Thirteen Colonies

This meeting had been called to discuss united action by the thirteen colonies against the king and Parliament.

By 1776, when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, there were 500,000 African Americans enslaved among the 2.5 million people in the thirteen colonies.

"Thus the thirteen colonies, at the outset of their struggle for independence, saw themselves surrounded north, south, and west, by lands where the rulers and the ruled were of different races, but where rulers and ruled alike were hostile to the new people that was destined in the end to master them all," Roosevelt wrote in his historical monograph, "The Winning of the West: From the Alleghenies to the Mississippi."

"Thus the thirteen colonies... saw themselves surrounded north, south, and west, by lands where the rulers and the ruled were of different races, but where rulers and ruled alike were hostile to the new people that was destined in the end to master them all," Roosevelt wrote.

Though the republican paradigm—representative government bottomed on the principle of popular sovereignty—has become the political norm in the twentieth century, no republican government prior to the American Revolution, apart from a few Swiss cantons and Greek city-states, had ever survived for long, and none had ever been tried over a landmass as large as the thirteen colonies.