Treaty of Paris Signed: America Gains Independence

Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay sat across from British diplomat David Hartley at the Hotel d'York in Paris on September 3, 1783, and signed the treaty that formally ended the American Revolutionary War and recognized the independence of the United States. Eight years after the first shots at Lexington and Concord, and two years after the British surrender at Yorktown, the Treaty of Paris transferred sovereignty over a vast territory stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River, from the Great Lakes to the northern boundary of Florida. The American negotiators secured terms far more favorable than anyone in Europe expected. Jay and Adams, distrusting French motives, conducted much of the negotiation without consulting their French allies, correctly suspecting that France's foreign minister Vergennes would have preferred a weaker, more dependent America. The final treaty granted the United States fishing rights off the coast of Newfoundland, navigation rights on the Mississippi River, and a western boundary at the Mississippi itself, roughly doubling the territory the colonies had actually controlled. Britain made these concessions partly because Prime Minister Lord Shelburne believed that generous terms would make the United States a valuable trading partner rather than a resentful neighbor. He was proved right: within a decade, trade between the two nations exceeded pre-war levels. The treaty also required the United States to recommend that individual states restore confiscated Loyalist property, a provision that was widely ignored and became a source of lingering Anglo-American friction. The Treaty of Paris did more than end a war. France, whose military and financial support had been essential to the American victory, was left nearly bankrupt by the effort, a fiscal crisis that contributed directly to the French Revolution six years later. The treaty established the precedent that colonial peoples could successfully break from European empires through armed struggle, an idea that would echo through Latin America, Asia, and Africa for the next two centuries.