November 30 · This Day in America
In a Paris hotel, the men of the new republic put their names to the preliminary peace. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, John Jay, and Henry Laurens have spent two months across the table from the British, bargaining over fishing banks and debts and borders — and over the only word that mattered. In the first article, the Crown acknowledges the thirteen states to be "free, sovereign and independent," and renounces all claim to them forever. The shooting had largely stopped after Yorktown a year before. But until this paper, independence was a thing declared, not a thing granted. Now the other side has written it down too. The final Treaty of Paris next September will barely change a word of it. A ragged colonial revolt that most of the world expected to fail has won, in writing, at a negotiating table. The country exists. It is signed.
Source: history.state.gov
Also on this day · 1835
In tiny Florida, Missouri, Samuel Langhorne Clemens is born two weeks after Halley's Comet swings closest to the sun. He will become the writer who teaches America how to sound like itself. Late in life he tells his biographer that he came in with the comet and means to go out with it — that the Almighty surely paired "these two unaccountable freaks." He died on April 21, 1910, the day after the comet returned. He kept his appointment.
Source: www.pbs.org
“I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.”Mark Twain, to biographer Albert Bigelow Paine, 1909