Thirteen colonies declared independence in the document commemorated by America250.
The Declaration of Independence represented the thirteen British colonies along the Atlantic coast that became the original states of the United States. They ranged from New Hampshire in the north to Georgia in the south.
The colonies were not identical. They had different economies, religious traditions, settlement histories, and relationships with Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans. Even so, their delegates acted together in the Second Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War.
The thirteen colonies are often confused with the later number of U.S. states. The United States has 50 states today, but the declaration concerned the original thirteen colonies. Their names appear in the document’s closing section, where the delegates declared the colonies “Free and Independent States.”