Before and during the colonies

People were living in America long before any ship arrived from Europe. We call them American Indians or Native Americans. Both names are correct, and either one is accepted as an answer on the civics test.

They were not one single people. There were hundreds of separate nations, each with its own language, leaders, land and way of life. Some grew corn, beans and squash. Others hunted, or fished the rivers and the coast.

The test may ask you to name one American Indian tribe. These names are on the accepted list for both versions of the test: Cherokee, Navajo, Sioux, Apache, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, Hopi, Pueblo, Chippewa, Cheyenne, Crow, Shawnee, Lakota, Oneida and Blackfeet. Pick one that is easy for you to say, and learn just that one.

Some nations joined together for peace and protection. In the northeast, several nations formed the Iroquois Confederacy, also called the Haudenosaunee. Their agreement, the Great Law of Peace, is one of the documents USCIS lists as an influence on the United States Constitution.

The arrival of Europeans was a disaster for these nations. Diseases brought from Europe killed enormous numbers of people who had no defense against them. Wars, broken treaties and forced removal took away most of their land over the next three hundred years.

American Indian nations still exist today. The federal government recognizes more than 500 tribes, and each recognized tribe has its own government and its own laws on tribal land. A law passed in 1924 made all American Indians born in the United States citizens.

A colony is a place that is settled and ruled by a country far away. From the early 1600s, people sailed from Europe across the Atlantic Ocean and settled along the east coast of North America. Jamestown in Virginia, started in 1607, was the first lasting English settlement. Over about 125 years these settlements grew into thirteen British colonies.

Religion was one of the strongest reasons for coming. In Europe, people could be fined, jailed or attacked for worshipping in the wrong way; that is called persecution. The group we call the Pilgrims sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 for exactly this reason. Maryland was opened as a place where Catholics could live safely, and Pennsylvania was founded by Quakers who welcomed other faiths.

Land and money were another reason. In Europe most land belonged to a small number of rich families, and an ordinary family had little chance of owning any. In the colonies a working family could have a farm of its own. Many could not pay for the voyage. They signed a contract to work for someone for four to seven years in exchange for the passage. These people were called indentured servants.

Some came for political liberty, meaning a share in making the rules they lived under. Each colony set up its own assembly, where men elected by the colonists made local laws. Before the Pilgrims even went ashore in 1620 they signed the Mayflower Compact, a short agreement to govern themselves by laws they made together.

So if the test asks why the colonists came to America, several answers are accepted: freedom, religious freedom, political liberty, economic opportunity, or to escape persecution. One is enough. Choose the one you can say most clearly.

The thirteen colonies later became the first thirteen states. From north to south they were New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.

You may be asked to name three of the original states, or five. All thirteen were in the east; none was in the west. If a list of thirteen is hard to learn, learn five you can pronounce easily and stop there.

Alongside the settlers who chose to come, another group was brought to America by force. Africans were captured in West and Central Africa, carried across the Atlantic in ships, and sold as slaves. If the test asks what group of people was taken and sold as slaves, the answer is Africans, or people from Africa.

Slavery meant that a person was treated as property. Enslaved people worked all their lives without pay, could be bought and sold away from their husbands, wives and children, and had no right to leave. A child born to an enslaved mother was born enslaved too.

The first recorded Africans in England's Virginia colony arrived in 1619. Over the next hundred years their number grew into the tens of thousands, and by the time of the Revolution there were about half a million. Every one of the thirteen colonies allowed slavery at some point. Slavery was largest in the South, where enslaved people grew tobacco, rice and later cotton on large farms called plantations.

Congress banned bringing any more enslaved people into the country from abroad, starting on January 1, 1808. That stopped the ships, but it freed nobody. Slavery inside the United States continued and grew for nearly sixty more years.

This did not match the words of the Declaration of Independence, which said that all men are created equal. Several of the men who wrote and signed the founding documents owned enslaved people themselves. The country argued about this contradiction for its first eighty-five years.

Enslaved people did not simply accept their position. They ran away, hid, rebelled, bought their freedom where they could, and built free Black communities in the North. Slavery in the United States did not end until the 1860s.