Still more delicate was the question of the treatment of the Loyalists. Tens of thousands of American colonists had opposed the war with the British mother country; many held deep loyalties to their ancestors’ way of life and no doubt hoped that this war was merely a temporary dispute that would soon be settled. Others, less sentimental but far more practical, opposed the war because it was sure to disrupt flourishing trade and businesses and would bring nothing but ruin to their enterprises. The more vocal of these Loyalists denounced Congress and the Revolutionary leaders as a collection of “quarrelsome, pettifogging lawyers,” and when the Declaration of Independence turned them into traitors, thousands of them entered into the services of the British army. To abandon these people, who had sacrificed their properties and reputations in America, who had obeyed their sovereign’s call to aid in putting down the rebellion, was not something the British ministry was prepared to do. It demanded that Congress return to these Loyalists all their confiscated property or reimburse them with new territory.
But the issue of Loyalists roused bitter memories among American Patriots. It was not just their traitorous behavior, their steady encouragement of desertions and mutinies in the American Army, their appearances in uniforms of the King’s troops. It was more even than the memories of men like Benedict Arnold. Members of Congress still remembered how, in that dark winter of 1776, when Washington was imploring the farmers of New Jersey for food for his destitute soldiers, the Tory squires of that state instead sold their rich harvests at good prices to Lord Howe and the British troops. And how, in the still darker winter that followed, while Washington’s starving and shivering army at Valley Forge was losing hundreds of men daily, the Tory drawing rooms of Philadelphia were brightly lit and lavishly stocked in honor of the British officers. It was a hard thing to ask this new country, already burdened with millions in war debt, with its political life yet to be established on a firm basis, and its industry and commerce all but destroyed, to recompense the very people who had done their best to wreck the Patriot cause. The British ministry finally accepted the assurances of the American commissioners that they would recommend the restitution of property to all Loyalists who had not taken up arms against the United States.
The preliminary treaty of peace was signed on November 30, 1782, more than a year after Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown; it was not to go in effect, however, until Great Britain and France had come to terms as well. Final peace arrangements continued until September, 1783, with the so-called Peace of Paris at Versailles. The thirteen former British colonies were now recognized as the independent United States of America. The territory of this new nation was to extend westward to the Mississippi and north approximately to the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. To Americans were granted the continued right to fish off Newfoundland. Private debts contracted before the war were to be repaid. Both British and Americans were to retain navigation rights on the Mississippi River. The United States, in turn, promised only that the Congress would “earnestly recommend” that the states restore Loyalist properties and that “no future confiscations” be made. This recommendation was never heeded by the state governments. Thousands of Loyalists fled persecution during the coming months and years and sought safety and a measure of happiness in Canada or overseas. Across the following decades many of their descendants returned to live in the United States, but Canada thus gained about 40,000 inhabitants who proved numerous enough less than a decade later to split that country into Upper (English) Canada and Lower (French) Canada, now the Province of Quebec.
To Spain was returned Florida south of the 31st parallel, which she had lost in 1763, and Minorca, which she had lost fifty years earlier, both as compensation for England’s keeping Gibraltar. Spain also retained all of North America south of the Canadian border and west of the Mississippi River. And France, with all her ambitions and hopes, wound up with a few West Indian islands, her West African settlements and a bankrupt treasury. More ominously, they inherited a spirit of liberte and egalite which, before the end of this very century, would throw their own country into a violent revolution.
News of the preliminary treaty did not reach America until March 1783, and since this treaty included an armistice, the war in America was thereby at an end. On April 18, the eighth anniversary of the night when Paul Revere and William Dawes had roused the minutemen of Lexington, General George Washington officially pronounced hostilities at an end. The Continental treasury was so empty that the soldiers were released from duty and sent home without pay, with only three months arrears in chits, signed by Robert Morris, superintendent of finance, and their muskets as a gift, relying on the goodwill of their new government to reward them eventually.