The New Hampshire Gazette And General Advertiser

From a PHILADELPHIA PAPER of April 24.

many erroneous opinions and ideas have been adopted respecting the TREATY of PEACE and a false and tortured construction put thereon by designing and selfish men, we are happy in having it in our power to present our readers with the following extract of an official letter, dated Princeton, October 16, 1783 from the Delegation of a sister State to the Governor thereof; which will, no doubt, satisfy every candid mind as to the true intent and meaning of the Preliminary and Definitive Articles of Peace.

"We should before this time have transmitted to your Excellency the material parts of the communications Congress have lately received from the Ministers of the United States at Paris, had they not been under an injunction of secrecy, till lately, on account of their being under a commitment. In their joint letter of the 18th of July, the preliminary articles, and their reasons for concluding them, are explained. They observe, that the British were very unwilling to make use of any terms that might give uneasiness to the Refugee Tories; and that the words, 'for restoring the property of real British subjects,' were well understood between them not to mean or comprehend American Refugees. Mr. Fitzherbert and Mr. Oswald, they acknowledge this to have been the case, and will readily confess and admit it. They observe, it was a more delicate mode of excluding the Refugee, and making a proper distinction between them and the subjects of Britain, whose only particular interest in America consisted in holding lands and property.

They think, the 6th article, declaring that no future confiscations should be made, &c. ought to have fixed the time with greater certainty; and the more so construction is, that it relates to the date of the cessation of hostilities; as they say, that is the time when peace first took place, in consequence of prior, uniform, though binding contracts to end the war. They consider the definitive treaty as only giving the dress of form to those contracts, and not so constituting the obligations of them: they observe, that had the cessation of hostilities been the effect of a truce, and consequently nothing more than a temporary suspension of war, another construction would have been the right one.

They say, Mr. Hartley had officially assured them, that positive orders for the evacuation of New-York had been dispatched, and that no avoidable delay would retard that event; that had they proposed to fix a time for it, the British Ministry would have contended that it should be a time posterior to the date of the definitive treaty, and would probably have been more disadvantageous to us than as that article now stands.

They are surprised to hear that any doubts have arisen in America respecting the time when the cessation of hostilities took place there; and say, it most certainly took place at the expiration of one month after the date of the declaration, in all parts of the world whether land or sea, that lay north of the latitude of the Canaries. The ships afterwards taken from us in the more northern latitudes ought to be reclaimed and given up, and say they shall apply to Mr. Hartley on this subject, and also on the transportation of Negroes from New York, contrary to the words and intention of the provisional articles."