Colonial Society in 1713
Thirteen Colonies, Three Regions
In 1713 Britain’s North American empire stretched along the Atlantic coast from what is now Maine down to South Carolina. Around 350,000 European and African inhabitants lived under the Crown, alongside many Indigenous peoples whose lands lay west of the line of settlement. Although called the ‘thirteen colonies’, this was not one society but three. Historians group them as the New England colonies (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire), the Middle colonies (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware) and the Southern colonies (Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas; Georgia was added in 1733). Each region had a different climate, economy and religious character, and treating them as one place is the most common mistake students make about colonial America.
The thirteen colonies divided into three regions: New England (small farms and shipping), the Middle colonies (mixed agriculture and trade), and the Southern colonies (plantation agriculture and enslaved labour). Each had a distinct society.
A Population of Many Peoples
Colonial society was never simply ‘English’. Migration after 1713 changed its character rapidly. The English remained the largest group, but newcomers reshaped the colonies in three major waves. Around 250,000 Scots-Irish Protestants arrived from Ulster between the 1710s and 1770s, pushing west into the backcountry of Pennsylvania and the Appalachian frontier. Around 100,000 Germans — mostly Lutherans and pietists fleeing war and poor harvests in the Rhineland — settled in Pennsylvania, where William Penn’s policy of religious toleration drew them. The Dutch remained a strong presence in the Hudson Valley around New York, the area they had governed before 1664. Most significantly, enslaved Africans, brought by force through the transatlantic slave trade, made up roughly one in five colonial inhabitants by mid-century.
Pennsylvania and New York welcomed Quakers, Mennonites, Lutherans, Catholics, Anglicans and Jews. Religious toleration, fertile soil and the busy port of Philadelphia attracted a wider mix of nationalities than New England (mostly English Puritan) or the Southern colonies (Anglican and African). By 1750, Philadelphia was the largest city in British America and one of the most ethnically mixed places in the British Empire.
Social Hierarchy in the Colonies
Colonial society had a clear pecking order, but it was more open than Britain’s. At the top sat the colonial gentry — large landowners in Virginia, wealthy merchants in Boston, and leading families in Charleston and Philadelphia. Below them was the ‘middling sort’: independent farmers, skilled craftsmen and shopkeepers who could vote in many colonies if they owned property. Beneath them were tenant farmers, sailors, day labourers and indentured servants, who had paid for their crossing by signing contracts of unfree labour. At the bottom, with no rights at all in law, were enslaved people. Indigenous peoples lived outside this hierarchy entirely, on lands the colonies regarded as theirs to expand into.
Colonial society was layered: gentry, middling sort, indentured servants and enslaved people. White men who owned property could vote — a wider franchise than Britain’s — but enslaved people and most women had no political rights.
Tensions Between Groups
Diversity bred friction. The most persistent tension ran between the wealthy tidewater elites of the Atlantic coast and the poorer settlers of the western backcountry. Backcountry farmers complained that colonial assemblies, dominated by tidewater grandees, ignored their petitions for protection from frontier raids and gave them too few seats. Religious dissent caused further strain: Puritans in Massachusetts had once expelled Quakers and Baptists; Anglicans in Virginia and the Carolinas resented paying tithes to support a state Church. Urban tradesmen in Boston, New York and Philadelphia clashed with merchants over the cost of bread and the high price of imported goods. None of these tensions were yet revolutionary, but they show that the unity later expressed in 1776 had to be built — it did not exist in 1713.
A common error is to write about ‘the colonists’ as a single English-speaking Protestant group. The specification opens with ‘expansion and immigration’ precisely because the population was English, Scots-Irish, German, Dutch, African (free and enslaved) and Indigenous, with sharp tensions between groups. Higher-band answers acknowledge this plurality from the start; weaker answers flatten it into ‘the Americans’.
A second misconception is that slavery was confined to the South. In 1713, enslaved Africans worked in every colony, including New York, where they made up around 15 per cent of the city’s population. Northern abolition is a story of the 1780s and 1790s, not of 1713.
Why This Matters
Colonial society in 1713 looks settled compared with what came later, but its key features — a diverse population, a layered hierarchy, regional differences, and tensions between coast and frontier — set the conditions for everything that followed. The economic boom of the eighteenth century would deepen all these divisions. The Great Awakening would expose religious cracks. The French and Indian War would politicise the backcountry. Without grasping the plurality of 1713, the road to 1776 cannot be understood.