Imagine boarding a small wooden ship, waving goodbye to everyone you know, and sailing for two stomach-churning months towards a land you have only heard rumours about. That is exactly what thousands of English families did in the 1600s. Some chased riches, some chased religious freedom, and some — the enslaved Africans carried across the same ocean in chains — were given no choice at all. Together, willingly and unwillingly, these people built the thirteen colonies.
Jamestown, 1607: hunger, tobacco and survival
The first lasting English colony was Jamestown, Virginia, founded in 1607 by a company of investors dreaming of gold. There was no gold. There was swampy water, disease and hunger — in the terrible early years, most settlers died. The colony was saved not by treasure but by a plant: tobacco, which grew well in Virginia and sold for high prices in England. Jamestown sat on the lands of the Powhatan people, a powerful alliance of about thirty communities. At first the Powhatan traded food that kept the starving colonists alive; later, as settlers took more and more land for tobacco fields, trade turned to bitter war.
Plymouth, 1620: the Mayflower families
Thirteen years later a different kind of settler arrived far to the north. The passengers of the Mayflower — later called the Pilgrims — were mostly religious families who had been punished in England for worshipping in their own way. They wanted somewhere to practise their faith freely, a hope that home-schooling families of any faith can understand. Their first winter in Plymouth was devastating: about half of them died. The survivors owed much to the Wampanoag nation and to a remarkable man named Tisquantum (often called Squanto), who spoke English and taught the newcomers how to grow corn in sandy soil. In autumn 1621 settlers and Wampanoag shared a harvest feast — a real moment of cooperation, though the peace it celebrated would not last forever.
1619: a ship arrives with people in chains
Two years before the Mayflower, in 1619, a ship reached Point Comfort, Virginia, carrying about twenty captive Africans who were traded to the colonists. They were the first of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who would be kidnapped from West Africa and enslaved in the colonies. It matters enormously to remember who they were: farmers, traders, scholars and parents from sophisticated West African societies, with rich cultures and deep faiths. Historians estimate that a notable share of the Africans enslaved in America were Muslim — West Africa had centuries-old Muslim kingdoms and centres of learning. Some, like the scholar Omar ibn Said (enslaved later, in the 1800s), left writings in Arabic that survive today, proof of learning that slavery could not erase. Slavery grew because tobacco and other crops made forced labour profitable — a cruel injustice built into colonial life from near the beginning, and one the American story would have to reckon with.
Thirteen colonies, three flavours
| Group | Examples | Character |
|---|---|---|
| New England | Massachusetts, Connecticut | Small farms, fishing, shipbuilding; towns built around churches and meeting halls; strong focus on reading so children could study scripture |
| Middle colonies | New York, Pennsylvania | Wheat farming and busy trading ports; the most mixed populations — English, Dutch, German and more — and, in Pennsylvania, unusual religious tolerance |
| Southern colonies | Virginia, Georgia | Large plantations growing tobacco and rice; wealth for a few landowners, built increasingly on the labour of enslaved people |
Everyday colonial life
For most colonial children, life meant work: fetching water, feeding animals, spinning wool, minding younger siblings. Homes were small and candle-lit; nearly everything — soap, cloth, butter, furniture — was made by hand. Education often happened at home, with the Bible as the main reading book. By the 1700s, thirteen separate colonies lined the Atlantic coast, each with its own government answering to the king of England — thirteen siblings who did not yet know they would one day become one family.