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    • Main contributor: Dr. David Heffernan
    A French colonial map of North America

    The colonial period in the United States refers to the period in the history of the region now covered by the United States prior to the emergence of the country at the time of the American Revolutionary War. The colonial period possibly began with John Cabot’s voyage to North America in 1497 when he may have reached what is now the state of Maine. It continued through to 1776 when the Declaration of Independence established the United States. In theory it continued until 1848 much further to the west, as large parts of what is now the United States remained under the control of France, Spain or Mexico here until the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848. The main period of colonial settlement in what is now the United States occurred between the English establishment of Jamestown in Virginia in 1607 and the establishment of Mexico’s independence in 1821. Tens of millions of Americans will be able to trace their family history back to an ancestor who arrived to America during the colonial period.[1]

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    Colonial period in the United States chronology of events

    Juan Ponce de Léon

    It is unclear when the first European contact with what is now the East Coast of the United States occurred. John Cabot may have arrived to Maine during his pioneering voyage to North America in 1497. Juan Ponce de Léon, the sometime Spanish governor of Puerto Rico, led an expedition to Florida in 1513 and subsequently tried to establish a colony there. By the late 1520s, having conquered the Aztec Empire in 1521, Spanish explorers were venturing into the southern edges of what are now New Mexico and Texas. By the 1560s these reconnaissance missions were sufficiently advanced that the French, English and Spanish were all tentatively trying to gain a foothold in Florida, while Sir Walter Raleigh attempted to do something similar further to the north in North Carolina in the mid-1580s. Still, it was not until 1607 that the first permanent colony in what is now the United States would be founded successfully at Jamestown in Virginia.[2]

    Thereafter the rate of colonial settlement in North America accelerated. By the middle of the seventeenth century the English had established numerous colonies, with the main settlement sites being in New England[3] and the Southern Colonies around Virginia and the Carolinas,[4] while a more private, proprietary colony was established by the Calvert family in Delaware. They had competition in the form of the Dutch who had wedged their way in between these two spheres of English influence to control the region around modern-day New York and New Jersey. They called this New Holland and the settlement on Manhattan New Amsterdam, that is until 1664 when the English captured it in the middle of the Second Anglo-Dutch War and renamed the region New York after James, Duke of York, the future King James II.[5]

    With English control now established all the way from New England south to the Carolinas, migration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland continued to grow. Over time the initial colonies on the eastern seaboard expanded and Georgia was established by settlers from the Carolinas, while another factor in the colonial settlement was the influx of slaves from western Africa as part of the Transatlantic slave trade. By the time the American Revolutionary War was entered into in 1775, the population of the Thirteen Colonies is understood to have reached around 2.5 million people and demand for land was leading to a westward expansion inland to the Appalachian Mountains and the Great Lakes.[6]

    Junipero Serra

    While the colonial period can be said to have ended on the East Coast in the second half of the 1770s as the United States came into being, parts of what is the US further to the west continued to be colonies of the European powers for decades to come. After the French lost Canada to the British at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, the focus of their settlement in North America switched to the Louisiana Territory, particularly the city of New Orleans and the surrounding Bayou region. The colonial period only ended here in 1803 when the government of Napoleon Bonaparte sold the vast Louisiana Territory to the US government headed at that time by Thomas Jefferson.[7]

    Finally, further west again, after being claimed by Spain since the sixteenth century, though completely neglected, California, Texas and New Mexico had begun to experience some sustained Spanish colonization from the 1760s onwards. The most prominent such colonial activity concerned the work of the controversial Franciscan missionary, Junipero Serra, and his followers, in establishing multiple presidios or fortified missions along the coast of California from San Diego to San Francisco between the late 1760s and the mid-1780s. These formed the basis for growing Spanish settlement here in the decades prior to the establishment of Mexican independence in 1821.[8]

    Extent of migration during the colonial period of the United States

    The bulk of the migration which occurred into what is now the United States during the colonial era took place from Britain and Ireland to the Thirteen Colonies on the East Coast. There were two elements to this. Firstly, there was simply a steady trickle of economic migrants from disparate parts of Britain and Ireland over the century and a half between the 1620s and the 1770s. Secondly, there were more precise waves of mass-migration during clearly identifiable time periods, with migrants that had specific motivations. For instance, the bulk of the thousands of migrants to New England in the 1620s and 1630s who built the colonies in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Hampshire to begin with were Protestant religious dissenters seeking to escape religious persecution back home in England. A huge wave of about 125,000 settlers of Scottish ethnicity from Ulster in the north of Ireland, forever known thereafter as the Scots-Irish, arrived to the Thirteen Colonies between the 1720s and 1760s, most of them settling in the Middle (Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey) and Southern (Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia) Colonies.[9]

    French New Orleans

    Exact records for the population of the Louisiana Territory prior to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 are not available. However, by extrapolating information from the 1810 US federal census historians have estimated that there were between 60,000 and 70,000 people living in the vast territory of non-native ethnicity by the time the colonial period here came to an end in 1803. Many of these were people of French ethnicity, though many others were people with roots in western Africa who were slaves, former slaves, or the descendants of slaves. A sizeable proportion had come via the Caribbean and had further roots in places like Haiti, Guadeloupe and Martinique.[10]

    Finally, the colonial period produced a colonial population of more than 100,000 Spanish-speaking people living in the region between Texas in the east and California and southern Oregon in the west. The 1850 federal census recorded that there were 80,000 former Mexicans, a few thousand Puerto Ricans and Cubans, and over 20,000 other Spanish-speaking people from Central and South America living in the territories annexed in 1848 at the end of the Mexican-American War.[11]

    Demographic impact of the colonial period of the United States

    The demographic impact of the migration which occurred during the colonial period cannot be understated. Simply put, without the migrations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the United States of America would never have come into being and everything which followed thereafter would have occurred differently. While the mass-migrations of the nineteenth century would soon dwarf those of the seventeenth and eighteenth, the Europeanization of the continental United States was a direct result of the migrations of the colonial period.

    See also

    Explore more about the colonial period in the United States

    References

    1. ↑ https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america
    2. ↑ https://www.history.com/topics/exploration/exploration-of-north-america
    3. ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/New_England_Colonies/
    4. ↑ https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/jamestown-settlement-early/
    5. ↑ Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America (New York, 2005).
    6. ↑ https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/american-war-independence-outbreak
    7. ↑ https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/the-french-in-new-orleans
    8. ↑ Steven W. Hackel, Junipero Serra: California’s Founding Father (Berkeley, California, 2013).
    9. ↑ Aaron Fogleman, ‘Migrations to the Thirteen British North American Colonies, 1700-1775: New Estimates’, in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Spring, 1992), pp. 691–709.
    10. ↑ https://www.census.gov/history/www/homepage_archive/2023/april_2023.html
    11. ↑ https://depts.washington.edu/moving1/latinx_migration.shtml


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