Benjamin West’s painting of the 1783 peace negotiations is half blank because the British delegation refused to pose. This episode goes beyond the textbook to explore the backroom betrayals, geographic blunders and economic strategy behind the Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolutionary War.

We examine French foreign minister Vergennes’s plan to confine the United States east of the Appalachians, John Jay’s decision to bypass France and negotiate directly with Lord Shelburne, and the surprisingly generous terms Britain offered. We then look at why the treaty’s provisions on debts, loyalist property and British forts broke down almost immediately, and how that failure exposed the weakness of the Articles of Confederation.

• Why Spain wanted Gibraltar and feared the American rebellion
• How Shelburne may have traded territory for a lucrative American market
• The Mitchell Map blunder at the Lake of the Woods
• Articles Four through Six and Congress’s power to merely “earnestly recommend”
• Why only Article One of the treaty remains in force today