NET - The Delaware Dilemma

The other night, I was watching "American Experience: John and Abigail Adams," and something in the show prompted me to look up the "Treaty of Paris" that ended the American Revolution. (John Adams was one of the American delegates.) I found a version on a website run by the University of Oklahoma College of Law. What I saw shocked me--the text of Article 1 read,

"His Brittanic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz., New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and independent states, that he treats with them as such, and for himself, his heirs, and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety, and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof."

Thinking I had stumbled on a nice piece of trivia, I decided to double check. After all, this could be a simple editing mistake on the website and not the real treaty. The website I stumbled on next was The Avalon Project at Yale Law School. It also omitted Delaware.

I decided this might be an interesting post for my blog, so I wanted to see what others had written on the subject--I Googled the terms "Treaty of Paris," 1783, and Delaware, and found a version of the treaty that does mention Delaware. They even cite their source for the text. Still, I didn't know who ran Earlyamerica.com, and perhaps a well-meaning editor corrected a mistake that should have gotten a "[sic]" instead. So I kept looking. The next one that appeared to be the treaty itself was in Bartleby.com -- a website I remembered using back when I was in college. Age doesn't make one more or less likely to be correct, but on the Internet, having been around for 10+ years makes one ancient! Further--they claimed they got it from the Harvard Classics, and we have a nice, bound set of those. I checked the book--it, too, said "Delaware," right on page 186.

The next site that had the text of the treaty was Historycentral.com--another website I'd never heard of run by who knows who. They, too, mentioned Delaware--but their text was suspect, because it lacked the opening paragraphs. (OK--who can blame them? They drone on for 400+ words, tell us where Adams, Franklin, and Jay each were a "minister plenipotentiary," and could be quite adequately summed up by "We all agreed to end the war, so....")

You can begin to see the dilemma. Here I have two reasonably reliable websites that show the text one way, and one very reliable website and its source book, plus two more of less certain provenance, that show a different text.

Even knowing that anyone can make changes there, I looked up the Wikipedia article about the treaty, and their copy of the text. The result was some interesting trivia about Vermont and another copy ignoring Delaware.

My libertarian leanings make me loathe to trust the government, but this is a treaty, and therefore an agreement made by the government--so I'd think they'd know the right version. I tried looking up copies of the treaty in the .gov top-level domain. The first I found was a Library of Congress webpage that mentions Delaware. The second was the rather cryptic "Ourdocuments.gov" page that doesn't mention Delaware--but that cites the Avalon Project as their source, meaning they just got it from another place I'd covered. The former page also has a link to other Library of Congress webpages with "the original document from the Journals of the Continental Congress ..."--and a page that I take to be a scanned image from the page of a book containing the same. Both mention Delaware.

The moral of the story is that you should be careful who you believe on the Internet. I have no way of knowing which is right. I strongly suspect the actual treaty mentioned Delaware--I find it astonishing that John Adams, Ben Franklin, and John Jay could ALL fail to notice that glaring of a mistake. (I don't mean to impeach the British commissioner David Hartley--though I wouldn't expect him to be as familiar with American geography as our representatives.) The point is this: both versions could be taken as reputable: both have at least one source from the U.S. Government, an association with an Ivy League University (although the Harvard Classics weren't published by Harvard University--they were published by P.F. Collier and Son), and another unrelated private source backing them up. This is not a small issue--this is THE sentence where the British Government legally acknowledged that the United States was an independent country. Nor should it be a particularly hard fact to check, if you have the right resources--I would think the notes from the talks would be extant, and could be checked. What did the British ratify? What did Congress pass? I can only lament and conclude that these questions that, though they should be simple, have become difficult to answer because some professionals repeated others' mistakes and used less diligence than I did for a humble blog entry.