John Adams to Samuel Huntington, March 30, 1780

Paris, March 30 1780. RC in John Thaxter’s hand (PCC, No. 84, I, f. 383–384). printed : Wharton, ed., Dipl. Corr. Amer. Rev. description begins The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States , ed. Francis Wharton, Washington, D.C., 1889; 6 vols. description ends , 3:581–582.

Read by Congress on 11 Sept., this letter contained an account of a confrontation in February between several corps of Irish volunteers and a body of British regulars at Dublin that resulted in the regulars being forced to give way to the volunteers to avoid bloodshed. Adams saw the outcome as an indication of the volunteers’ confidence in their own strength and compared the confrontation to similar ones in Boston before the Revolution.