Please click the icon to follow us on Facebook.on this day at his lodgings in the Hotel d'York in Paris, the British Member of Parliament David Hartley signed a treaty agreement that sold the territories of the Thirteen Colonies for cash and bought the liberty of five hundred thousand enslaved African loyalists using future trading tarriffs to be collected by the City of London.

With both parties favouring a neutral location, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay had not been invited to the Embassy at 44 Rue Jacob. And to remove any scintilla of celebration from the inauspicious treaty signing location the British delegation then departed, refusing to pose for a never-to-be-completed painting by the artist Benjamin West.

If the British continued to harbour resentment towards their "former colonists", then perhaps the patriots could take some satisfaction from the settlement. Because not only had the last vestiges of hated British authority been removed, but also the legacy issue of slavery which otherwise would surely have left a pernicious stain in the revolutionary fabric of the new nation. Certainly Franklin knew this best of all. Not only had he published abolitionist tracts for half a century, but he had been there to console Thomas Jefferson when his more idealistic statements were struck from the Declaration of Independence.

Even if the British had turned against slavery more quickly than expected, the "national interest" was a driving force in policy making. Of course the British desperately needed additional labour resources to commercial exploit the sugar islands and refill the Treasury's woefully depleted coffers. And over the next few years as the freedman were transhipped to the Caribbean, European immigrants arrived to take their place (albeit as paid workers) on the cotton plantations of the south. After all, when the Contintental Congress commissioned Messrs Adams, Franklin and Jefferson to design a seal for the United States, they produced a national emblem only depicting Americans of English, Scottish, Irish, French, German and Dutch Extraction.