Paris: Negotiated for Nothing

Almost two years passed between Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown and the treaty that formally ended the war. Franklin, Adams, and Jay had spent that time in Paris negotiating not just with Britain but managing the competing interests of France and Spain, America's own allies, who had their own territorial ambitions that did not always align with the new nation's. What the three men signed on September 3, 1783 was, in substance, almost identical to the preliminary articles they had already agreed to the previous November. Founders Online preserves the full record of that morning, and of what the commissioners actually felt as they put their names to the document that ended the war.

Franklin, Jay, and Franklin's grandson William Temple Franklin rode into Paris that morning carrying four official copies of the treaty. Joined by Adams, they met the British negotiator David Hartley at his lodgings, the Hôtel d'York, reviewed the texts, and at half past ten in the morning, the four principals signed and sealed the documents that formally ended the American Revolutionary War.

Founders Online's editorial account of the signing, drawn from the commissioners' own correspondence, describes the moment plainly: Hartley wrote that the treaties were signed "with the most perfect cordiality on both sides." None of the American commissioners left any description of celebration that day. John Adams's own diary entry made no note of the signing at all. His son John Quincy Adams wrote only two words: "Signature of the Definitive Treaty."

What the commissioners actually felt about the day survives in their letters, and the tone across all three Americans is closer to exhaustion than triumph. Adams wrote to his wife Abigail the following morning.

Franklin, gravely ill with gout and kidney stones through much of that summer, wrote to Henry Laurens with the same weary resignation rather than celebration, telling him only that after so many frustrating months, "it is come finally to this." Laurens himself, writing to Congress, expressed regret rather than pride at how the negotiation had gone. Of the four American commissioners, only John Jay struck a genuinely hopeful note, in a letter to Robert Morris.

The treaty's opening article contained the single sentence the entire war had been fought to obtain: British recognition, in the king's own formal language, that the United States were free, sovereign, and independent states. Its boundary provisions extended American territory west to the Mississippi River, north to the Great Lakes, and south to Florida, nearly doubling the land area of the original thirteen colonies and formally securing, on paper, the Illinois country George Rogers Clark had fought for at Vincennes.