AP U.S. History

North America held hundreds of distinct societies long before 1492, each shaped by the food its environment could produce. The Europeans who sailed west were pushed by mercantilism, religious conflict, and a new way of pooling money. Spain, France, and the Dutch each built a different colonial world, and each rested on a different relationship with Native nations.

From one English starting point, four very different regions grew: a tobacco Chesapeake, a Puritan New England, a diverse Middle Colonies breadbasket, and a rice-and-indigo Lowcountry. Coerced labor held the southern economies together, shifting after the 1680s from indentured servitude to permanent, hereditary racial slavery. A century of loose imperial supervision taught colonial assemblies to govern themselves, which is exactly why later British control felt like an attack.

A century of governing themselves left colonists convinced they already held the rights of Englishmen, so Britain's post-war taxes and enforcement read as theft rather than policy. Protest hardened into war, war into independence, and independence into the problem of building a government that could actually function. The Articles of Confederation failed at that, the Constitution replaced them, and the 1790s turned the founders themselves into rival parties.

The War of 1812 left the country more confident and more nationalist, and Henry Clay's American System tried to bind it together with a national bank, a protective tariff, and roads and canals. Steamboats, canals, factories, and new machines turned households into customers and let the North, South, and West specialize, while cotton and the Missouri crisis showed how slavery could pull them apart. By 1828 the one-party Era of Good Feelings had broken into Jackson's Democrats and their opponents.