JA spent a busy fortnight in the Netherlands conversing with his Patriot friends at
The Hague and with bankers and merchants in Amsterdam, paying his respects to the
Stadholder, and writing lengthy letters to Livingston on the sugar trade, on American
commercial opportunities generally, and on European politics. With
JQA he left The Hague on 6 Aug. and was back at the Hôtel du Roi on the 9th (
JA to Livingston, 10 Aug.,
LbC,
Adams Papers;
Wharton, ed., Dipl. Corr. Amer. Rev., 6:641; see also
JQA, Diary,
6–, 7, 8, and 9 Aug. 1783).
He found that no appreciable progress had been made in the negotiation at Paris, and
on the very day of his return the real explanation of the British ministry's tactics
was set down in a letter from London by Henry Laurens to his fellow commissioners.
Laurens had seen Secretary Fox, who conceded that the Preliminary Articles left much
to be desired but was unwilling to negotiate new terms “under the eye of, or in concert
with, the court of France”; it would be much better to start over again by the appointment
of an American minister to London, a measure that Fox said would be very acceptable
to the British government (
Wharton, ed., Dipl. Corr. Amer. Rev., 6:637–640). It was therefore agreed in Paris that the Preliminary Articles would
be ratified without change except for a preamble declaring them to be the Definitive
Treaty (
JA to Livingston, 13 Aug.,
LbC,
Adams Papers;
same, p. 645). On 3 Sept. this was done, at Hartley's lodgings in the Hotel d'York (now
56 Rue Jacob in the 6th Arrondissement, a building occupied by the publishing firm
of Firmin Didot). In the
Adams Papers are copies of the exchange of full powers and a text of the Definitive Treaty as
signed and sealed. For a printed text (from one of the two originals in the State
Department Treaty File), see
Miller, ed., Treaties, 2:151–157, with notes on the transmittal and ratification of the Definitive Treaty.
John Thaxter brought one of the originals to Congress; see entry of
14 Sept., below. The Commissioners' final report on the five-month negotiation was dated 10
Sept. 1783 (
LbC,
Adams Papers;
Wharton, ed., Dipl. Corr. Amer. Rev., 6:687–691); for some reason the original report sent to Congress is not in place
among the Commissioners' dispatches in
PCC, No. 85, though a long series of the proposals exchanged by Hartley and the American
Commissioners, selected in a somewhat hit-or-miss fashion and not carefully dated,
originally enclosed in that dispatch, is present in that volume.