Britain and the United States signed the Treaty of Paris on September 3, 1783, formally ending the American Revolutionary War.
The treaty followed preliminary peace articles agreed in November 1782. American negotiators John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and Henry Laurens worked with British representatives to settle the conflict. The final treaty recognized the United States as free, sovereign, and independent.
Its terms established generous boundaries for the new nation, extending west to the Mississippi River and south to Spanish Florida. The agreement also addressed fishing rights, debts, property, prisoners of war, and Loyalists’ claims. Some provisions proved difficult to enforce after the war.
The treaty was signed in Paris, where France had supported the American cause. Although Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown in 1781 was a decisive military event, Yorktown did not legally end the war. The Treaty of Paris supplied the formal diplomatic conclusion and international recognition of American independence.