was concentrated inside the Empire and enforced by the Navigation Acts, which colonists dodged through smuggling.

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

The Albany Plan for coordinating defense was rejected by the leaders of most colonies.

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

Unusually, this war started in North America and spread to Europe rather than the other way round.

What did colonists call the War of the Austrian Succession?

Colonists were angry when Britain handed captured Louisbourg back to France in 1748 in exchange for Madras.

The War of Jenkins' Ear was sparked by an incident involving a mariner of what nationality?

Hundreds of North Americans volunteered for Admiral Vernon's assault on Cartagena de Indias in the war against Spain.

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

France had secretly handed Louisiana west of the river to Spain the year before; Britain also gained Spanish Florida.

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

The land was designated an Indian Reserve; settlers ignored it, but resented that it was issued without consulting them.

Which was the first of the new taxes Britain imposed after the French and Indian War?

The Sugar Act of 1764 was followed by the Currency Act, the Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Acts of 1767.

The Stamp Act of 1765 taxed newspapers and what else?

Printers took strong exception and spread anti-tax literature, fuelling the "no taxation without representation" argument.

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

Lord North hoped colonists would accept the principle of British taxation; Boston's Sons of Liberty dumped the tea instead.

Which 1774 laws greatly restricted self-government in Massachusetts?

They let commanders claim homes for troops and moved trials of soldiers and crown officials to England.

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

Ordered to seize Patriot arsenals, he sent troops toward Concord, triggering the battles of April 1775.

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

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

What boycott did the delegates of 1774 agree to instead of attacking Boston?

It worked: the value of British imports dropped dramatically.

Where did Jefferson draft the Declaration of Independence in June 1776?

He wrote it largely alone in 17 days on the second floor of a three-story home at 700 Market Street, now the Declaration House.

Which man was NOT on the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration?

The five were Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Livingston and Sherman; the committee handed Jefferson the first draft.

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 colonial school was the only one outside New England and the Middle Colonies?

Southern families generally relied on tutors or sent their children to school in England.

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

Both were charter colonies; elsewhere governors were royal or proprietary appointees with absolute veto power.

In 1680, which was the only royal colony among the thirteen?

By 1720 half the colonies were under royal governors appointed from London.

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

He lost, but John Adams later wrote, "Then and there the child Independence was born."

Which religious revival swept the colonies in the 1740s?

Baptists and Methodists grew rapidly during it.

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.