Conquest by the Cradle
The common term "thirteen colonies" is misleading. There were thirty-two colonies, but only thirteen of them unfurled the standard of revolt.
White and black inhabitants of the thirteen colonies by 1760 numbered about 1.6 million; by 1775 they had pulled themselves up, largely by their birthrate bootstraps, to about 2.5 million.
Marriage-especially early marriage-was encouraged. An unwed girl of twenty0one could be labeled "an antique virgin."
The colonial birthrate was impressively high, especially in New England, where the people were fertile even if the soil was not.
The bulk of the population was cooped up east of the Alleghenies, although by 1775 a vanguard of pioneers had trickled into the stump-studded clearings of Tennessee and Kentucky.
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