The acquisition of the Abner Weston diary by the Museum of the American Revolution around 2019 is worth a more sustained discussion, because it is the most significant addition to the primary-source record of Deborah Sampson’s story in recent decades.
Before the Weston diary, the evidence for the earlier failed enlistment attempt was substantially dependent on accounts that traced back to the Mann biography and to oral traditions that Mann had collected. These accounts were not entirely unsupported — the returned enlistment bonus and the church discipline provided corroborating context — but the contemporaneous documentary evidence was thin.
The Weston diary provides a contemporaneous document. It was written in 1782 by a militiaman who apparently witnessed or heard about the Middleborough enlistment attempt and recorded it as a notable event. The diary was not produced for publication or advocacy. It does not appear to have been written with any awareness that the woman involved would become a public figure. It is a private record that preserves what Weston saw and heard at the time.
The specific detail in the diary — that the woman hired herself to Israel Wood and was found out — adds a layer that is not present in the Mann biography’s account. The Israel Wood detail gives the incident a specificity that a later fabrication would be unlikely to include.
The diary’s implications for the Yorktown claim are significant. By placing the Middleborough enlistment attempt in January 1782, after Yorktown had already occurred in October 1781, the diary provides contemporaneous evidence that she was not serving in the Continental Army during the Yorktown campaign. This is not an absolute proof — a diary entry can misremember a date, and Weston was recording what he heard rather than necessarily what he saw — but it is stronger contemporaneous evidence than the 1818 petition that contains the Yorktown claim.