The Peace of Paris of 1783 was the set of treaties that ended the American Revolutionary War. On 3 September 1783, representatives of King George III of Great Britain signed a treaty in Paris with representatives of the United States of America—commonly known as the Treaty of Paris (1783)—and two treaties at Versailles with representatives of King Louis XVI of France and King Charles III of Spain—commonly known as the Treaties of Versailles (1783). The previous day, a preliminary treaty had been signed with representatives of the States General of the Dutch Republic, but the final treaty which ended the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War was not signed until 20 May 1784; for convenience, however, it is included in the summaries below.
The treaty dictated that Great Britain would recognize the independence and sovereignty of the United States of America, formerly their Thirteen Colonies on the Eastern seaboard of North America. The treaty marked the end of the First British Empire. The United States gained more than it expected, thanks to the award of western territory. France got its revenge over Britain after its defeat in the Seven Years' War and gained Tobago and Senegal but ended up financially exhausted. It was already in financial trouble and its borrowing to pay for the war used up all its credit and created the financial disasters that marked the 1780s, and some historians link those disasters to the coming of the French Revolution. The Spanish regained Minorca, West Florida and East Florida from Britain, but not Gibraltar. The Dutch did not gain anything of significant value at the end of the war.
Path to negotiation
News of the surrender of Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown to a joint Franco-American army reached Britain late in November 1781, shortly before Parliament was due to debate the military spending estimates for the following year. The hastily revised plan was that forces in America were to be retained at their existing level, but the policy of "offensive" war and long campaigns far away from well-supplied strongholds (which had also led to the Saratoga defeat four years earlier) was to be abandoned in favor of a new approach, details of which had to remain secret. The budget was passed by a large majority, but a few days later news was received that the British fleet in the Bay of Biscay had been able to capture only a fraction of a very large French fleet, carrying troops for invasions of British colonies around the world. Parliament immediately ordered an inquiry into the administration of the Royal Navy, to be held after the Christmas recess. At the beginning of January, it was learned that French forces had begun capturing small British-held islands in the West Indies even without the help of the new fleet (which had been driven back to France by storms), so a large British fleet was sent westwards as soon as possible. Also in that month, the government appointed a new commander for the American forces, Lieutenant General Guy Carleton who had defeated the American invasion of Canada in the early phase of the war, and the Colonial Secretary, Lord Germain, was replaced by the hawkish Welbore Ellis.
The inquiry into Navy administration was followed by a parliamentary vote on 20 February in which the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich, narrowly escaped dismissal. The following week, Parliament voted for a guarantee of the "no offensive war" claim made the previous autumn, on the grounds that increased military commitment to America would, among other things, be "the means of weakening the efforts of this country against her European enemies". On 27 February 1782, the House voted against further war in America, by 19 votes. At the beginning of March, news arrived which absolutely confirmed the wisdom of this position – the loss of two more West Indian islands in January (with a third seemingly at the mercy of the French Navy), and of the Mediterranean base on Menorca in February. The opposition in Parliament then began tabling motions alleging that Great Britain had no confidence in its government; the first of these was rejected by just 10 votes, another a week later by 9 votes. Hours before yet another such vote was due, on 20 March, the government leader, Lord North, persuaded King George III to accept his resignation (this set a precedent that successful Parliamentary votes of "no confidence" would automatically force a prime minister to resign). The king's choice as replacement, Lord Shelburne (who, though an old friend of Benjamin Franklin, had initially stated in February that he "would never consent, under any possible given circumstances, to acknowledge the independency of America") refused the post, leading to the formation of a strange new government team, nominally led by Lord Rockingham, whom the King hated, with Shelburne and Charles James Fox, who hated each other, as Secretaries of State.
Negotiation process
Ground rules
Rockingham's team recognised that their priority was to get Britain out of its four linked wars, and that time might be short—within days of his appointment, news came from the West Indies that three more British islands had been captured by the French. Therefore, the decision was made to build on the "no offensive war" policy and begin peace talks with the Americans. Three factors made this the logical approach: first, the stated aim of the 1778 Treaty of Alliance between the United States and France was specifically to maintain the independence of the United States. Second, for well over a year, informal discussions had been held with Henry Laurens, an American envoy captured on his way to Amsterdam. On 31 December 1781 Laurens had been released on parole, and now he was offered the chance to help begin negotiations. Third, on hearing of Lord North's resignation, Benjamin Franklin immediately wrote from Paris, making it clear that the Americans were ready to begin talking. However, Laurens, Franklin, and John Adams (then representing America in the Dutch Republic) all made it clear to the British that America could not, under the 1778 alliance treaty, make peace without French agreement. What none of them knew was that France, under its completely separate treaty of alliance with Spain, could not make peace without Spanish agreement; indeed, not without a guarantee that the British stronghold of Gibraltar, commanding the narrow entrance to the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean, would be handed over to Spain. Spanish and French forces had been besieging Gibraltar for nearly three years without success, so it was likely that they would have to negotiate with Britain to exchange it for some other territory, perhaps some of the captured West Indian islands. For Britain that would be a tough decision—although the West Indies produced vast profits, holding Gibraltar allowed unhindered sea trade with all the Mediterranean countries.
The British government decided to resist accepting American independence as a precondition for negotiation, as they were aware that the French government was nearly bankrupt, and that the British reinforcements sent to the West Indies might well reverse the situation there at any moment (the fleet was commanded by Admiral Rodney, who had returned to England from the Caribbean on sick-leave just before the French fleet there sailed north to blockade Yorktown; he also faced numerous expensive lawsuits over his looting of the Caribbean island of St. Eustatius—in short, a glorious victory was his only option). The British negotiator sent to Paris was Richard Oswald, an old slave-trading partner of Henry Laurens, who had been one of his visitors in the Tower of London. His first talks with Franklin led to a proposal that Britain should hand over Canada to the Americans. On 23 April, Lord Shelburne, without specifically referring to the terms of that proposal, which he kept a secret from nearly all his colleagues, replied with an offer to accept full American independence, but on the existing borders. A second British envoy, Thomas Grenville (unaware of the Canada suggestion), was now sent to begin talks with the French government, based on this proposal. He indicated that the French could help to secure American independence, their avowed reason for entering the war back in 1778, by offering to return the British possessions they had captured in the West Indies, but the French rejected this, and separated their own peace demands from America's. That did indeed violate the spirit of their 1778 treaty of alliance with America, and fundamentally affected the future of the negotiations. Another factor which gave added power to the Americans was the decision on 19 April of the Dutch Republic (otherwise known as the United Provinces of the Netherlands, its 200-year-old federal government structure being a model from which the United States would learn) to recognise John Adams as the ambassador of an independent country. This led swiftly to the offer of a much-needed loan from the Netherlands, following which Adams went to Paris to join the impending peace negotiations.
British government changes again
On 18 May, the decision to keep full independence as a point for negotiation was vindicated by the arrival in Europe of news that, over a month previously, Admiral George Rodney had gained a significant naval victory over the French in the Caribbean saving Jamaica from a Franco-Spanish invasion. It was also learned that the French Admiral Comte de Grasse had been captured during the battle. This was what both Rodney and Britain so desperately needed so Grenville was sent back to France to negotiate with both the Americans and the French, but found himself making little progress with either—only when Oswald told him about the Canada proposal did he begin to understand why, and he wrote an indignant letter to Charles Fox, who was no happier about what his hated rival Shelburne was doing. Having exposed the trickery to his colleagues, at the end of June Fox proposed a vote that the independence of the United States should be accepted without preconditions, but in the light of Rodney's victory and the consequent French weakness, this was rejected (though the news that a combined Spanish and American fleet had forced the surrender to Spain of the Bahamas arrived in Britain at about this time).
On 1 July, Lord Rockingham, the figurehead leader of the government, died, so Shelburne was forced to take over, which led to the resignation of Fox and a massive split in the anti-war Whig party in Parliament. Regardless of this, the remainder of the negotiations would be carried out under Shelburne's devious leadership. For example, he took advantage of the great delay in trans-Atlantic communication to send a letter to George Washington stating that Britain was accepting American independence without preconditions, while not authorising Richard Oswald to make any such promise when he returned to Paris to negotiate with Franklin and his colleagues (John Jay had by this time returned from Spain).
Diplomatic manoeuvres
While the British were busy trying to stabilise their second new government of the year, Franklin neutralised what could have been France's biggest weapon against the United States—the vagueness of the repayment terms for the loans the French had been making to the Americans every few months since 1778. These totalled 18,000,000 livres (equivalent to over 2.5 million Spanish dollars—the preferred hard currency in America) plus an additional 10,000,000 livres (nearly 1.5 million dollars) which had been borrowed from the Dutch by King Louis XVI of France on America's behalf in 1781 when no international lender would loan anything directly to the Americans. By a contract dated 16 July 1782, America was to pay this money back on very favourable terms, with no payments due at all until three years after peace was finalised (a stipulation which would lead fairly directly to the next great milestone in American history, the Constitution of 1787).
The French too played their diplomatic cards with some skill. While preparing to aid the Spanish forces in a massive assault on the fortress at Gibraltar, they stalled for time by insisting on American independence as a precondition for negotiation. They also sent a secret envoy to speak directly with Shelburne in England, for there were some matters on which they were seriously opposed to the Americans. The most notable of these was the rich Newfoundland fishery, one of the main factors which had drawn the French across the Atlantic over 250 years earlier, and which they had managed to retain as a concession when the British took Canada in 1763. As British colonists, the Americans had rights to fish in these waters, but as the United States they would have no legal right to fish there unless it could be written into the peace treaty. For Britain, the logical course would be to make France give its rights to the Americans. The Americans also wanted fishing rights in the Gulf of Mexico, to which again they had previously been entitled thanks to the British colonies in Florida (now controlled by Spain).