Peering into the Josiah Austin Story

Back in 2020 the Spared & Shared website, which usually presents documents from the U.S. Civil War, published the transcript and scans of an account of events on 19 Apr 1775.

Attributed to Josiah Austin, “formerly of Charlestown now of Salem,” this narrative describes the effort of driving a wagon load of “powder & balls” from Concord as the British army closed in.

Indeed, according to this document, regulars actually found the wagon disabled on the road, only to ignore the men with it as “affrightened ‘Yankees,’ returning from market.”

Earlier this year, Alexander Cain at Historical Nerdery did a fine job of pointing out the holes in this account.

The transcription quotes Austin stating “he was at Concord with Col. Barrett and others on the 18th of April 1775 having in charge ammunition &c.” We know that James Barrett was storing a large amount of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s military supplies on his farm—until a couple of days before, when the family and friends started to move that stuff to better hiding-places.

Alex Cain points out that those hiding-places were naturally to the west, further away from Boston and any expedition coming from there. Yet Austin said his wagon went east “toward Lexington.” Why the hell would anyone drive a wagon of secret ammunition toward the military search party?

We also have the names of men employed by the Massachusetts Patriots to help Barrett gather and prepare military supplies. One man was John Austin. None was named Josiah Austin.

The British expedition stopped several young men riding out on the roads on the night of 18–19 April, sometimes detaining them for hours. (One, Asahel Porter, was killed in the shooting on Lexington common.) Cain notes it would therefore be quite odd for some soldiers to come across a wagon in the vicinity of the place they had been ordered to search and pass by without examining the cargo.

Finally, Austin claimed that the British soldiers he met were “pioneers,” but none of those specialized soldiers were assigned to the march to Concord.

I have nothing to add to Alex Cain’s cutting analysis of the document’s content. But I’ll make an observation about its form. The first six lines refer to “Col. Barrett” twice—but only after editing.

Spared & Shared’s scans of the handwritten document show that originally the transcriber wrote another name, possibly “Butler.” Sometime after the original writing, that name was crossed out and replaced with “Barrett.” We don’t know how much later that change was made. We don’t know if someone looking up Barrett’s name in historical sources prompted that change as a correction.

But we do know that whoever first told this story didn’t initially remember the name “Barrett,” even though Josiah Austin was supposed to have worked with Col. Barrett and traveled on the ammunition wagon with Barrett’s son.

That’s just one more reason to deem this account dubious. Josiah Austin might have been telling an exaggerated story to a credulous transcriber, or the entire document might have been concocted.