Treaty of Paris (1783)

The peace treaty signed in Paris on 3 September 1783 brought the American War of Independence to a formal close. In it, Great Britain accepted that its thirteen former colonies were free and sovereign states and agreed borders that gave the United States nearly all the land between the Atlantic and the Mississippi. Together with Britain's separate agreements with France, Spain and the Dutch Republic, it forms the settlement known as the Peace of Paris.

The British surrender at Yorktown to American and French forces undermined support for the war in London. Lord North's government fell on 20 March 1782, and peace talks opened in Paris the following month. The American commissioners were Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, Henry Laurens and John Adams; Britain was represented by Richard Oswald and David Hartley.

France, the main ally of the Americans, was worn out by the war, and most parties wanted peace. Spain was the exception, hoping to fight on until it had taken Gibraltar. In September 1782 the French foreign minister, Vergennes, floated a compromise that would have confined the new republic to the land east of the Appalachians, left the region north of the Ohio to Britain and placed an Indian buffer state under Spanish control to the south. The Americans rejected it. Jay told the British he was ready to deal with them directly, without France and Spain, and the prime minister, Lord Shelburne, accepted. Shelburne saw a chance to separate the United States from France and to make it a valuable trading partner.

Preliminary articles were drafted on 30 November 1782, and the final treaty was signed at the Hôtel d'York in Paris by Adams, Franklin, Jay and Hartley. Its first article recognised the thirteen states, named one by one, as free, sovereign and independent, with the Crown giving up all claims to them. Other articles drew the boundaries, gave American fishermen rights on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland and in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, and promised that creditors on both sides could recover genuine debts. Congress undertook to recommend that the states return confiscated Loyalist property and to prevent further confiscations. Prisoners were to be freed, and both nations were granted permanent access to the Mississippi.

The settlement was strikingly favourable to the Americans, and deliberately so. Shelburne expected the growing population of the trans-Appalachian west to become a profitable market for British goods without costing Britain anything to govern, and in time a large two-way trade did develop.

The Congress of the Confederation ratified the treaty at Annapolis, Maryland, on 14 January 1784. Britain ratified it on 9 April, and the ratifications were exchanged in Paris on 12 May 1784. In Britain's parallel treaties, Spain received East and West Florida and Menorca, while the Bahamas, Grenada and Montserrat went back to Britain. France gained Tobago and Senegal, and Britain returned captured Dutch possessions in the East Indies under an agreement finalised in 1784.

Several terms were never fully honoured. Individual states ignored the recommendations on Loyalist property, and Virginia kept laws blocking payment of debts to British creditors. Britain, citing these failures, held on to forts on American soil around the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain. The geography was also faulty: a line drawn west from the Lake of the Woods could never meet the Mississippi, which does not reach that far north, and the vague Florida boundary led to a dispute with Spain that was settled only in 1795. The forts were finally handed over after the Jay Treaty of 1794. Of the treaty's articles, only the first, recognising American independence, remains in force today.

Our 1783 map shows North America in the year of the treaty, with the new United States beside British Canada and Spanish territory to the south and west, and our 1800 map shows the young republic before the Louisiana Purchase.