The Treaty of Paris
The Treaty of Paris, which the Confederation Congress ratified on January 14, 1784, brought the Revolutionary War to a far more successful conclusion than most Virginians could have imagined in 1776. The treaty confirmed Virginia and the other former British colonies named in Article 1 as “free, sovereign, and independent states.”
Of particular importance to white settlers moving by the thousands to the district of Kentucky, Article 2 of the Treaty of Paris placed the United States’ western border at the Mississippi River. In addition, Article 8 promised that the inland waterway upon which Kentucky’s livelihood depended would remain open to subjects and citizens of the signatory powers “from its source to the ocean.” But the treaty was silent about whether that vast domain belonged to the union as a whole, to Virginia and the other states with western claims, or—as Native leaders were asserting—to the region’s Indigenous inhabitants. Virginia was free to strike the best deal it could in determining whether or how to dispose of its western claims. According to James Madison, Britain’s terms were “extremely liberal” and gave Americans all they could hope for. Most Virginians agreed.
Britain’s generosity, however, came with conditions that Virginia proved unwilling or unable to meet, and that failure helped ensure that the problems of the Confederation, in Madison’s words, would be the state’s problems, too. For a broad cross-section of Virginia’s white citizens, who owed nearly half the union’s £5 million in prewar debts to British creditors, the most onerous condition was the requirement in Article 4 that the debts be repaid in “sterling money,” not depreciated paper notes and debt certificates issued by Congress and the states during the war. Like every other state, Virginia also objected to the treaty’s protection of Loyalists in Articles 5 and 6. As it happened, many Loyalists were also creditors to whom Virginians owed debts that they resented having to pay. From Maine to Georgia, Loyalists responded by leaving in droves, with an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 people preferring exile in Britain’s remaining colonies to an uncertain future in the United States.
As the Loyalists’ plight became clear, Britain retaliated by refusing to honor Article 7, which required the king’s forces to withdraw from New York and other British-held posts “with all convenient speed and … without carrying away any Negroes or other property of the American inhabitants.” During the evacuation of New York, General Sir Guy Carleton, commander-in-chief of the king’s land forces in America, allowed nearly 3,000 formerly enslaved people to leave for Nova Scotia. Meanwhile, officials in Canada refused to withdraw British garrisons from Detroit, Niagara, and five other strongholds that, according to Article 2, were now in the United States. In Virginia, these violations created a pretext for the General Assembly to close the state’s courts to British creditors under Article 4. For its part, Britain used the unpaid debts to justify refusing to compensate former enslavers for their loss of human property and to continue occupying the western posts.
Although Virginia was not the only state affected by the standoff, the failure of Britain and the United States to fulfill their treaty obligations had lasting implications for the state and its inhabitants. General Carleton’s refusal to enforce the prohibition on “carrying away Negroes” allowed Black Loyalists like Harry Washington, an African native who had been enslaved as a hostler at Mount Vernon, to start a new life as a farmer and community leader in Sierra Leone. Another freedom seeker, Dinah Archer, who was enslaved by a Loyalist merchant in Norfolk, made her way to New York and successfully resisted re-enslavement with the help of Carleton’s staff. She evacuated to Nova Scotia in 1783. Because Virginia planters had a financial incentive to exaggerate their losses, it is unclear how many people followed the example of Washington and Archer, but likely thousands did, making the Revolutionary War Virginia’s largest incident of enslaved self-emancipation before the Civil War.
In Kentucky and in the Northwest Territory, which Virginia ceded to the United States in 1784, the impasse over the treaty strengthened the efforts of Native leaders to keep American settlers and speculators from taking their land. Although British officials declined to formally recognize the Northwestern Confederacy led by Mohawk war chief Joseph Brant to resist settler expansion north of the Ohio River, Canadian and Loyalist traders kept the alliance supplied with guns and other war materiel. That assistance played a vital, if covert, role in the stunning victories by Blue Jacket and Little Turtle over the forces of General Josiah Harmar in 1790 and General Arthur St. Clair in 1791. Until Britain and the United States settled their differences, the resistance of the Northwest Territory’s Native inhabitants ensured that the claims of both Virginia and Congress under Article 2 of the treaty would remain more nominal than real.
Nor was Virginia’s access to the Mississippi River, which Article 8 opened to citizens of the United States, any more secure. Because the conquest of West Florida gave it control of both banks, Spain closed the river below Natchez to American ships and goods in 1784. Although Britain was not directly involved, settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee held it partly to blame for the closure since it had failed to mention the river’s navigation in its peace treaty with Spain. Westerners also knew that Spain’s hold on West Florida depended on the Scottish-Creek leader Alexander McGillivray and the Scottish merchants William Panton and John Leslie, who supplied McGillivray’s Creek hunters and soldiers with rifles and ammunition. Although they were now officially allies and subjects of Spain, McGillivray, Panton, and Leslie had been loyal British subjects during the Revolutionary War. Without Britain’s tacit support, their resistance to the westward expansion of Virginia would have been far less effective.
Inevitably, these Anglo-American differences over the peace treaty affected Virginia’s relations with the rest of the union. Foreign Secretary John Jay’s proposal to Spanish envoy Diego de Gardoqui in 1786 and 1787 to “forbear” the United States’s navigation of the Mississippi for twenty-five or thirty years in exchange for the right to trade with Spain and the Canary Islands split Congress along sectional lines. Led by James Monroe, delegations from Virginia and the other southern states opposed the proposal, while the seven northern states whose merchants stood to benefit approved. Although the southern states were numerous enough to ensure that an agreement containing the controversial provision would never receive the nine votes that the Articles of Confederation required for treaties to be ratified, the dispute produced the union’s first sectional crisis—and was widely seen as a harbinger of crises to come.
Virginia’s refusal to allow British creditors to collect debts under Article 4 was another source of tension. Under pressure from Congress, the General Assembly agreed in 1787 to open the state’s courts to British debt suits. It tied the concession, however, to Britain’s evacuation of the western posts and compensation for the losses of enslavers, neither of which seemed likely. Only with the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, the sixth article of which made treaties the “supreme law of the land,” and the creation of federal courts with the authority to enforce the article, did Virginia take steps to resolve the controversy. Even so, British debts played a role in Virginia’s opposition to Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s 1790 proposal to assume the states’ war debts. It was not until Ware v. Hylton in 1794, ten years after the ratification of the Treaty of Paris, that the first Virginia debt case was settled in a British creditor’s favor, and it would be another two years before the defendant exhausted his last appeal.
If Virginians had reason to resist Congress and the federal government, Virginia’s cession of its claims north and west of the Ohio River in 1784 gave the state and many of its citizens a stake in preserving and, if necessary, strengthening the union. During the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and the ratification debates that ensued, Federalists argued that the United States would never be able to persuade—let alone compel—Britain to evacuate Detroit and other posts unless Congress had the power to tax and raise an army. Despite the opposition of Patrick Henry and Virginia’s Anti-Federalists, such arguments carried the day. In 1788, Virginia’s convention narrowly voted to ratify the Constitution, and in 1790, the state’s congressional delegation reluctantly agreed to support Hamilton’s fiscal program. As opposition to Hamilton and the Federalists took hold, Virginia became a bastion of the Democratic-Republican Party that Madison and Thomas Jefferson organized in response, but support for the Constitution and the union that it created did not waver.
Although the Treaty of Paris was not the only reason for Virginia’s social and political turbulence, it was never far from the controversies of the 1780s and 1790s—a reminder of the thin line that separated foreign and domestic affairs during the era of the American Revolution. If we have a hard time today remembering just how thin that line was, Virginians at the time had no such difficulty.
