Deborah Sampson Gannett (1760-1827)

Sources

Continental soldier

Fame and Obscurity. Deborah Sampson Gannett was a controversial figure in her own time. Born into poverty, she achieved fame and a certain notoriety only to sink into obscurity again. Assuming male dress and the name Robert Shurtlieff, Deborah enlisted as a soldier in the Continental Army, saw action, and was wounded. She was discovered, and as her story was retold and exaggerated, she became something of a celebrity in the years after the war.

Early Life. Deborah Sampson was one of seven children born into a Plympton, Massachusetts, family. When her father abandoned the family, Deborah became an indentured servant and was adept at the innumerable chores of farm life. She also learned to read and write, and when she was eighteen, she taught school in the town of Middleborough. Tall (probably 5’7”), strong, and agile with brown hair and brown eyes, Deborah was considered plain by the standards of her day, but she could converse intelligently about politics, theology, and the war that engulfed the country during those years.

Army Service. Sometime in 1781 or 1782 Sampson assumed her male guise and visited army recruiting centers in nearby Massachusetts towns. She tried to enlist in the army at Middleborough but was detected; she went to New Bedford to sign on to a privateer but met with difficulties there too. Finally, in Bellingham she enlisted in the Continental Army and received a signing bounty of sixty pounds. With fifty other recruits she marched to West Point, New York, and received a uniform and military equipment. Women were not unknown in army camps; they were a common presence as servants and prostitutes. But Sampson’s masquerade was unique though there was nothing remarkable about Sampson/Shurtlieff’s military career except for her gender. She probably enlisted after the siege of Yorktown but saw action in New York against Loyalists and Indians. While fighting Loyalist cavalry near Tarrytown in 1782, Sampson was wounded, but she managed to escape being found out as a woman. She and her company were called to Philadelphia in the summer of 1783 to suppress a threatened mutiny of soldiers demanding their wages. Sampson contracted a fever in Philadelphia, and the attending doctor, Barnabas Binney, recognized her as a woman. Binney did not denounce her to the military authorities. She received an honorable discharge in October 1783 and headed home to Massachusetts, where she was expelled from her Baptist congregation for “Dressing in mans Clothes and inlisting as a soldier.” A few newspaper accounts concerning her exploits appeared in New York and Massachusetts. But she settled down to a rather mundane life, marrying Benjamin Gannett in 1785 and bearing three children.

Fame and Last Years. In 1797 Herman Mann, a news-paper publisher, wrote an account of Sampson Gannet’s military career, Female Review: or, Memoirs of an American Young Lady. This heavily fictionalized account brought renewed interest in Sampson Gannet just as Americans were looking back on the Revolution with nostalgia and pride. At the same time Sampson Gannett’s application for a soldier’s pension was stalled in Congress. The talented and famous poet Philip Freneau took up her case in an epic poem: “A Soldier should be made of Sterner Stuff—On Deborah Gannett.” He invoked shame on “Ye congress men and men of weight, Who fill the public chairs” for their inaction on behalf of “her who handled sword and spear” and “Despisd’ the Briton’s rage.”

Speaking Tour. Five years later, in 1802, Sampson Gannett, the only known female veteran of the Revolutionary War, embarked on a speaking tour through the North-east, appearing in uniform at theaters, giving a speech ghostwritten for her by Mann. Taking advantage of popular curiosity, Sampson Gannett capitalized on her fame. Her diary from this period shows her to have had a practical turn of mind; she arranged her own bookings and took care of details of costume and printing handbills.

Widower and Heirs . After her brief turn in the public spotlight Sampson Gannet returned to her family. In 1837, ten years after her death, Sampson Gannet’s husband, Benjamin, applied for a widower’s pension. Benjamin died before Congress could act on the request, but eventually eighty dollars per year was allocated “for the relief of the heirs of Deborah Sampson Gannett,” the heirs being her two daughters. Deborah Sampson Gannett was an ordinary person of extraordinary character and ambition—a soldier during turbulent times and a self-promoter during a time of Patriotic enthusiasm. Remarkably, she defied the sexual conventions of her time and not only got away with it but also capitalized on her transgression, becoming a hero of the Revolution.

Sources

Vera O. Laska, “Remember the Ladies”: Outstanding Women of the American Revolution (Boston: Commonwealth of Massachusetts Bicentennial Commission, 1976);

Fred L. Pattee, ed., The Poems of Philip Freneau: Poet of the American Revolution (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963).