The signing of the Declaration created a new nation on paper, but it would take another six years of war and a peace treaty to actually inscribe the territory of a newly independent nation on the map. In 1782, representatives of the United States and Britain gathered in Paris to negotiate the treaty in which American independence would be recognized. At this time, the exact borders of the thirteen colonies were not entirely clear. Diplomats needed to determine which parts of the continent would be governed by the independent nation, and which would remain under British rule. This map, reproduced from the British Library’s collections, was a key document in that process. The original map was printed in 1775 and was used by diplomats to understand what was happening in North America. The thinner red outline was probably drawn by Richard Oswald, the British delegation’s secretary at the Paris negotiations. King George III himself added ten handwritten notes labeling the line as the “boundary as described by Mr. Oswald,” including off the coast of Massachusetts.
How do you show independence on a map? Is it enough for a diplomat and a monarch to mark up an older map with red ink? Or does a nation only appear when an entirely new map is drawn?