On September 3, 1783, Great Britain and the United States signed the Treaty of Paris, formally ending the American Revolutionary War and recognizing the United States as a sovereign nation under international law. Drafted in late 1782, the treaty was later ratified by the Continental Congress on January 14, 1784, making independence legally complete and binding.
For Alexandria, the treaty confirmed what Parliament had already conceded the year before: that the town’s future lay within a new nation. Independence was no longer provisional or political—it was permanent, recognized, and enforceable in the courts and markets of the Atlantic world.