Thirteen colonies were represented when the Declaration of Independence was adopted.
The colonies stretched along the Atlantic coast from New Hampshire to Georgia. They were separate British jurisdictions with different economies, religious traditions, and political institutions, but their representatives assembled in the Second Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War.
The Declaration’s formal title calls it the unanimous declaration of the thirteen United States of America. The word “states” reflected the political transformation being claimed: the colonies were presenting themselves as independent states rather than British colonies. The original thirteen are remembered today in the thirteen stripes of the United States flag, although the flag’s stars later came to represent the number of states in the Union. America250 uses the 1776 union of these thirteen polities as a central starting point for the national commemoration.