Congress had ordered its peace commissioners to do nothing without France's consent, and all three of them ignored it; the treaty they signed on September 3, 1783 gave the United States a western border that could not physically be drawn

Congress had put its instructions to the peace commissioners in writing: undertake nothing without the knowledge and concurrence of the French ministers, and be ultimately governed by their advice. Not one line of that was obeyed.

What was signed on September 3, 1783

The room was rented, and not by the Americans. David Hartley, a member of Parliament for Hull and a long correspondent of Benjamin Franklin's, was lodging at the Hôtel d'York at 56 rue Jacob, and that is where four men met at eight in the morning to end the American Revolutionary War.

Britain signed two other peace treaties that same day, both at Versailles. Spain took back Menorca and the two Floridas. France collected Tobago and its old trading stations on the Senegal River, along with a war debt that helped bring the monarchy down inside of six years.

The American treaty got a hotel.

John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and John Jay signed in alphabetical order; Hartley signed for George III. The business was finished before most of Paris had eaten, which is an odd way to close out eight years of fighting and was very probably the point. Britain's ministers disliked concluding every peace treaty under the eye of the French court, and this was the one they did not have to.

Why did the Americans negotiate behind France's back?

Their orders, issued by Congress on June 15, 1781, were an act of self-abasement. France had lent the money and sent the fleet, and Congress wrote the deference straight into the paperwork.

John Jay would not have it. He suspected that the Comte de Vergennes, foreign minister to Louis XVI, intended to keep the new country penned east of the Appalachians and to spend American claims on French and Spanish gains elsewhere. Jay brought Adams around, Adams brought Franklin, and by the fall of 1782 the three were dealing directly with Richard Oswald, a Scottish merchant acting for the Earl of Shelburne's ministry, without telling Versailles what was on the table.

The preliminary articles were done on November 30, 1782. Vergennes had reason to be furious, and he was.

The American defense was technical and, as lawyering goes, sound: the articles were preliminary and could not take effect until Britain and France had settled their own war. France signed its own preliminary terms on January 20, 1783, which is what allowed the whole package to be converted into definitive treaties that September. Vergennes kept his temper. He also kept his opinion of the other side, which he put in one line: the English buy peace rather than make it.

He was not wrong about the generosity. Shelburne wanted a trading partner more than a punished colony, and the boundary he conceded reached the Mississippi rather than the mountains.

The border that could not be drawn

Article 2 is the one that gave the most and aged the worst. West of Lake Superior the line was to run "through the Lake of the Woods to the northwesternmost point thereof, and from thence on a due west course to the river Mississippi."

No such course exists.

The negotiators worked from John Mitchell's map of North America, first published in 1755 and by then a generation stale. Mitchell drew Lake of the Woods as a neat oval with an unmistakable northwest corner, and he placed the head of the Mississippi off to the west of it. The river actually rises at Lake Itasca, well to the south. A line running due west from that corner never meets the Mississippi; it crosses the plains and keeps going.

Fixing it took two more agreements. The Anglo-American Convention of 1818 ran the boundary north or south from the lake's northwest point until it hit the 49th parallel, then due west along the parallel. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 settled where that northwest point actually was.

Why is Benjamin West's painting half empty?

Benjamin West, the Pennsylvania-born painter who had become history painter to George III, began a group portrait of the peace commissioners in 1783 and never finished it. The five figures on the left are complete: John Jay, John Adams, Franklin, Henry Laurens and Franklin's grandson William Temple Franklin, who worked as secretary to the delegation. (Franklin never sat for it; West worked up his likeness from an engraving.) The right side of the canvas, where the British negotiators belong, is bare.

Here the record gets thin. The usual explanation is that Oswald and his secretary Caleb Whitefoord declined to pose because Britain had no appetite for a monument to its own defeat. A second account, handed down through John Quincy Adams, has Oswald refusing on the grounds that he was an ugly man and blind in one eye. Both may be true; neither is documented in a way that would satisfy a careful historian.

What survives is the object itself, at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, showing a peace with only one delegation in the room.

How long did it take to ratify?

Longer than the treaty allowed. Article 10 gave the parties six months from signing to exchange ratifications, and the Atlantic took roughly two months to cross in each direction.

Congress could not raise a quorum. Under the Articles of Confederation, nine of the thirteen states had to be represented to approve a treaty, and through the fall of 1783 the delegates were scattered and slow to reach the new seat of government at Annapolis. By mid-December only seven states had appeared. An eighth turned up in the first days of January; the ninth was Richard Beresford of South Carolina, who reached Annapolis ill on January 13, and Congress voted the next day, January 14, 1784.

Britain ratified on April 9. The ratifications were exchanged in Paris on May 12, more than eight months after the signing, which is to say that the deadline written into Article 10 was missed by everyone and enforced by no one.

What the treaty never settled

Article 7 obliged Britain to withdraw its garrisons from American soil "with all convenient speed." It did not. British troops held Detroit, Michilimackinac, Niagara, Oswego and a string of smaller posts for another thirteen years. Richard J. Werther, writing in the Journal of the American Revolution, sets out the reasons: the forts were leverage over the prewar debts that Article 4 protected and the states refused to honor, and they controlled the fur trade, then the most profitable business on the continent. The posts came down only under the Jay Treaty, with Fort Mackinac handed over on October 2, 1796.

The people whose land was being divided were not in the room and are not in the text. Britain ceded to the United States an interior it did not occupy and could not deliver, and the nations living there learned the terms afterward.

Article 1, the recognition of independence, is the only part still in force. Everything else has been superseded, with one exception that comes up every winter.

Angle Township, Minnesota, better known as the Northwest Angle, is the surviving splinter of Mitchell's error and the only piece of the lower 48 north of the 49th parallel. Around 150 people live there. To reach the rest of their own state by road they drive some 60 miles through Manitoba and report themselves at an unstaffed crossing with a video kiosk; in deep winter they can instead pay a toll and take a 37-mile ice road across the lake.

The ice road is not a fixture. It depends on how Lake of the Woods freezes, so whether the Angle has a winter link to Minnesota is settled each February by the weather. The commissions of 1818 and 1842 closed the argument on paper. The lake has never agreed to close it.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "Treaty of Paris (1783)"
• Wikipedia, "Treaty of Paris (painting)"
• Wikipedia, "Northwest Angle"
• Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, "Treaty of Paris, 1783"
• Maryland State Archives, "Ratification of the Treaty of Paris"
• Richard J. Werther, "The 'Western Forts' of the 1783 Treaty of Paris," Journal of the American Revolution (2023)