Unit 7 · Colonies to a New Nation

A colony is a place ruled by a faraway country. By the 1730s, Britain had thirteen colonies along the Atlantic coast. The four northern ones were called New England: Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island. Winters were long and cold. The soil was thin and full of rocks.

Farmers in New England could feed their families, but not much more. So many people turned to the sea. Cod fish were thick off the coast. Tall forests gave wood for ships. Boston became a busy harbor, a safe place where ships load and unload. Ships from Boston carried fish, lumber and rum across the ocean.

We know this from ship records, tax lists and letters. A merchant’s account book from Boston lists barrels of fish sent to Spain and the West Indies. Geography did not force people to fish. But it made fishing and trade the smart choice. That is how land shapes life.

South of New England lay the Middle Colonies: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware. Here the soil was deep and dark. Winters were shorter. Farmers grew so much wheat, corn and rye that people called this region the breadbasket of the colonies. Anna’s family in the story lived here.

Two big rivers, the Hudson and the Delaware, worked like highways. Farmers floated grain to New York City and Philadelphia. Mills along the rivers ground wheat into flour. By 1750, Philadelphia was one of the largest cities in the colonies. Its streets were laid out in a neat grid.

The Middle Colonies were also the most mixed. Pennsylvania was started in 1681 by William Penn, a Quaker. Quakers believed every person had a light from God inside. Penn promised freedom of worship. Germans, Dutch, Scots-Irish, Swedes and English all came. On one street in Philadelphia, you might hear four languages.

The Southern Colonies were Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. Summers were long and hot. Rivers ran slow through flat, wet land. This was perfect for cash crops, crops grown to sell rather than eat. Virginia and Maryland grew tobacco. South Carolina grew rice and indigo, a plant used for blue dye.

A large farm that grew cash crops was called a plantation. Tobacco and rice took huge amounts of hand labor. Planters wanted workers who could not quit. So they bought enslaved Africans. By 1740, more than half the people in South Carolina were enslaved. Cato in the story was one of them.

There were few big cities in the South. Charleston was the main one. Most people lived spread out on farms. Rich planters lived in brick houses and sent their sons to England for school. Small farmers lived in one-room cabins. We know the numbers from colonial tax lists, which counted enslaved people as property.

About nine out of ten colonists lived on farms. A farm family made most of what it used. They grew food, spun wool, made soap and candles. But no farm could make everything. For nails, salt, cloth and tools, families went to town.

A colonial town had a blacksmith who shaped iron, a miller who ground grain and a cooper who made barrels. A merchant bought and sold goods from far away. In port towns, ships brought tea, sugar and cloth. They left with fish, flour, tobacco and lumber.

Trade connected everyone. A Pennsylvania farmer’s wheat became bread in the West Indies. Sugar from there became rum in Rhode Island. Enslaved people were bought and sold in this same trade. A Boston merchant’s ledger from the 1700s shows all of it on one page: barrels of rum, bolts of cloth and human beings.

There was no such thing as a lazy morning. Colonial children worked. On a farm, a six-year-old fed chickens and carried water. By ten, boys plowed and girls spun thread. Anna churned butter. A girl might sew a sampler, a cloth stitched with letters to practice sewing and reading.

In towns, a boy of twelve might become an apprentice. He lived with a craftsman for several years and learned the trade. Benjamin Franklin was an apprentice in his brother’s print shop in Boston in the 1720s. Girls learned cooking, spinning and child care at home.

Enslaved children worked too, but for no wage and no future choice. Cato scared birds from rice. Older children carried water to field workers. They could be sold away from their parents at any time. Free and enslaved children might live a mile apart and have completely different lives.

In most colonies, the church was the center of town life. In New England, the Puritans built a meetinghouse in the middle of each town. Families sat through long sermons on hard benches. In Pennsylvania, Quakers met in plain rooms with no minister. In the South, Anglican churches followed the Church of England.

Puritans believed everyone should read the Bible. So in 1647, Massachusetts passed a law: any town with fifty families had to hire a teacher. Towns with one hundred families needed a grammar school. This was the first law in the colonies requiring schools.

Children learned from a hornbook, a wooden paddle with the alphabet under a thin sheet of horn. Later they used the New England Primer, a small book of rhymes and prayers. Outside New England, schooling was spotty. Rich children had tutors. Poor children often had none. Teaching enslaved people to read was against the law in some colonies.

The trip from Europe cost more than most poor people had. So many signed an indenture, a contract. A ship captain or planter paid for the trip. In return, the person worked for four to seven years without pay. This person was an indentured servant. Perhaps half of all Europeans who came to the colonies before 1776 came this way.

Life as a servant was hard. Masters could whip servants and add years for running away. Many died of fever before their time was up. But the contract had an end. When the years were done, the servant was free. Some got land, tools or a new suit of clothes.

Here is the key difference. An indentured servant’s contract ended. Slavery did not. By 1700, colonial laws said enslaved people were property for life, and their children were too. Both groups worked without pay. Only one group had a way out.

Cato’s grandmother was taken from West Africa. Traders marched captured people to the coast and sold them to ship captains. The ocean voyage was called the Middle Passage. It was the middle leg of a trade route between Europe, Africa and the Americas.

Below deck, people were chained side by side with barely room to turn. The trip took about two months. The air was foul. Disease spread fast. Roughly one in six or seven people died before reaching land. Ship records kept by the traders themselves tell us these numbers.

Over about three hundred years, roughly twelve million Africans were forced onto ships. Most went to Brazil and the Caribbean. About four hundred thousand were brought to what became the United States. Olaudah Equiano, who was taken as a boy in the 1750s, later wrote a book about it. His words are one of the few accounts we have from someone who survived the voyage.

In New England, the men of a town gathered in the meetinghouse for a town meeting. They voted on roads, schools, fences and taxes. Anyone could speak. Decisions were made by majority vote. Town meetings still happen in some New England towns today.

Each colony also had an assembly, a group of elected men who made laws for the whole colony. Virginia’s assembly, the House of Burgesses, first met in 1619. It was the first elected lawmaking body in the colonies. Assemblies decided how tax money was spent. That gave them real power.

Who could vote? Mostly white men who owned land. Women could not vote. Enslaved people and most free Black people could not. Native people could not. Still, more colonists could vote than people in most of Europe. This habit of self-rule would matter a great deal when Britain started to push.

London was three thousand miles away. A letter took six weeks or more to cross the ocean. The king sent a governor to most colonies, but the governor could not do much without the assembly, which controlled the money. Many governors just tried to get along.

Britain cared most about trade. Laws said colonists should ship goods on British ships and sell certain crops only to Britain. But there were few officials to enforce this. Smugglers sneaked in sugar and tea from other countries. Britain mostly looked the other way. Historians call this hands-off rule.

For about a hundred years, this worked. Colonists thought of themselves as loyal British subjects with British rights. They also thought of themselves as people who made their own laws. When Britain later tried to tighten its grip, colonists were shocked. They had grown up free of it.

For a hundred years, Britain mostly left the colonies alone. Then, in 1763, Britain won a long and costly war with France. It had huge debts. It also had thousands of soldiers stationed in America. Parliament, Britain’s lawmaking body, decided the colonists should help pay.

In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act. Colonists had to buy a special stamp for newspapers, legal papers, even playing cards. This was a tax, money paid to the government. Colonists were furious. Not because the tax was big. Because they had never voted for it. No colonist sat in Parliament.

Their slogan became no taxation without representation. Colonial assemblies had always decided their own taxes. Now a body across the ocean was doing it. Colonists refused to buy British goods. Crowds threatened stamp sellers. Within a year, Parliament backed down and repealed the Stamp Act. But it did not give up the right to tax.

Parliament passed new taxes in 1767 on glass, paint, paper and tea. Boston protested loudest. So Britain sent soldiers to Boston to keep order. Townspeople hated it. Soldiers took part-time jobs and pushed down wages. Fights broke out in the streets.

On the cold night of March 5, 1770, a crowd gathered around a soldier on King Street. People threw snowballs, ice and insults. More soldiers came. Someone yelled fire. The soldiers shot into the crowd. Five colonists died. One was Crispus Attucks, a sailor of African and Native descent. Colonists called it the Boston Massacre.

Was it a massacre or self-defense? A silversmith named Paul Revere made a picture showing soldiers firing in a neat line at peaceful people. It was propaganda, made to stir anger. At the soldiers’ trial, witnesses told a messier story. The lawyer who defended the soldiers was John Adams, a patriot. Most were found not guilty. Both sides used the same night as evidence.

By 1773, only one tax was left: the tax on tea. Parliament kept it to prove it still had the right. Then it let one British company sell tea cheaply in the colonies. Colonists saw a trick. Cheap tea would get them to pay the tax without noticing.

On the night of December 16, 1773, about one hundred men, some dressed as Native Americans, climbed onto three ships in Boston Harbor. They broke open 342 chests of tea and dumped them into the water. It took about three hours. No one was hurt. People called it the Boston Tea Party.

Britain was furious. In 1774, Parliament closed Boston Harbor until the tea was paid for and took away much of Massachusetts’s self-government. Colonists called these laws the Intolerable Acts. Instead of scaring the colonies, the punishment united them. Delegates from twelve colonies met in Philadelphia that fall. In April 1775, shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. The war had begun.

In the spring of 1776, a cheap pamphlet called Common Sense sold by the tens of thousands. Its author was Thomas Paine. He argued in plain words that a small island should not rule a continent. Many colonists who had wanted to stay British began to change their minds.

In June, Congress asked a Virginian named Thomas Jefferson to write a statement. He was thirty-three. He wrote that all men are created equal. He wrote that every person has rights that cannot be taken away. Among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He wrote that governments get their power from the consent of the governed.

That last idea was the big one. Kings had always claimed their power came from God. Jefferson said it came from the people, and that people could change a government that hurt them. On July 4, 1776, Congress approved the Declaration of Independence. It was a breakup letter to the king. It was also a promise that Americans would spend the next two centuries trying to keep.

The Continental Army was not much to look at. Farmers, apprentices, fishermen and free Black men signed up. Some were fourteen. Many had no shoes. They faced the strongest army in the world. Congress chose George Washington of Virginia to lead them. He lost more battles than he won, but he never quit.

The worst time came in the winter of 1777 to 1778 at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. About twelve thousand soldiers camped in log huts. Food ran out. Men wrapped rags around bare feet. Roughly two thousand died of disease and cold. Washington wrote letter after letter begging Congress for supplies.

Yet the army held. A German officer, Baron von Steuben, drilled the men all winter until they could march and fight as one. Women followed the army to cook, wash and nurse. Some, like Margaret Corbin, fought. Around five thousand Black soldiers served on the American side during the war. Freedom was promised to some of them. Not all got it.

The Americans could not win alone. They needed guns, money, ships and trained soldiers. France, Britain’s old enemy, was watching. But France would not help a losing side. Benjamin Franklin went to Paris to plead the case. He wore a plain fur cap, and the French loved him.

In October 1777, an American army forced a whole British army to surrender at Saratoga, New York. That was the proof France needed. In 1778, France signed an alliance, an agreement to fight together. French soldiers, French gold and, most of all, the French navy came to America. A young French nobleman, the Marquis de Lafayette, became one of Washington’s most trusted generals.

In 1781, the British general Cornwallis camped at Yorktown, Virginia, by the sea. Washington and a French army marched south and trapped him by land. A French fleet blocked the sea. Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, 1781. Two years later, in 1783, Britain signed a treaty. The United States was free.

After breaking from a king, Americans feared strong government. So their first plan, the Articles of Confederation, made the states almost separate countries. Congress could declare war and make treaties. But it could not collect taxes. It could not raise an army on its own. There was no president and no national court.

Problems piled up. Congress could not pay soldiers who had fought the war. States printed their own money and taxed each other’s goods. Nine of thirteen states had to agree to pass any law. All thirteen had to agree to change the Articles. Almost nothing got done.

In 1786, farmers in Massachusetts, many of them war veterans, could not pay their debts. Led by Daniel Shays, they shut down courts with guns. The national government had no army to send. Shays’s Rebellion scared leaders across the country. Washington wrote that the union was falling apart. In 1787, states sent delegates to Philadelphia to fix it.

The delegates in Philadelphia threw out the Articles and wrote a new Constitution, a written plan for government. The big fight was over votes. Big states wanted votes by population. Small states wanted equal votes. The answer was a deal: a Congress with two houses. In the House of Representatives, big states get more seats. In the Senate, every state gets two.

The plan splits power into three branches. Congress, the legislative branch, makes laws. The president, the executive branch, carries them out. The courts, the judicial branch, decide what the laws mean. Each branch can stop the others. The president can veto a law. Congress can override the veto. Courts can strike down laws. This is called checks and balances.

The idea came from experience. A king with all the power had been the problem. So the delegates made sure power was divided. They also made the Constitution changeable. It can be amended, but only with wide agreement. That has happened only twenty-seven times in over two hundred years.

Writing the Constitution was only half the job. Nine states had to approve it. Many people said no. Where, they asked, was the list of rights? What stopped this new government from jailing people for speaking out, as the king had? Supporters promised to add a list. Only then did enough states say yes.

In 1791, ten amendments, or changes, were added. Together they are the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment protects freedom of religion, speech, the press and the right to gather and protest. Others protect against unfair searches, promise a fair trial and forbid cruel punishment.

These rights came from real memories. Soldiers had been housed in colonists’ homes, so the Third Amendment forbids it. Officials had searched homes without cause, so the Fourth Amendment requires a good reason. The Bill of Rights is short. But every day, in courts across the country, people still argue over what its words mean.

The Declaration said all men are created equal. The Constitution said We the People. But who counted? In 1787, about one in five people in the new nation was enslaved. Women could not vote. Native nations were treated as outsiders. Most states let only white men with property vote.

The delegates in Philadelphia argued about slavery and then made deals. Enslaved people would count as three-fifths of a person when deciding how many seats a state got in Congress. That gave slaveholding states more power. The slave trade from Africa could continue until 1808. Runaways had to be returned. The word slavery never appears, but the deals are there.

Some delegates were troubled. Others owned enslaved people themselves. Washington and Jefferson both did. Free Black Americans noticed the gap right away. In the 1790s, they wrote petitions to Congress asking why liberty did not include them. Abigail Adams told her husband John to remember the ladies. The promise was written down. It was not yet kept.

The delegates built a door into the Constitution: it could be amended. That door has been used to widen who counts. After the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery in 1865. The Fourteenth, in 1868, made everyone born here a citizen. The Fifteenth, in 1870, said the vote could not be denied because of race.

Women won the vote with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, after decades of marches and arrests. Native Americans were made citizens by law in 1924. In 1971, the Twenty-sixth Amendment lowered the voting age to eighteen. Each change came because people pushed, often for a lifetime.

Words on paper did not do this alone. Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery, said the Constitution’s promises belonged to Black Americans too. Illinois sent Abraham Lincoln to the White House. Chicago women marched for the vote. The gap between the promise and the practice is where much of American history happens. Every generation has argued about it.

In April 1789, George Washington stood on a balcony in New York City and took the oath as the first president. Nobody knew what a president should do. There had never been one. Every choice Washington made became a pattern for the future.

He chose advisors to lead departments, a group later called the cabinet. Thomas Jefferson handled other countries. Alexander Hamilton handled money. Washington insisted on being called simply Mr. President, not Your Majesty. He wanted the job to look like a job, not a throne.

His biggest choice was to leave. After two terms, in 1796, Washington stepped down and went home to his farm in Virginia. Kings ruled until they died. Washington showed that power could pass peacefully. In his farewell message, he warned Americans against splitting into angry parties and against getting tangled in other countries’ wars.

Farmers west of the Appalachian Mountains had a problem. Their only road to market was the Mississippi River, and its mouth at New Orleans belonged to France. If France closed the port, the farmers were stuck. President Thomas Jefferson sent men to Paris to try to buy New Orleans.

France’s ruler, Napoleon, needed money for war. He surprised the Americans. He offered all of Louisiana, a giant stretch of land from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains. The price was fifteen million dollars, about four cents an acre. In 1803 Jefferson said yes. This was the Louisiana Purchase.

It doubled the size of the United States. Illinois’s western border, the Mississippi, was now the middle of the country, not the edge. No one asked the Native nations who lived there. To Jefferson, it was empty land waiting for farmers. To the Osage, Lakota and dozens of others, it was home.

Jefferson wanted to know what he had bought. He sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark with about thirty men to find a water route to the Pacific. They left the St. Louis area in May 1804 in a large boat and two canoes. They carried gifts, medicine, guns and blank notebooks.

The team did not go alone. A young Shoshone woman, Sacagawea, traveled with them and her baby. She helped them get horses from her people to cross the mountains. Clark’s enslaved man, York, went the whole way. Many Native nations fed the party, drew maps for them and told them what lay ahead.

They reached the Pacific in November 1805 and came home in September 1806. There was no easy water route. But they brought back maps, journals of animals and plants, and news of the people they met. Their notebooks are how we know what the land looked like then. Fur traders and settlers soon followed the paths they described.

Before the Constitution was even written, Congress faced a question. What should happen to the land north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi? This was the Northwest Territory. Today it is Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota.

In 1787, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance. It said the land would not be a colony. It would be split into territories, and when a territory had sixty thousand people, it could become a state equal to the old ones. The law promised freedom of religion and trial by jury. It said schools should always be encouraged.

One line mattered most for Illinois. The Ordinance said there would be no slavery in the territory. That made the Ohio River a border between slave states and free states. It was the first time the national government drew such a line. The law also said Native land should not be taken without consent. That promise was broken again and again.

Illinois became a territory in 1809. Most settlers lived in the far south, near the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The capital was Kaskaskia, a small French village on the Mississippi. In 1818, with far fewer than sixty thousand people, Illinois asked to join anyway. Congress said yes. Illinois became the twenty-first state on December 3, 1818.

Illinois came in as a free state under the Northwest Ordinance. But it was not fully free. The first state constitution let some people be held under long labor contracts, and enslaved people already in the state were not freed. In 1824, voters rejected a plan to allow slavery outright. It was a close vote.

Then the people came. Sarah’s family in the story was one of thousands. They came down the Ohio on flatboats or overland through Indiana. The capital moved north with them, to Vandalia in 1820 and to Springfield in 1839. Chicago, a muddy trading post in 1830, became a town in 1837.

Before 1810, going down a river was easy and going up was nearly impossible. Flatboats like Sarah’s drifted down and were sold for lumber. Then the crew walked home, sometimes a thousand miles. That is why Sarah’s father was so amazed by the steamboat.

In 1807, Robert Fulton’s steamboat chugged up the Hudson River from New York to Albany. A steam engine turned a big paddle wheel. Within twenty years, hundreds of steamboats worked the Ohio and Mississippi. A trip from New Orleans to Louisville that once took months now took about a week.

River towns boomed. Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis and Alton, Illinois, grew fast. Farmers could send corn and pork south and get sugar, coffee and cloth back. Steamboats were also dangerous. Boilers exploded. Snags ripped hulls. But the river had become a road that ran both ways.

Rivers only went where nature put them. So people dug their own. A canal is a man-made waterway. The Erie Canal, finished in 1825, ran about 363 miles across New York, linking the Great Lakes to the Atlantic. Mules on a towpath pulled the boats. Shipping costs dropped sharply. New York City became the nation’s biggest port.

Illinois wanted its own. The Illinois and Michigan Canal opened in 1848. It connected Lake Michigan at Chicago to the Illinois River, and so to the Mississippi. Now a barrel of flour could go from Chicago to New Orleans by water, or to New York by the lakes. Chicago sat right at the hinge.

Then came the railroad. The first American lines opened around 1830. Trains did not freeze in winter or need a river at all. By the 1850s, tracks spread across Illinois. Chicago became the place where rails from every direction met. The city that was a trading post in 1830 had tens of thousands of people by 1850.

Every acre Sarah’s family bought had belonged to someone. As settlers pushed west, the government pressured Native nations to sign treaties giving up land. In Illinois, the Sauk leader Black Hawk tried to return to his village in 1832. Soldiers and militia drove his people out. Within a few years, most Native people in Illinois had been forced west of the Mississippi.

In the South, the Cherokee had done everything settlers said they should. They farmed, built schools, wrote a constitution and printed a newspaper in their own alphabet. It did not matter. Georgia wanted their land. In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. President Andrew Jackson signed it.

The Cherokee fought in court and won. The Supreme Court said Georgia had no right to their land. Jackson ignored the ruling. In 1838, soldiers rounded up about sixteen thousand Cherokee and marched them about eight hundred miles to what is now Oklahoma. Roughly four thousand died of cold, hunger and disease. The Cherokee call it the trail where they cried. We call it the Trail of Tears.

In 1793, a young teacher named Eli Whitney built a machine called the cotton gin. It pulled the sticky seeds out of cotton. By hand, one person cleaned about a pound a day. With a gin, one person could clean fifty pounds. Cotton became the South’s great cash crop.

Here is the cruel twist. The machine made cotton cheap to clean, so planters wanted more cotton, so they wanted more enslaved people to plant and pick it. The number of enslaved people in the United States roughly quadrupled between 1790 and 1860. A machine meant to save work made slavery grow.

On the prairie, the problems were different. Prairie sod was so thick and sticky that iron plows clogged. In 1837, a blacksmith named John Deere in Grand Detour, Illinois, made a plow of polished steel that cut clean. In 1831, Cyrus McCormick built a reaper that cut grain many times faster than a man with a blade. In 1847 he moved his factory to Chicago. Illinois soil plus Illinois machines fed the country.

By 1819 there were twenty-two states: eleven that allowed slavery and eleven that did not. Each side had the same number of senators. Then Missouri, carved from the Louisiana Purchase, asked to join as a slave state. That would tip the balance. Congress argued for months.

The answer was the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Missouri came in as a slave state. Maine came in as a free state. That kept the balance. And a line was drawn across the rest of the Louisiana Purchase. North of it, no slavery. South of it, slavery allowed. Illinois sat north of that line.

Thomas Jefferson, old and worried, wrote that the news scared him like a fire bell in the night. He saw what was coming. Every new state and every new railroad west would raise the same question. In 1830 Sarah’s flatboat passed between a slave state and a free state. Thirty years later, that river would be a battle line. An Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln would be president.