The Treaty of Paris

SEP 03 1783 · 12:00

American Commissioners of the Preliminary Peace Negotiations with Great Britain, by Benjamin West, 1783 to 1784. The British delegation refused to sit; the painting is unfinished. Place: Hôtel d'York, rue Jacob, Paris Figures: Benjamin Franklin · John Adams · John Jay · Henry Laurens · David Hartley, for Great Britain Britain Recognizes a Continent Preliminary articles are signed at Paris on 30 November 1782; the definitive treaty follows on 3 September 1783, the same day as the parallel treaties of Versailles between Britain and France and Britain and Spain. Article 1 is the substantive line: His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz. New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, to be free, sovereign and independent states. The territorial settlement is generous to the United States: the western boundary at the Mississippi, the northern boundary roughly along the present Canadian line, the southern at the 31st parallel. Britain retains Canada, regains Senegal-side concessions, returns Florida to Spain, returns Tobago to France. The seven-year war has cost about £100 million; Britain accepts the loss of thirteen colonies and the continued possession of Canada and the Caribbean sugar islands as the consolation. The System Acquires Its First Non-European Member The Westphalian family of states, which since 1648 has expanded chiefly by recognizing existing European entities (Dutch Republic, Swiss Confederation, eventually Sweden and Russia) and by reorganizing them at treaty conferences, here for the first time admits a wholly new polity from outside Europe, constituted by revolution against an existing member. The American case becomes the template: a colonial population claims sovereign status, secures recognition by a European Great Power (France, then others), defeats the metropolitan power militarily, and is recognized in the resulting peace. Within fifty years the template will be applied across the Americas: Haiti (1804), the Spanish American republics (1810s and 1820s), Brazil (1822). The number of sovereign states recognized in the Westphalian system, which had been hovering around twenty European entities for most of the eighteenth century, more than doubles by the 1830s. The thirteen American states themselves write a federal constitution four years later, declaring their thirteen sovereignties to be one. The next century and a half of debate over what sovereignty can be pooled, divided, federated, and surrendered begins at Phil Video: Ken Burns' Benjamin Franklin on the 1783 Treaty of Paris that recognised the United States, negotiated by Franklin, Adams, and Jay.