Colonial era & the founding

The Three Colonial Regions

English North America was not monolithic. The Chesapeake began with the Virginia Company's settlement at Jamestown (1607), driven by tobacco monoculture, indentured servitude, and—after 1619, when the first enslaved Africans arrived at Point Comfort—racialized chattel slavery codified in Virginia's slave statutes of 1662 and 1705. New England was settled by Separatist Pilgrims at Plymouth (1620, governed by the Mayflower Compact) and Puritans under John Winthrop in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1630), producing town-meeting governance, Congregational churches, and a diversified economy of farming, fishing, and shipping. The Middle Colonies (New York, taken from the Dutch in 1664; Pennsylvania, chartered to William Penn in 1681) were the most ethnically and religiously plural, anchored by Quaker tolerance and grain exports.

Salutary Neglect and Its End

For decades Britain practiced what Edmund Burke later called 'salutary neglect': mercantilist Navigation Acts (from 1651) regulated trade on paper while colonial assemblies governed in practice. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 reinforced colonists' sense of inherited English liberties. That equilibrium shattered after the Seven Years' War (the French and Indian War, ending with the Treaty of Paris, 1763). Saddled with war debt and a larger empire to defend, Parliament moved to tax and control the colonies directly: the Proclamation of 1763, the Sugar Act (1764), the Stamp Act (1765), the Townshend Acts (1767), and the Tea Act (1773).

The Road to Independence

Colonial resistance crystallized around the principle 'no taxation without representation.' The Stamp Act Congress (1765) and the Sons of Liberty organized boycotts; the Boston Massacre (1770) and Boston Tea Party (December 1773) escalated confrontation. Parliament's punitive Coercive (Intolerable) Acts of 1774 prompted the First Continental Congress. Armed conflict opened at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. The Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, drafted principally by Thomas Jefferson and grounded in Lockean natural-rights theory: governments derive 'just powers from the consent of the governed.' Military victory turned on the French alliance secured after the Battle of Saratoga (1777) and the decisive Franco-American win at Yorktown (1781), where Cornwallis surrendered. The Treaty of Paris (1783) recognized American independence and set the Mississippi River as the western boundary.

These regional foundations matter analytically: the Chesapeake's slave economy and New England's free-labor commercial order seeded the sectional divide that would detonate in 1861. The colonial inheritance of representative assemblies, common-law rights, and religious dissent supplied the vocabulary of the Revolution itself.

The Articles of Confederation and Their Failure

The Articles of Confederation, drafted in 1777 and ratified in 1781, created a 'firm league of friendship' rather than a national government. Power rested in a unicameral Congress in which each state held one vote; there was no executive, no national judiciary, and no power to tax or regulate interstate commerce. Amendment required unanimous consent. The Confederation did achieve two enduring successes: the Land Ordinance of 1785, establishing the rectangular survey system, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which provided for orderly admission of new states and banned slavery north of the Ohio River. But its structural weaknesses were fatal. Congress could requisition but not compel revenue; Shays' Rebellion (1786–87) in western Massachusetts, an armed revolt of indebted farmers, exposed the government's inability to keep order and galvanized elites toward reform.

The Philadelphia Convention, 1787

Fifty-five delegates met in Philadelphia from May to September 1787, ostensibly to revise the Articles but in fact to replace them. James Madison's Virginia Plan proposed a bicameral legislature with representation by population; William Paterson's New Jersey Plan defended equal state representation. The Connecticut (Great) Compromise resolved the impasse: a House apportioned by population and a Senate with two seats per state. The Three-Fifths Compromise counted three of every five enslaved persons for apportionment and taxation, entrenching slaveholding power; the Convention also barred any prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade until 1808 (Article I, Section 9).

Ratification and the Bill of Rights

The Constitution established separation of powers, federalism, and checks and balances. Ratification pitted Federalists—Alexander Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay, whose Federalist Papers (1787–88) remain the canonical exposition of the design—against Anti-Federalists (notably Patrick Henry and George Mason), who feared centralized tyranny and the absence of a rights guarantee. The Constitution took effect after New Hampshire became the ninth ratifying state in June 1788. To secure ratification in Virginia and New York, Federalists promised amendments; the first ten, the Bill of Rights drafted by Madison, were ratified in 1791.

Why This Matters for the Exam

The FSOT's US History, Society, and Culture component tests the founding heavily, and the Situational Judgment and English Expression sections reward candidates who can reason from constitutional first principles. Expect multiple-choice items on the distinction between the Articles and the Constitution, the three great compromises of 1787, and the Federalist–Anti-Federalist debate. High-yield retention: the dates 1607, 1620, 1776, 1781, 1783, 1787, 1788, 1791; the authors of the Declaration and the Federalist Papers; and the specific defects of the Articles (no taxing power, no executive, unanimous amendment). The PYQ pattern favors cause-and-effect chains—why the Articles failed and how each constitutional mechanism answered a specific Confederation weakness.