13-0 · The pool

The Thirteen Colonies

Thirteen colonies, founded over a span of 126 years, from Jamestown in 1607 to Savannah in 1733. Every candidate in 13-0 comes from one of them. This is who they were, when they were settled, and what each one was actually for.

Small, cold, and crowded onto a short stretch of coast. Four of the thirteen, all founded within sixteen years of each other, and all of them towns rather than plantations.

• New Hampshire

  1623

  Capital Portsmouth

  New Hampshire began as a commercial grant to a London fish merchant and spent most of the colonial period tangled up with Massachusetts. Its value to the Crown was timber: the great white pines of the interior were reserved by law for naval masts, and surveyors who found the broad arrow cut into a trunk knew the tree was not theirs to fell. The colony's only coastline is a few dozen miles long, which is why its settlers looked inland to the lumber trade rather than to the sea.

  The clues it gives you

  1. 1A fishing and timber colony. Its tallest white pines were marked with the King's broad arrow and reserved for Royal Navy masts.
  2. 2Wedged between Massachusetts to the south and the forests that run to Canada, it touches the Atlantic in one short stretch.
  3. 3Settled in 1623 at Odiorne's Point, chartered to John Mason in 1629, and governed as a royal province from 1679.

• Massachusetts

  1620

  Capital Boston

  Massachusetts is two settlements in one story: the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620 and the Puritan Great Migration into Massachusetts Bay a decade later. Boston became the colony's port, its printing centre, and by the 1760s the loudest town in America. The map used in this game merges Maine into Massachusetts, because the District of Maine was governed from Boston until it separated in 1820 — for the whole colonial period it was the same colony.

  The clues it gives you

  1. 1Where the Pilgrims landed, and where a cargo of tea went into the harbour.
  2. 2Cape Cod curls out into the Atlantic from its southeastern corner.
  3. 3Plymouth planted in 1620, the Massachusetts Bay charter granted in 1629, and the District of Maine governed from Boston until 1820.

• Rhode Island

  1636

  Capital Newport

  Rhode Island exists because Massachusetts expelled Roger Williams. He bought land from the Narragansett and founded Providence in 1636 as a place where the colony's religious courts had no jurisdiction. Other dissenters followed — Anne Hutchinson among them — and the settlements around Narragansett Bay were finally united by a royal charter in 1663. Newport grew into a serious port, and the colony's tolerance made it a haven for Quakers and Jews as well as dissenting Protestants.

  The clues it gives you

  1. 1Founded by a man banished from Massachusetts for his religious opinions.
  2. 2The smallest of the thirteen, built around a large bay full of islands.
  3. 3Roger Williams settled Providence in 1636; the royal charter of 1663 named it Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.

• Connecticut

  1636

  Capital Hartford

  Connecticut grew out of congregations that left Massachusetts for better land along the Connecticut River. Thomas Hooker's party reached Hartford in 1636, and three years later the towns adopted the Fundamental Orders — a written frame of government often described as the first constitution in the Americas. The charter Charles II granted in 1662 survived a famous attempt to seize it in 1687, when it was reportedly hidden in an oak tree that Connecticut later put on its currency.

  The clues it gives you

  1. 1Its royal charter was once hidden inside a hollow oak to keep it out of a governor's hands.
  2. 2The river that gives it its name runs the length of the colony and reaches the sea at Saybrook.
  3. 3Thomas Hooker brought his congregation to Hartford in 1636; the Fundamental Orders followed in 1639.

The most mixed region: Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, German, Scots-Irish and Welsh settlers, and the only colonies founded as commercial or religious experiments rather than as chartered settlements.

• New York

  1624

  Capital New York City

  New York started as New Netherland, a Dutch trading venture on the Hudson. The English took the colony in 1664 without much of a fight and renamed both the province and its port for the Duke of York, the future James II. That Dutch inheritance never quite disappeared — patroon estates, a polyglot port, and a merchant culture that stayed more interested in trade than in theology. New York also has the longest coastline of the thirteen and, after Virginia, the largest population.

  The clues it gives you

  1. 1Taken from the Dutch and renamed for an English duke.
  2. 2The Hudson River runs from the northern interior straight down to a harbour at its southern tip.
  3. 3New Netherland planted at Fort Orange in 1624; the English took it in 1664 and named it for the Duke of York.

• New Jersey

  1664

  Capital Perth Amboy

  New Jersey was created by paperwork. When the Duke of York received his grant in 1664 he handed the land between the Delaware and the Hudson to two proprietors, and for the next forty years the colony was a disputed property shared out among Quakers, Scots, and speculators. In 1676 it was formally divided into East and West Jersey, each with its own assembly; in 1702 the Crown took both back and governed them as a single royal province with two capitals, Perth Amboy and Burlington.

  The clues it gives you

  1. 1A colony that spent much of its life split in half, and was finally handed back to the Crown to settle the argument.
  2. 2It is squeezed between two great rivers, the Delaware on one side and the Hudson on the other.
  3. 3Created in 1664 out of the Duke of York's grant, divided into East and West Jersey in 1676, and reunited as a royal colony in 1702.

• Pennsylvania

  1681

  Capital Philadelphia

  Pennsylvania was a debt settlement. Charles II owed the Penn family money, and in 1681 he paid it in land. William Penn, a Quaker, designed the colony as a place where religious belief would not decide a person's rights — and advertised it across Europe, which is why Pennsylvania filled up with Germans, Scots-Irish, and Welsh as well as English. Philadelphia, laid out on a grid in 1682, became the largest city in the colonies and the meeting place of the Continental Congress.

  The clues it gives you

  1. 1A Quaker's experiment in religious toleration, and the most deliberately planned colony of the thirteen.
  2. 2Its capital was laid out on a grid where the Schuylkill meets the Delaware.
  3. 3Chartered to William Penn in 1681 as payment of a debt the Crown owed his father; Philadelphia founded the next year.

• Delaware

  1638

  Capital New Castle

  Delaware is the smallest colony and the most passed around. Sweden planted New Sweden at Fort Christina in 1638; the Dutch took it in 1655; the English took it from the Dutch in 1664. For most of its colonial life it was the Lower Counties on Delaware, attached to Pennsylvania and governed from Philadelphia, which suited the Pennsylvanians and increasingly did not suit the Delawareans. In 1701 they were granted a separate assembly while keeping the same governor, an arrangement that held until independence.

  The clues it gives you

  1. 1The smallest of the thirteen, and the only one that began as a Swedish trading post.
  2. 2A narrow strip of farmland along the western shore of the bay named for the river it sits on.
  3. 3Settled by Swedes in 1638, taken by the Dutch in 1655 and the English in 1664, and governed from Pennsylvania until it won its own assembly in 1701.

The largest, the richest, and the most unequal. Tobacco first, then rice and indigo, all built on an enslaved population that outnumbered the planters in several of these colonies.

• Maryland

  1634

  Capital Annapolis

  Maryland was the one colony founded as a haven for Catholics in a Protestant empire. George Calvert asked for the land and died before it was granted; his son Cecil received the charter in 1632 and sent two ships, the Ark and the Dove, to St. Mary's City in 1634. The colony's Toleration Act of 1649 protected Trinitarian Christians of any denomination — a narrow tolerance by later standards, but unusual for its time. Annapolis replaced St. Mary's City as the capital in 1695.

  The clues it gives you

  1. 1A refuge for English Catholics, granted to a lord and named for a queen.
  2. 2It wraps around the Chesapeake on both sides, so it has two shores rather than one.
  3. 3The charter went to Cecil Calvert, second Baron Baltimore, in 1632; the first settlers landed at St. Mary's City in 1634.

• Virginia

  1607

  Capital Williamsburg

  Virginia is where the English colonies begin: Jamestown, 1607, a commercial venture that nearly failed twice before tobacco made it profitable. In 1619 the colony seated the House of Burgesses, the first elected assembly in the Americas. The map used in this game shows Virginia including the territory of modern West Virginia, which split away in 1863 during the Civil War — for the entire colonial period it was the same colony, though its western mountains were far beyond the reach of the government at Williamsburg.

  The clues it gives you

  1. 1The oldest of the thirteen, and for most of the colonial period the largest and most populous.
  2. 2Tobacco from its plantations went out through the Chesapeake, and its capital sits on a peninsula between two rivers.
  3. 3Jamestown planted in 1607, the House of Burgesses seated in 1619, and the capital moved from Jamestown to Williamsburg in 1699.

• North Carolina

  1663

  Capital New Bern

  North Carolina began as the upper half of Carolina, granted by Charles II to eight Lords Proprietors in 1663. The northern settlements filled with small farmers and dissenters from Virginia who had little in common with the rice planters around Charles Town, and the two halves were governed separately from 1691. By 1712 the split was formal and North Carolina had its own governor; the Proprietors sold out to the Crown in 1729. New Bern, founded by Swiss and German settlers in 1710, became the capital.

  The clues it gives you

  1. 1The northern half of a single grant to eight men, which the two halves soon stopped sharing.
  2. 2Its Outer Banks are a line of sandbars that wrecked so many ships the coast is called a graveyard.
  3. 3Carolina was chartered in 1663; the two settlements drifted apart and North Carolina got its own governor in 1712.

• South Carolina

  1670

  Capital Charles Town

  South Carolina was the wealthiest colony per head and the most unequal. Settlers from Barbados brought the plantation model with them, and rice cultivation along the tidal rivers made a small planter class extremely rich on the labour of an enslaved majority — by 1720 Black Carolinians outnumbered white ones. Indigo, subsidised by the Crown from the 1740s, added a second cash crop. Charles Town became the largest city in the South and one of the busiest ports in North America.

  The clues it gives you

  1. 1Its fortune was built on rice and, later, indigo, worked by the largest enslaved population of any colony.
  2. 2Charles Town sits on a peninsula where two rivers meet the Atlantic.
  3. 3Settled at Albemarle Point in 1670 and moved to Oyster Point in 1680; the lower half of Carolina got its own governor in 1719.

• Georgia

  1733

  Capital Savannah

  Georgia is the thirteenth and the last. James Oglethorpe and a board of trustees received a charter in 1732 and founded Savannah in 1733, with two purposes: to give England's poor a fresh start, and to put a settled colony between South Carolina and Spanish Florida. The trustees banned slavery and limited landholdings, which made the colony unpopular with settlers who could see how rich the rice planters next door had become. The ban was lifted in 1751 and Georgia became a royal colony in 1752; it grew quickly after that.

  The clues it gives you

  1. 1The youngest of the thirteen, founded as a refuge for debtors and as a buffer against Spanish Florida.
  2. 2The southernmost colony, its coast runs from the Savannah River down toward St. Augustine.
  3. 3James Oglethorpe landed at Yamacraw Bluff in 1733; the ban on slavery in the new colony was lifted in 1751.

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