Peace is signed at the Hôtel d'York; the United States is free and independent
For two years after Yorktown, the war that had already been won on the battlefield still needed to be won on paper. On September 3, 1783, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay signed the Treaty of Paris on behalf of the United States, meeting British negotiator David Hartley at the Hôtel d'York on Paris's Rue Jacob. The treaty gave the new nation the land between the Mississippi, Canada, and Florida, along with fishing rights off Newfoundland. In the treaty, Britain recognized the thirteen colonies as free and independent states.
The treaty's Article 1, the only clause still legally in force, is the founding document of American sovereignty itself: Britain's plain acknowledgment that the states were free and independent. The boundaries it drew, however clumsily, set the template for the westward expansion of the next century.
QWho actually delivered the British side of the negotiations before the final signing?
Richard Oswald was one of Lord Shelburne's negotiators alongside David Hartley representing Great Britain during the 1782 talks, before Hartley signed the finished treaty in September 1783. Oswald had personal ties to America going back to prewar business dealings, which Shelburne believed would make him sympathetic and effective at the table. He helped shape the generous boundary terms long before Hartley ever picked up a pen.
QWhat specific fishing grounds did the treaty hand the United States, beyond the coastal waters everyone assumes?
American negotiators secured rights not just off Nova Scotia but in the Grand Banks off Newfoundland and in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, some of the richest cod fisheries in the Atlantic world. New England's fishing fleets had worked those waters for generations under British protection, and losing access would have gutted a major colonial industry. The treaty's fisheries clause preserved an economic lifeline that had nothing to do with land at all.
QWhat was the address where the treaty was actually signed?
The signing took place at the Hôtel d'York, a Parisian lodging house at what is now 56 Rue Jacob on the Left Bank, chosen simply because it was where the American delegation was staying rather than for any ceremonial reason. There was no grand hall or formal chamber involved. Four men signed the document in a rented room on a residential street, and the building still stands there today.
