The Treaty of Paris Ends the French and Indian War

The war whose approach had brought the colonies together at Albany ended on February 10, 1763, when Britain, France and Spain concluded a definitive treaty at Paris. Portugal acceded the same day, and the terms had been set out in preliminaries signed at Fontainebleau the previous November. France renounced Nova Scotia and ceded Canada, the island of Cape Breton and the islands of the Gulf and River of St. Lawrence to Britain. The boundary between the two empires was fixed along the middle of the Mississippi, though France kept the town of New Orleans and the island it stands on, and both nations were to have free navigation of the river. Spain ceded Florida, with Fort St. Augustine and the Bay of Pensacola. Britain handed back the captured sugar islands, Guadeloupe and Martinique among them.

Britain had won an empire and inherited a bill. The American Battlefield Trust's account of the war puts the national debt as having nearly doubled over the course of it, and the new territory, running from Canada south to Florida and west to the Mississippi, now had to be governed and garrisoned. Parliament looked to the colonies for part of that cost. Within two years the Sugar Act and then the Stamp Act made the intention explicit, and the argument over who could tax the colonies began in earnest.

The victory also loosened the bond it appeared to strengthen. With France out of the Great Lakes and the Ohio country, the colonies no longer needed British regiments standing between them and a rival empire, and settlers began pressing west into the land the Crown had just acquired. That October the King closed it by proclamation. Benjamin Franklin had argued the case for taking Canada three years earlier, in a London pamphlet weighing Canada against Guadeloupe, and the treaty settled the question his way. The settlement that removed the French threat also removed the main reason the colonies had to tolerate imperial control, and the quarrel that followed ran from the proclamation line through the tax crisis to independence.