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Founding The New Nation

From 33,000 B.C.E. to 1793 C.E.

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The European explorers who followed Christopher Columbus to North America in the 16th century had no notation of founding a new nation.

Neither did the first European settlers to peopled the 13 English colonies on the Eastern shores of the continent in the 17 and 18th centuries.

These original colonists may have fled poverty or religious persecution in the old world where they continued to view themselves as Europeans and as subjects of the English king.

They regarded America as but the West most rim of a transatlantic European world.

Yet life in a new world gradually made the colonists different from their European cousins, and eventually during the American revolution, the Americans came to embrace a vision of their country as an independent nation.

How did this epochal transformation come about? How did the colonists overcome the conflicts that divided them, unite against Britain, and declare themselves at great cost to be "American" people.

They had much in common to begin with. Most were English speaking.

Most came determined to create an agricultural society modeled on English customs.

Conditions in the new world depended their common bonds.

Most colonists strove to live lives unfettered by the tyrannies of royal authority, official religion, and social hierarchies that they had left behind.

They grew to cherish ideas that became synonymous with American Life–reverence for individual liberty, self government, religious tolerance, and economic opportunities.

They also commonly displayed a wellness to subjugate outsiders. First Indians, who were nearly annihilated throughout war and disease, and then Africans, who were brought in chains to serve as enslaved workers, especially on the tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations of the southern colonies.

But if the settlement experience gave people a common stock of values, both good and bad, it also divided them.

The 13 colonies were quite different from one other.

Puritans carved tight, pious, and relatively Democratic communities of small family farms out of rocky-soiled New England.

Their's was a close-knitted, homogenous world in comparison to most of the southern colonies, where large landholders, mostly Anglicans, built plantations along the coast from which they lorded over a labor force of enslaved blacks and looked down apon poor white farmers who settled the backcountry.

Different still were the middle colonies stretching from New York to Delaware.

Their diversity reigned. Well-to-do merchants put their stamp on New York City, as Quakers did on Philadelphia, while out on the countryside sprawling estate were interspersed with modest homesteads.

Within individual colonies, conflict festered over economic interests, and ethnic rivalries, and religious practices.

All those clashes Long made it difficult for colonists to imagine that they were a single people with a common destiny, much less that they ought to break free from Britain.

The American colonist in fact had little reason to complain about Britain.

Each of the 13 colonies enjoyed a good deal of self rule.

Many colonists profited from trade within the British Empire.

But by the 1760s, the stable arrangement began to crumble, a victim of imperial rivalry between France and Britain.

Their struggle for supremacy in North America began in the late 17th century and finally dragged in The colonist during the French and Indian war from 1756 to 1763.

That war in one sense strengthened ties with Britain because colonial militias fought triumphantly alongside the British Army against their mutual French and Indian enemies.

But once the French were driven from the North American continent and new Anglo-Indian Peace treaties were forged, the colonists no longer felt that they needed the British army for protection.

Indeed, they increasingly resented British efforts to prevent them from encroaching on Indian lands west of the Appalachians.

More important still, after 1763 a financially overstretched British government made the fatal choice of imposing new taxes on colonies that had been accustomed to answering mainly to their own colonial assemblies.

By the 1770s issues of taxation, self rule, Western expansion, and trade restrictions brought the crisis of imperial authority to a head.

Although as late as 1775 most people in the colonies clung to the hope of some kind of accommodation sort of outright independence, royal intransigence soon thrust the colonists into a war of independence that neither antagonist could have anticipated just a few years before.

8 years of revolutionary war did more than anything in the colonial past to bring Americans together as a nation.

Comradeship-in-arms and the struggle to shape a national government forced Americans to subdue their differences as best they could.

But the spirit of national unity was hardly universal.

1 and 5 colonies sided with the British as "loyalists," and a generation would pass before the wounds of the first American "civil war" fully healed.

Yet in the end, Americans won the Revolution, with no small measure of help from the French, because in every colony people shared a firm belief that they were fighting for the on "unalienable rights" of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," in the words of Thomas Jefferson's Magnificent Declaration of Independence.

Almost 200 Years of living a new life had prepared Americans to found a new nation.