The American Revolution: A global war (Part 2)

Chloe: Just a note before we begin - this episode contains outdated and offensive language found in historical records. We have preserved this wording where necessary to accurately reflect the historical sources and their context.

It’s Christmas Eve, 1776, in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Spain.

For the best part of seven hours, a small American ship has been running for her life.

Behind her, a British warship of sixty-four guns looms closer and closer… when finally there is nowhere left to run. 

The British Naval Captain boards the ship to seize the documents on board, looking for vital intelligence they can feed back to the war effort.

"Is this it?" he asks.

There are none of the usual log books, letters, charts. Just three documents remain:

A licence to hunt British war ships. A set of orders from the Congress. 

And a copy of a document printed only months earlier. It was likely the first one the captain had ever seen in person - The Declaration of Independence.

He sends it directly to his higher ups. But they clearly don’t share his urgency. 

It simply goes into a stack of papers - where it will lie, overlooked, for the next two hundred and fifty years.

This cat and mouse chase was one of hundreds that would take place during the American Revolutionary War. The National Archives holds thousands of documents captured, intercepted or seized during this period - a great many of them taken from ships, far out at sea.

We tend to think of the revolution that made America as fought, and won, on American soil. But these records begin to reveal not just a hidden front - one fought on the oceans - but also the international scale of this war. 

Intelligence and ideas, money and arms, crossed oceans and borders to decide who would win, and who would lose.

I'm Chloe Lee, a historian and records specialist at The National Archives. 

This is On The Record.

And we're asking - how "American" was the American Revolution?

Chloe: In this episode, I'm joined by the National Archives historians and record specialists Graham Moore and Séverine Angers. They’ve both brought along documents from the archives that will help us bring this chapter of history to life. 

We're going to start where we finished last time. So it's 1776, a year into fighting between British loyalists and American rebels just before the Declaration was signed on July the 4th. 

Graham, you're one of the curators of our Revolution 250 exhibition, which you can still catch here at the National Archives in Kew until the end of November 2026. Can you tell us - what is the Declaration of Independence, and why did it escalate the conflict?

Graham: So the Declaration is a really interesting document historically. Now for people in the United States of America, they see this as the moment that the United States is born. The Fourth of July 1776, is their nation's birthday, which 2026 has been the 250th anniversary of. At the time, that's still all up in the air. We don't really see the United States recognised on the national stage until 1783 at the end of the American Revolutionary War when Britain finally relinquishes its claim to the Thirteen Colonies that rebelled against it. So the Declaration is kind of this big swing, by the Continental Congress, the governing body that is ruling these rebel colonies to say, we are a new nation unto ourselves. And in doing so, it's really a game-changing moment for them. It is a statement of no return almost for the Thirteen Colonies by changing their argument because, of course, previously they'd been saying that, we have grievances against the Parliament, against the government in England, um, that we believe our rights have been taken away. They're now saying those grievances are not against the government, but against the King himself, and that's what the Declaration is on a textual level. It's a list of grievances against King George III.

Chloe: Right. Okay. And most people assume it was sent to Britain, but that's not the case? 

Graham: No. Um, we actually hold the largest single collection of original copies here at The National Archives in the UK. So we have three of them here. But none of those were sent to us by the Americans in July 1776.

Chloe: Okay. 

Graham: Um, so no copy was actually formally sent to Britain, and the British weren't really the target audience. Or at least not British people in Britain.

Chloe: So this was something that was written for American audiences? 

Graham: Yes. 

Chloe: Or at least American in how we conceptualise Americans now. 

Graham: Yes, and we have to be careful when we talk about this history of when we use the word American, of course, because the audience is really people who are sitting on the fence, and they don't know whether they think of themselves as American or not yet. And the argument that it's making is you should be American, here's why.

Chloe: I see, and we talked a little bit in the last episode about how that was you know, really quite a live debate for some people. But we also talked about Britain governing the Thirteen Colonies from so far away from across the ocean. How long did it take then for news of the Declaration of Independence to travel across the Atlantic to Britain?

Graham: There's a huge sort of communications gap, right? And this has become part of the problem for Britain, has been the problem. We know that very early on, British officers and officials in North America know about this declaration, within days. But the full text won't arrive in Britain until a lot later. And the first copy that actually arrives in Britain, sort of copy printed in America, sent all the way across the Atlantic, is sent on the 31st of July. So there's a big gap here, and then it's gonna take several weeks to cross the ocean, and we actually know that that letter enclosing that copy only arrives on the 3rd of September, 1776, by which point this news has already sort of spread around Britain, but no one knows exactly what to do with it yet.

Chloe: So you said we have three copies of these original prints. Is that right? 

Graham: Yes, so the first copies are printed on the night of 4th of July 1776 in Philadelphia by a man named John Dunlap. So Thomas Jefferson, who's working with a small committee from Congress to draft the Declaration, takes that text, which has been ratified, finalised by Congress, signed off, to John Dunlap and they print overnight about 200 copies, and these are the original copies and they can be surprising to some of our visitors here at The National Archives because people don't always expect them to look the way they do. There is a very famous copy of the Declaration of Independence, which is in the United States National Archives, and that is a handwritten copy. It's got sort of beautiful handwritten script. It's got all the signatures at the bottom. That's not produced until late in July, where they're going around trying to get all those signatures on a piece of paper. The early copies are not ornamental display copies like that one. They are for quick distribution, so they're something we call a broadsheet print. It's a very wide piece of paper. It has a very sort of large capital letter block text title at the top. It's designed to be printed really quickly. You can pin it up on a wall. You can read it out in the streets like a sort of, like a town crier almost. We know that Washington reads one out to his troops, for example, and one is pinned up in Boston on their sort of town hall. So that's the original purpose of the early versions, and they have a life of their own. So the ones we have have fold marks where they've been folded up and carried around and sent in letters and things like that. 

Chloe: And that's true of the one that we have that was captured aboard what ship?

Graham: ​​​Aboard the Dalton. 

Chloe: Right and that's the copy we heard being discovered by a British Naval Captain at the beginning of the episode. This is a so-called Exeter Declaration. Tell us about this version, how is it different from the original?

Graham: So the version we have from the Dalton, which is captured all the way across by  Spain at the end of the year, looks a little different to the first ones. It's got two columns, not one of text, for example. Um, some of the type setting's a little bit different. Some of the versions have typos on as well, so you can really see this as kind of like a live news. 

Chloe: Ok, so take us back to the moment on the Dalton - what was this American ship doing near the coast of Spain in the first place?

Graham: So the Dalton is an American privateer, so her and the crew have a commission from the Continental Congress to attack British ships, and they then sail from the east Coast of the United States across the Atlantic to European waters up near the northwest end of Spain, where they are cruising around trying to capture British ships. That doesn't go so well for they're actually captured by a British naval vessel. Um, and they're in fact the first American ship captured in European waters. So it's a really landmark moment in the war as well, beccause it's that war in America almost coming home to Europe.

Chloe: Ok so this Declaration was taken through a process called "prize". Can you explain how that worked and why it was important? 

Graham: So prize is the process of taking enemy ships at sea in a time of war. Essentially, naval officers and captains of ships we might call privateers are authorized to take enemy ships, and then they would go through a specific legal process to prove that capture is what they would call good prize. And a good prize is a ship that you can prove is an enemy ship. If you're a privateer or a naval officer, during times of war, you can capture enemy shipping, but only enemy shipping, not neutral or friendly nations' ships. So usually you would retain any piece of paper you could find on that vessel that you've taken to prove what it is. This is what the captain of the naval ship should have done. 

It's a very odd case with the Dalton because he didn't do that. He sent most of the paperwork to the High Court of Admiralty, which is the place he's supposed to do it. But he takes the declaration out and sends it directly in a letter to the Admiralty in London, and he doesn't tell them what it is in the letter he sends. He just says, I found another paper on the ship as well. I think he's being quite coy about this. I think he knows exactly what he's found. But to him, this is probably the first copy of the Declaration he's seen. He doesn't know if the Admiralty has a copy of the full text yet. He thinks this is really live information 

Chloe: And Séverine, you're incredibly familiar with these processes, because you've spent time working on the Prize Papers project here at The National Archives, something that's expected to take 20 years to sort through. What do these papers reveal about why these clashes took place at sea during the Revolutionary War?

Séverine: So, I think it's really like a hidden front of the American War because when we think of, yeah, the American Revolutionary War, we think mostly of the events, you know, taking place, uh, on land. But yeah, the Prize Papers collection is just huge, and it really reveals how the ocean was a major theatre of operations because war at sea it’s a crucial component of warfare, like, throughout history, and the American Revolutionary War is no exception. So, war at sea, it involves, you know, all those big naval engagements, like two fleets fighting each other. And the American Congress is aware very early on that, you know, it's important to also take care of the seafront. And as early as in October 1775, they established the Continental Navy. Because it's also important to remember that the majority of the colonies, I think all of them except Pennsylvania, they're like coastal colonies, which is both a strength and a weakness because it's good, you know, for communication and supplies, but also a weakness because it means you're, like, harder to defend. But the Continental Navy, it's not established for big naval engagements because, remember, they're taking on, like, the Royal Navy, which is the best navy in the world at the time, so they know there's no way they can, rival them. And they don't even have the money at first to build new ships, so they repurpose merchant ships. And also, as the Continental Navy did not have the means, you know, to have a proper fleet, they relied heavily on privateers which is a privately owned ship, but with an official permission issued by a government to attack, and they're called letter of marque. It's a very old practice, you know, but it really has its heyday in the 17th century, up until the end of the Napoleonic Wars, so we're talking, like, 1815, uh, period. And yeah, that's what the prize papers reveal, like how much privateering is a crucial component that is often hidden.

Chloe: Right so the Continental Army is being bolstered by privateers. But they will need more support. Séverine, who do they turn to? 

Séverine: Yes. So very early on actually in the war, the Americans are seeking foreign support because they know that they don't have many resources, they don't have much money, they don't have as much military skills as the British do. So they need a strong ally. So they turn to France. 

First, it's Britain's biggest rival, you know. So, uh, the Americans think that France might be interested in joining them to get their revenge at Britain. Because it's not that long after the Seven Years' War, which left France humiliated, like they were driven out of the North American mainland. And France used to have this huge colony, uh, stretching from the Atlantic Coast of Canada to the Great Lakes all the way down to Louisiana. And after the Seven Years' War, all they have left are two small islands, which they wanted as a base for fishing, mostly cod. Uh, so they're humiliated. 

And yeah, so the Americans thought, Maybe we've got a chance of getting them on board. And also for France, like helping the rebels would be a way to weaken Britain. And there's also this hope for them that if the war is successful, they might regain some of their territory in North America. But also in France, like, so there's these practical considerations, but there's some genuine sympathy for the cause in France, too. And there's one, uh, French officer, like he's an engineer, and he reports back to the French minister of war that there's actually more sympathy in a single café in Paris for the cause than in the Thirteen Colonies. Uh, so that gives you a sense of like how big there was an enthusiasm for the cause in  France. We also have evidence in the Prize Papers of American clubs forming in France, you know, people drinking to the revolution. And so there's really this enthusiasm, which can be seen a bit as a paradox because, you know, France is a monarchy and the Americans are fighting a monarchy, so why would they help, you know, them fight it?

So, there's this important question. Like the newspapers in France and like writers who are like supporting the American cause, they make a point of saying that the Americans, they don't have anything against the monarchy as a system in general. They are against the British monarchy, like, which is considered like as tyrannical. And that distinction is very important because especially in France at the time when the, uh, revolution starts, they have a new king on the throne, like Louis XVI. So there's still like in France this idea that monarchy can actually be a good system.

Chloe: So before there was an official alliance then, it sounds like, on a kind of more granular individual level, French people were behind the kind of cause, American cause. Can you tell me a bit about the man who became the face of those volunteers who crossed the Atlantic to join the rebels?

Séverine: Yeah. Well, as they say you know in the musical Hamilton, it's the favourite Frenchman of the time, uh, Lafayette, uh, known as the hero of the two worlds. So, France officially became an ally in 1778, but yet, as you said, just before that, French officers as individuals decided to join the cause and cross the Atlantic to help the Americans, and Lafayette was one of them. He set for America in 1777, and he was extraordinarily young at the time. He was barely 19. Just, like, think about that. And he was also very wealthy and idealistic.

His life story is both like a bit tragic, like, he became an orphan at age 12, and he inherited a huge fortune. And also coming from a military family, he was very early commissioned in the French army as an officer, so he joined the army at age 14. He was married two years later, to Adrienne de Noailles. It was an arranged marriage, which turned into a, if not love, a very, very affectionate match. And, you know, during the first few years of his marriage, he was stationed at a different garrison in France, and his interest for the American cause really, really grew. And he decided that he wanted to join them because it fitted with his own ideals of equality and self-determination, which is kind of surprising for a nobleman of the time. And he also had a personal reason because he grew up loathing the British. His dad was killed during the Seven Years' War in a battle against the British.

So he really wanted to go to America, but at that point, like in 1776-77, France is still hoping not to join the war officially, and they're worried that if they send, you know, French officers that this will trigger a declaration of war from Britain. 

Chloe: Against France. 

Séverine: Against France, yes. So Lafayette is, you know, forbidden to go by his father-in-law, who is his commanding officer, but that doesn't stop him. Because he's very wealthy, he just buys a ship called, uh, La Victoire, and he sets for America in April 1777. And he learned English on his way to America, and when he got there, he met with Congress and George Washington. They got along very, very well, and he became his protégé.

Chloe: And how do the Americans react to this new arrival?

Séverine: At first I think some of them are a bit skeptical. Lafayette also doesn't have any practical experience. 

Chloe: And he doesn't have any official backing at this stage. He's a young man with a ship. 

Séverine: Yes, a young man with a ship. I mean, sure he has his army commission. He has a title. But you know, when you're fighting a war, you need a bit more than that. But very early he proved his worth in battle. He first saw combat at the Battle of Brandywine in September 1777, and he was praised for his bravery, and it's something that throughout the war is a constant. So even though he started without any experience, he proved his worth, yeah, very early on.

Chloe: Right. And we have a document that is directly linked to Lafayette. Can you tell us about it? 

Séverine: Yes, it's a lovely document. It's a letter from his wife, dated 1778, and it's simply addressed to Marquis de Lafayette with the army of the United States, which is something that is surprising because she didn't really know where he was, so she just addressed a letter to the American army.

Chloe: Did it find its way to him? 

Séverine: It didn't, no, because we have it. Yeah. So the ship that the letter was on was captured, off the coast of Virginia, just before, it was just about to reach its final destination when it was captured. 

Chloe: What does the letter reveal? 

Séverine: When you read it, you're like, oh, he never got it. And it makes it very sad because it's a very adorable love letter. So his wife, Adrienne de Lafayette, at the time, she's in Bordeaux. She lived in Paris, but she was visiting relatives there at the time. And so she opens with calling him my dear heart, which was their sweet nicknames, for each other. And she writes, you know, of her grief and fear of being separated from him. It's also a time of personal tragedy because the couple just lost their first daughter in the spring before, and she's struggling to go through this loss, you know, by herself.

And she ends the letter, you know, by begging him to take care of himself on the front line. So you have, like this, her own personal story in there. But also you can tell how she's also interested in the cause you know. She writes that she's sad to leave Bordeaux, which was this centre of support for the American cause at the time.

Uh, so she writes to him, "I have some regrets in leaving this town because here they speak of you constantly. My dear America is the subject of all conversations, and above all, here I have received news from you which fills me with hope. And finally, I have learned today that Monsieur d'Estaing has arrived in America." So d'Estaing was the commander of the French fleet that left France, you know, to go help the Americans. So you can know she's very well informed, about what's going on.

Chloe: Wow, thank you for sharing that. So you've really got a personal letter, really deep insight into someone that may not have been documented in the same way as her husband that not only reveals, you know, a deeply personal story of grief and change, but also of how… I'm just stunned by how politicised she is in the way that she's talking about “dear America”. So that letter was written in 1778. You mentioned there about the French fleet. When do the French give the Americans their official support, and what difference does that make? 

Séverine: So they give their official support in 1778 after a long process because France was already unofficially supplying the American with weapons, ammunitions, uniforms. But the Americans had sent some envoys like Benjamin Franklin to try to forge a formal alliance. So Benjamin Franklin had been in France since 1776, actually, and he was like a superstar there. Like, he was extraordinarily popular during his time. Everyone wanted to meet him. He was invited to the salons and all. And in part because of his great diplomatic skills, he was able to secure an official alliance in 1778. But the turning point to the French, like finally saying yes, was the Battle of Saratoga, which took place in 1777. So Saratoga, it's in the state of New York, and this was a decisive victory by the American rebels against the British Army of John Burgoyne. And it was a sign that, oh the Americans might actually win this, which is what France had been waiting for to officially give her support.​​

Chloe: So, Graham, the US have secured this key ally. Who are the British looking to for support, and why? 

Graham: In many ways, the British were trying to recreate the success of the Seven Years' War, where the fighting in North America on both sides, France and Britain during the Seven Years' War, relies very heavily on alliances with Indigenous nations. Britain has long-standing alliances with numerous Indigenous nations. The largest and perhaps most powerful of those nations is a group called the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, mostly based in what we would now think of as upstate New York. They are a very powerful alliance of six nations who have historically sided with the British and fought with the British against France during the Seven Years' War. 

Britain would love for them to join the American Revolutionary War against the rebels. But the Haudenosaunee Confederacy are very reluctant to do so and this becomes a major point of sort of diplomatic effort for the British as they try and persuade them to join what the Haudenosaunee see as, perhaps accurately, a British civil war that happens to be happening on their doorstep. They don't want to get involved, but over time they are pulled into this conflict.

Chloe: And how are the Indigenous nations spoken about in the Declaration of Independence, if at all? 

Graham: There is one mention of indigenous nations in the Declaration of Independence, and that is amongst the list of grievances against King George III, the Declaration alleges that the King has deployed what they call “merciless Indian savages” against the colonists in the frontier areas. And to understand the relationship between Indigenous nations and the rebellion, we have to look back at that long history of over 150 years of British settlement in North America. And what we have really is this, this frontier pushing west as colonists are settling initially along the coast, and they're looking to spread inland into territory of Indigenous nations. So there is this long history of conflict, cohabitation, agreements, disagreements, fighting and uneasy alliances between those colonies. And they become quite intermeshed with the Indigenous nations in some ways. What they're really doing when they settle in North America is entering an already very complex political system with hundreds of Indigenous nations who have their own alliances. And the British are initially trying to sort of get a foot in, in that. And then after a while, as they become more established trying to, in many ways, kind of play kingmaker in North America, playing off Indigenous nations against each other to gain a foothold

Chloe: And I guess this is where you have colonial agents going and kind of, trying to be diplomats on behalf of Britain with different nations.

Graham: We do. And those are the same structures that eventually the rebellion are also trying to leverage to bring some nations into the war on their side as well. And this is where we start to see divides in groups like the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. We have a really interesting document here at The National Archives, which is essentially an account of a Congress of those six nations where they're debating whether or not to join the war. And the ultimate settlement of that particular debate is they decide not to join the war. But we see in this transcript, British officers who are there trying to persuade them to throw in their lot with the British against the rebels. 

Chloe: So in the Congress of the six nations, they decide to not get involved. Is that right? 

Graham: They do initially decide to not get involved, yes. 

Chloe: So, the first choice was neutrality, but what happens in the eventual split? 

Graham: We see in some ways, some nations joining the British and some nations joining the rebellion. If we look at this at a very macroscopic level, it looks like four of the Six nations, chiefly the Mohawk nation, have joined the British side, and two, chiefly the Oneida, but also the Tuscarora nation, have joined what becomes the American side. But actually, even within those nations, it's never a done deal. They have not sort of formally agreed to join this conflict. We have, um, again, factions within those nations who have taken it upon themselves to fight with or help supply those nations.

Chloe: Okay. So this really doesn't reflect an official involvement at a national level. So what did the Indigenous nations provide the British with, and what do the British then offer them in exchange? 

Graham: So for the Indigenous nations they are looking for a confirmed settlement from Britain that will protect their lands, their territories, and their rights. This is something they've been promised for a long time, um, that has never quite come to fruition. There is an attempt to solidify this in the 1760s after the Seven Years' War, but it never quite gets off the ground. They want that confirmed. And on the flip side, for Britain, they want military support, and they want supplies. So for them, what they really need is auxiliary allies who can fight on their side, who are experts in the country that they're fighting in. 

Chloe: So let's just step back a bit. I'd love to hear from you both how much you think these alliances actually shaped the course of the war. Why don't we start with you, Séverine? 

Séverine: Yes, I think these alliances, they immensely shaped the course of the war because there's actually the argument that without alliances like, with France, the Americans might not have achieved victory, actually. 'Cause they got, from France, but also Spain will join through the family pact, uh, with France. So, they have like strong allies which provided them with, not only material support and manpower, but also expertise. 'Cause the Continental Army is not a well-disciplined army at first. And so French officers and also Prussian officers who are like bored and looking for employment in peacetime Europe will also go and help turn the Continental Army into a well-drilled and disciplined one. So this immensely helps, um, yeah, the Americans, going toward like that culminating point of Yorktown in 1781, which is, when the British Army surrenders. And that victory is often termed like as an American victory, but really we should speak of an allied victory. Uh, 'cause Washington actually at first wanted to attack New York, and it's the French who pushed, you know, to attack further south in Virginia where a French fleet, which was in the Caribbean, was coming up. So they thought we could meet, you know, halfway. It would be easier than trying to attack New York, which is much better protected. And so both Washington's army and the French army and the French fleet, they were able to like cut the supply lines of the Cornwallis' British army there. And after a siege of three weeks, yeah the British surrendered. So, without French support, yeah, the outcome might have been completely different, we could say. 

Chloe: Mm. So real kind of military might supporting the rebels there. And

Graham, what do you think about these alliances and how they shape the course of the war?

Graham: In terms of the Indigenous alliances in the war, I think really, they are indicative of not only how European nations and the United States have learned to fight in North America, but they're also indicative of, with the benefit of hindsight here, I think, a little bit, what will happen after the conflict as the United States asserts itself and attempts to gain control over increasingly large areas of North America. The war is catastrophic in many ways for Indigenous nations. They have these long-standing alliances, all the way up and down the Thirteen Colonies with Britain. Those are now essentially worthless 'cause Britain's not there anymore at the end of the war. 

In 1783, we see this argument for the peace settlement. One of the questions that they are debating over, they are arguing where should the boundary line be? How far west do the colonies go? France, as Séverine mentioned earlier, previously had this huge swathe of the colonised territory going from Louisiana all the way up to Canada. They would've liked it back, I think. That probably would've been a war aim. They don't get that back at the end of the war, and instead what we see is the original line of the British colonies, which claim territory as far west as the Mississippi River, being ceded to the United States. But the difference here is that whilst previously there was the right to access that territory, Britain writes that it is giving that territory, the land itself, ownership of it, to the United States. That land is not theirs to give. So what they've done there really is they've taken the old boundary line, in 1763 we have this proclamation line on the Appalachian mountains, they've moved that really far west. And they're doing that as a concession to the United States, essentially to kick France off the map. The United States and France, very close allies, have been throughout the entire war. That is a big future problem for Britain if they let it continue, so they want to prise that alliance apart.

Chloe: And also at the same time, they're sweeping all those promises to the Six Nations, under the rug, effectively.

Graham: Exactly. And we see nations like the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Six Nations, who have been in many ways devastated by this war. Um, George Washington orders something called the Sullivan Expedition, which is essentially a scorched earth expedition to destroy the homes, farmland, and livelihoods of the Six Nations. They can never recover from that. And they also no longer have the political footing to try and recover from that without this alliance with Britain. So we see mass displacement of Indigenous nations as well; a large proportion of the Mohawk nation, for example, move to Canada, which is still British, because they know now that they are not on friendly terms with the United States. 

Chloe: Thank you, Graham. So you've really shown us how, these alliances built on promises, you know, specifically for the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, don't come through, when  the British Army finally surrender. And that brings us to another group of British allies whose fate is similarly in question at the end of the war.

In the last episode, we heard a bit about the Black Loyalists, so enslaved people who were promised their freedom in exchange for their service in the war effort on behalf of the British. Can you remind us what had been promised to them and then what actually happened?

Graham: So in 1775, we have this document, the Dunmore Proclamation, which offers freedom to enslaved and indentured people if they will fight on the British side in the war. This is then reiterated in 1779 with something called the Philipsburg Proclamation, which extends that from not just Virginia, but to all the Thirteen Colonies, and is a bit more explicit about that offer as well to enslaved people. And this creates this group of people called the Black Loyalists, who escape enslavement or join up the British side, and they then fight on that side throughout the rest of the war. The end of the war, we again see this story of who wins and who loses in the final settlement, and the Black Loyalists are essentially set up for a fall by the British and American negotiators when they're negotiating that final peace treaty.

Deep in the records of the Foreign Office here, we have the draft treaty of the 1783 Treaty of Paris. And it has a really interesting addition. So this is drafted in 1782. It's the provisional articles of the treaty, and the idea is you would send these around, so everyone can sort of work through the settlement before you have the final peace treaty signed almost a year later. There's various different facets to the treaty about territory, about rights, about, setting up future diplomacy. But in particular here, we should look at the seventh article of the treaty, which is about the return of property at the end of the war.

Chloe: Okay

So most of this is about land and other types of property that have been lost. But what we see in this negotiation is a very last-minute addition in 1782 by an American negotiator named Henry Laurens, which specifies that this should also include any formerly enslaved people i.e. the Black Loyalists. 

Chloe: Because at this point in time, enslaved people are considered property. 

Graham: Yes. So Henry Laurens himself is a slave trader. He's actually spent most of the end of the war locked up in the Tower of London. He's released just in time to travel to Paris to join this negotiation, so he's really here within sort of the last few days before this document is there. So this addition we have to Article 7 is literally written in superscript between the lines and it specifies, I'm quoting here, that it includes the "carrying away of any Negroes" um, should be returned at the end of the war. 

So he is able to do this because he's tapping into a bigger political anxiety in the United States, and also in Britain, that this might undermine the transatlantic slave trade and the trade in tobacco, sugar, which both the United States and Britain now rely upon. In fact, one of the negotiators on the British side, Richard Oswald, used to be a business partner of Henry Laurens in the slave trade. So this is quite an insidious business that is right in the roots of this negotiation. 

Chloe: Yeah, I see that. And so what happened to the Black Loyalists in practice 

then? 

Graham: So, at this point, we have thousands of Black Loyalists who, at the end of the war, are mostly in New York as are most of the other British troops from the Thirteen Colonies. They're sort of retreating to New York, ready to evacuate, And the story of the year 1783 is basically Britain preparing to do this evacuation. Uh, for the Black Loyalists, though, it's a much more difficult story, because as soon as these provisional articles are released, which suggest that they could be re-enslaved, we have American citizens, previously we'd call rebels, I suppose we can now call them Americans, essentially descending upon New York to try and re-enslave Black Loyalists.

Chloe: To in their minds, have their property, in this case enslaved people, returned back to them. 

Graham: Yes, which they see as now justified under the terms that Britain is going to sign. It actually shakes out a little bit more complicated than that. So the peace treaty that's being negotiated is seen as quite embarrassing for Britain. And there is also this understanding amongst some British officers that the promise that was made in the Dunmore Proclamation in 1775, in the Philipsburg Proclamation in 1779, should be honoured. So we see, the commander-in-chief now of the British forces in North America, a guy called General Sir Guy Carleton, who's also in New York, um, arguing, we have these letters backwards and forwards with him and George Washington about the fact that he doesn't want to re-enslave the Black Loyalists.

They reach a compromise, and this is a compromise which is obviously still very dangerous for a vast number of these Black Loyalists who are still going to be enslaved, where a commission is set up, a joint commission of British officers and American officers, to review individual cases of Black Loyalists to basically ascertain whether they have the right to remain free. 

Chloe: And they must have heard thousands of cases? 

Graham: Yes, we know at least 3,000 people went through this process, because we have their records and their names written down in essentially a large ledger we have here at The National Archives, which the commission at the time called “The Book of Negroes”, and it is a list of 3,000 Black Loyalists whose freedom is being confirmed, and they're being offered safe passage to Nova Scotia, which is still a British colony. And those are the ones we can trace really well, and they've gone through this very arduous process. 

​​​​​​​And one of the peoples whose lives we can trace in some ways, due to this process of this commission at the end of the war, is a woman named Judith Jackson. So she escapes apparently very early on in the war under the Dunmore Proclamation and she writes a petition to Guy Carleton describing her conduct during the war, to show that she was acting as a Black Loyalist and that she should be eligible to remain free under that proclamation. She describes how she starts off as a washerwoman. She's washing clothes for Dunmore and his army in Virginia and then she moves around the United States, throughout the course of the war, working with the British Army. Uh, until at the very end of the war, there she is in New York, and suddenly she's at risk of being re-enslaved. She writes about how a man named Thomas Elbeck is attempting to re-enslave her and has already re-enslaved her child who she writes has been taken and carried back to Virginia already. So we're starting to see that families are being split up by this process. 

She has to be very careful with the way she describes what happened to her with Thomas Elbeck, because he is also claiming that he has a right to re-enslave her because he is a Loyalist. So under the terms of the Dunmore Proclamation, only anyone enslaved by a rebel had the right to escape.

Chloe: And to claim freedom after. 

Graham: And to claim freedom. So by saying that he's a Loyalist and that he was her former enslaver, he's saying she doesn't have the right to claim freedom as a Black Loyalist. 

So she's going through this process, and so we have her petition, and then the next document we have is the decision on her petition by the commission. And the commission decide, in very few words, to uphold Elbeck's claim against hers and that she should be re-enslaved. So we see this sort of judicial decision that changes someone's life. 

We can follow her story a little bit further. We don't know what happens in between the decision and the next document, but she's also in the “Book of Negroes”.

So at some point, the decision was overturned. And what I think happened, judging by the remarks in the book that describes her exiting on nearly the last day of the evacuation at the end of 1783, is that they, the commission no longer believed that Elbeck had actually been her enslaver in the first place.

Chloe: Right. So there it brings into light another question of false claims for enslaved people that were being made by the Loyalists. 

Graham: Yeah, and who has the right or the ability to leverage a claim. We see that Elbeck is initially believed over Judith Jackson. They eventually seemingly found more evidence in her favour, but they obviously decided to take his side first. And I think her case is just one example among thousands of people who are undergoing this very same process.

Chloe: I mean, stories like this sit really uncomfortably with the language in the Declaration, you know, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. For whom? 

Graham: I think so, because we have this idea, that the Declaration is staking its claim on and that have now become such a key part of what sort of this beginning of America is supposed to be, this idea of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, all men are created equal. These kinds of words. But we see as well throughout this conflict, people whose lives, liberty, happiness are being infringed upon by that same process. We have them mentioned in oblique terms in the Declaration of Independence. We have that mention to “merciless Indian savages”. Um, we also have in that same line, actually, a line about George III having “incited domestic insurrections” against the colonists, which is actually a reference to the Dunmore Proclamation. So in many ways, the Declaration is set up against the lives and liberties and pursuit of happiness of some in favour of others.

Chloe: And abolition for slavery doesn't come for still another 50 years?

Graham: No. And I think that's something to think about with the history of the Black Loyalists, is that they are in many ways precursors to this abolitionist movement, and some of them actually go on to be involved in abolitionist movements. But they are at a time where empire, whether that's British, French, or soon to be United States, imperial ventures and colonial ventures, are built on the exploitation of enslaved labour and the exploitation of lands belonging to Indigenous nations.

Chloe: Mm. It certainly feels like a trying on of different types of freedom, And what that means for different people, and who's left out of that conversation, and what freedom could mean for someone.

So we've heard how the surrender of the British impacted their allies, the Black Loyalists and Indigenous nations. How did this conflict impact Britain and its colonies? And how are relations between America and Britain after the Treaty of Paris is signed?

Graham: I think it's really important to cite this in the sort of longer context of British Empire in North America, but also around the world. So I believe at the beginning of the last episode, Sean spoke about this idea of seventeen sixty-three as this moment where the empire could reinvent itself. All these opportunities that are afforded by the treaty at the end of the Seven Years’ War, and this idea of a new modernised empire is something that the British government and monarchy are very interested in. And of course, they then run into the fact that the Thirteen Colonies do not want to be modernised in that way, and that is what becomes the American Revolution. Ironically, by losing the American Revolutionary War, Britain is actually able to now do that. They can create this new sort of modernised version of a British Empire. And we see this redirection of British Empire, because of course they've lost this vast swathe of territory in North America, to other areas of the world with renewed ferocity in ways that suggest they've learned from their mistakes in North America. So first, we see this consolidation of British control in Canada and also in the West Indies and the Caribbean islands. So they want to hold onto those, and they want those to function as the sort of main economic engine within this Imperial system. And then we see Britain looking elsewhere and looking to the East Indies, looking to Australia. The colony of New South Wales is set up not long after the American Revolutionary War. And in the way that colony is formed, we see the echoes of the Revolutionary War, where we have this much more direct control of the colony by the government centrally in Britain. And you can, I think, see there lessons learned. So Britain is taking a huge hit, but it's going to bounce back, and we haven't really seen the peak of the British Empire yet. 

And then on the other hand, we have this relationship with the United States of America. And this is really interesting because we have these two nations which, as we've seen, have this shared political history, this shared cultural history, all those things which used to tie them together, which are then used by the rebellion to argue for separation. These are one and the same. And there is very quickly this effort by the British government. It's actually in King George III's first speech to Parliament when he admits that they're going to sign the peace treaty. He talks about maintaining friendly relations with people who they're bonded to by blood, religion, culture, society across the Atlantic. And of course, that's tactical as well. 

Chloe: Yes. I mean, after all this discussion, can we come back to that question from the very start of the episode? How American was the American Revolution. really? What do you think?

Graham: And this is one of those great historical questions where you can take it any direction you like. Um, I think there's two different ways to think about this. On the one sense, very American in the sense that it's shaped by its fact of being in North America. We've seen over the course of the discussion we've had today how that gap in communication between Europe and America shapes the American Revolution, how the geography shapes the American Revolution, how we have this, sort of frontier warfare on one side, the control of the coastline on the other side, the ability to control choke points, which is what really clinches Yorktown for the alliance at the end. That's all so rooted in an Americanness of the American Revolution. But on the other hand, if we think about it in American in the sense of United States American, um, we've seen how you have these sort of, this shared history between America and Britain. And the fact that there is no Americanness to fight for yet in terms of a national identity. That's something that's being forged in this crucible of the Revolutionary War over this very time period. This is that fork in the road where we have now after this, developing a Britishness and an Americanness that are separate. So of course, in retrospect, if we look back over 250 years of the history of the United States, this is the American Revolution, right? This is where the Americanness comes from. But at the time, I think what that looks like is such an open question. 

Séverine: Yeah. No, uh, drawing on that, 'cause there's, this idea that this is such a watershed moment for the American nation, where it asked the question what it means to be American. And as we talked about with the Black Loyalists and, you know, the Indigenous, like who is included or not in this idea of liberty, equality, and pursuit of happiness. So, yeah, like who is included in that definition of Americans, I think is a good question. But also speaking only of American Revolution kind of reduces the scale of the conflict as well, because one of the main point we talked about today is how global it was. And so it reduces also the role of allies, both like Indigenous nations and also European allies into that conflict. 

(music up) 

Chloe: Thank you so much for joining me today, Séverine and Graham.

Séverine: Well, thanks for having us. 

Graham: Thank you so much 

Chloe: My thanks to our National Archives historians and record specialists Séverine Angers and Graham Moore. 

And you can see many more documents related to the American Revolution in our exhibition: Revolution 250: America’s Independence Story: 1763–1783 at The National Archives. It’s here in Kew, London until the 29th of November 2026. Or you can check out our website for exhibition highlights and more. 

That’s where you’ll also find a link to the Prize Papers - a collaborative project between the National Archives and Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities. 

I'm your host, Chloe Lee, a record specialist at The National Archives

Thank you so much for listening to On The Record. Subscribe wherever you are listening, so you don't miss new episodes, which are released throughout the year. 

You can also share your feedback or suggestions for future series by emailing us at OnTheRecord@nationalarchives.gov.uk.

This episode was produced by Em Whalley and Peggy Sutton at Reduced Listening for The National Archives.

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