“Thence along the middle of said water communication into the Lake Huron”: Tracking text exclusion and incursion in Article 2 of variants of the Treaty of Paris, 1783

Authors

Charles D. Bernholz, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

3-2015

Citation

Published online in American Indian Treaties Portal by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

http://treatiesportal.unl.edu/paris1783/

Comments

Copyright (c) 2015 Charles Bernholz.

Abstract

The texts of Article 2 of variants of the Treaty of Paris, 1783 were examined to understand the provenance of two passages that deviated from the boundary parameters found in official British and American copies of this document. Newspapers published in London, promptly brought to New York by the mail packet Lord Hyde, already exhibited the first fault. Afterwards, it is clear that a New York paper introduced a second inconsistency into this Article. The spread of these text mistakes into subsequent American renditions is discussed, as is the hypothesis that the British Foreign Office, in its initial distribution of the Paris text to London newspaper printers shortly after its arrival from the treaty negotiations, had induced the first text defect itself.