Carlisle Peace Commission

The Carlisle Peace Commission was a group of British negotiators who were sent to North America in 1778, during the American War of Independence. The commission carried an offer of self-rule to the rebellious colonies, including Parliamentary representation within the British Empire. The Second Continental Congress, aware that British troops were about to be withdrawn from Philadelphia, insisted on demanding full independence, which the commission was not authorised to grant. The Peace Commission marked the first time the British government formally agreed to negotiate with Congress; a previous informal attempt at negotiation took place in 1776.

The first attempt at negotiation between Great Britain and the rebellious Thirteen Colonies after the outbreak in April 1775 of the American War of Independence took place in September 1776, when a committee from the Second Continental Congress agreed to meet with Admiral Lord Richard Howe, who had been given limited powers to treat with colonies individually. The limited authority given to both Howe and the American negotiators made it a virtual certainty that nothing would come of the meeting. The meeting was a failure, in part because the Congress had recently declared independence from Britain, something Howe was not authorised to recognise, and because the American commissioners had no substantive authority from Congress to negotiate.

After the British defeat at Saratoga in October 1777, and fearful of French recognition of American independence, the Prime Minister, Lord North, had Parliament repeal such offensive measures as the Tea Act and the Massachusetts Government Act, and sent a commission to seek a negotiated settlement with the Continental Congress. The commission was empowered to offer a type of self-rule that Thomas Pownall had first proposed a decade earlier (and which later formed the foundation of British Dominion status). The fact that the commission was authorised to negotiate with the Continental Congress as a body also represented a change in official British government policy, which had before then been to treat only with the individual states.

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