Eight in the Morning

It was eight o'clock on a Wednesday in Paris. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay walked into David Hartley's lodgings at the Hôtel d'York. Hartley represented the King of Great Britain. The three Americans represented the United States. They sat down, put their names on a Definitive Treaty of Peace, pressed their seals, and handed the papers over. That was the morning the Revolutionary War, the eight-year fight for American independence, officially ended.

The fighting had mostly stopped two years earlier, when a British army under Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia, in October 1781. Provisional articles of peace had been signed in Paris the following November. This Wednesday was the last step, and it felt like one. Adams wrote Abigail the next day that they had negotiated six months for a simple repetition of what they already had. Then they dined with Hartley and drank tea with the Duchess of Manchester. Very good friends, he told her. Quite free, easy, and social.

The Best They Could Obtain

Article I did the thing that mattered. Britain named the thirteen states, New Hampshire down to Georgia, and called them free, sovereign, and independent. Hartley signed for the king. Adams, Franklin, and Jay signed in alphabetical order.

Two days later Adams wrote Congress. On Wednesday the third, he said, the American ministers met the British minister at his lodgings and signed, sealed, and delivered the treaty. A confirmation of the provisional articles. The best they could obtain.

George Washington was not in that Paris room. He had commanded the Continental Army through the war. On December 23, 1783, he stood before Congress in the Maryland State House at Annapolis and laid down his commission. In January, Congress ratified the treaty in that same town.

The Unfinished House

Seventeen years later Adams became the first president to sleep in the President's House in the new federal city of Washington. He rolled up on November 1, 1800. The plaster was barely dry. A portrait of Washington was already hanging. The next morning he wrote Abigail from the second floor, hoping honest and wise men would live under this roof. She came later that month, called it the great castle, and hung the washing in the East Room. On New Year's Day they opened the doors and received whoever came.

Still There

The treaty is in the National Archives. The house is still there.

Our 2026 White House Heritage Collection ornament marks the 250th year of the country that morning made. Finished in 24k gold, made in America, sold only here.

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