Deborah Sampson Gannett stood on a stage in Boston in March 1802 in front of a packed audience. Dressed in her military uniform—a jacket of deep blue, tight-fitting white pants, and a leather helmet topped with a bit of fur—and holding her musket in hand, she responded to shouted commands: “Poise—Firelock! … Take aim! Fire! Charge bayonet!”
The Boston audience went wild, as did the audiences in other cities in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York during her one-year stage tour in 1802–03.
Deborah Sampson Gannett was acting out the role she played in real life as a soldier in the Continental Army. She had bound her breasts, dressed as a man, and signed up as Robert Shurtliff. She served for three years, living every day and night alongside her fellow soldiers. Why didn’t anyone notice she was a woman?
Deborah Sampson was born just before Christmas on December 17, 1760, in Plympton, Massachusetts, one of six children. When she was only five, her father deserted the family. Deborah was sent to live with relatives since her mother was unable to support all the children, and at age 10 she became an indentured servant in the Thomas family in nearby Middleborough. On their farm she milked cows, spread manure, and stacked bales of hay to earn the room and board offered by the family in exchange for her work.
Deborah Sampson Gannett.
Library of Congress LC-USZ61-202
Yet she also became part of the family. During winters, she often went to school along with the Thomas sons and learned to read and write. When, at age 18, in 1778, she completed her obligation to the Thomases and was free to begin a new life, she stayed with them and secured a teaching position at a nearby school.
Four years later, in the winter of 1781–82, when the Continental Congress put out a call for soldiers in the sixth year of the Revolution and few men volunteered, Deborah decided to do so. While visiting another family for a few days, she borrowed a suit of male clothing without telling her hosts, dressed herself as a man, visited the local recruiting office, and, on December 17, 1781, signed up using the name Timothy Thayer. She also took the offered cash payment for enlisting.
Perhaps elated with successfully signing up and beginning a new adventure, Deborah, still dressed as a man, stopped that evening in a local tavern. No one recognized her, and she had some drinks. According to a story related in Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson by Alfred F. Young, when it was time for the new recruits to report for duty, she didn’t show up. Her absence was a topic of conversation at the recruiting office, which was in a private home. An older woman who had been in the home when Deborah signed the recruitment papers, who had known of Deborah when she was a schoolteacher in the area, commented that the young recruit had held a pen in the same way as Deborah Sampson. The woman voiced her suspicion that the recruit had been Deborah Sampson acting a part. Further inquiry led to the discovery of the borrowed suit of male clothing and of Deborah’s attempt to enlist. When she was confronted, she returned the bounty she had been given—minus the money she had used to buy a new dress.
The following spring, Deborah decided to try again. Tying her long hair in a ponytail and binding her chest with cloth, she wore a man’s suit and a ruffled shirt and traveled miles away from her home, away from people who might know her. On May 23, 1782, she signed up and became a private in the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment using the name Robert Shurtliff. Her first assignment was to a fort at West Point, one of the forts north of New York City, where she was chosen to be in the light infantry, the soldiers who marched before the main army. She was one of 10,000 soldiers who learned the formation drills she later performed onstage. She learned how to charge with a bayonet and load and shoot a musket twice in only a minute.
Fear of discovery must have been constantly on Deborah’s mind. How did she manage to hide her identity? As explained by historian Sally Smith, “Deborah was about five feet eight inches tall…. Army shirts of the day were loose fitting and by binding her breasts, Deborah evidently managed to appear not significantly different from her fellow soldiers. The lack of a beard was not an obstacle, for the desperate continentals were enlisting teenage youth into the ranks.”
But soldiers lived together, slept together, bathed together. When it came time for bed, like the other soldiers, Deborah shared a straw mattress with another soldier; yet, also like the other soldiers, she wore her uniform all day and all night as well.
There were close calls. On only her first assignment in June 1782, Deborah’s unit traveled to White Plains, where they were ambushed. Among the reinforcements who showed up as backup, she saw the face of a neighbor of hers from home. Disguised, seen out of context, and given the tense situation, Deborah wasn’t recognized by the neighbor.
She wasn’t so lucky in the summer of 1782 in an area near Tarrytown. Deborah’s unit was patrolling when it was attacked by a group of loyalists who charged with bayonets. While she fired with her musket, a loyalist soldier slashed her with a saber. Then she was shot in her leg. Her concerned sergeant carried Deborah on his horse to a French field hospital, where the doctor treating her first saw the head wound and treated it. When he asked her if she had other injuries, she denied it. Distracted by others who were injured, the doctor took her at her word and walked away.
Knowing the danger of her leg wound, however, Deborah picked up a silver surgical instrument she found nearby and used it to remove one musket ball from her thigh. A second musket ball was lodged too deep for her to pull it out and would remain in her leg for the rest of her life, causing her pain and discomfort. Deborah bandaged her leg, left the hospital, and made her way back to camp.
Deborah had enlisted late in the war. The English had actually surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia, in October 1781, months before Deborah enlisted, but she and the others were recruited to handle conflicts that continued during the peace negotiations. Those were the conflicts in which she and her fellow soldiers fought against loyalist groups that led attacks on civilians and soldiers loyal to America.
While it seemed as though the war would end before Deborah would be discovered, her luck finally ran out. While camped with her unit in Philadelphia, she contracted a fever that affected many in the camp. When she was taken to the hospital, she was too sick to be cautious and was probably asleep when a Dr. Barnabas Binney examined her and discovered her secret. Instead of turning her in, he took her to his home so that she could recuperate, and he encouraged her to continue in her identity as Robert Shurtliff.
While Dr. Binney kept Deborah’s secret even from his family, he did reveal it to someone who mattered: General John Paterson, the commander of West Point. When Deborah later met with General Paterson, she admitted her true identity. Instead of retaliating, however, he treated her with kindness. That meeting took place six weeks after the signing of the treaty that officially ended the war. Robert Shurtliff was honorably discharged from the army on October 25, 1783, and Deborah Sampson began a new chapter of her life.
By 1792, almost 10 years later, she had married Benjamin Gannett and given birth to three children. In postwar America, making ends meet was a challenge. Like many other soldiers before her, she sent a petition to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to claim the money she was owed from her time as a soldier. While she waited more than a decade for her claim to be approved, Deborah was creative and resourceful. Realizing she had quite a story to tell, she worked with a local writer, Herman Mann, to write The Female Review, a book about her life, as well as a theatrical piece about her time as a solider. In 1802–03 she went on the road in a show titled Mrs. Gannett’s (Late Deborah Sampson) “The American Heroine.” Handbills promoting her show were passed out in the towns where she performed. It was the first lecture tour by an American woman.
It wasn’t that Deborah wanted fame, though perhaps she enjoyed it. She needed money to support her family. While she received a small pension from the state of Massachusetts and made some profit from speaking engagements, it was not enough to end her worries. Moved by Deborah’s impoverished situation, Boston’s Paul Revere helped with her appeal for an additional pension from the government by writing a letter on her behalf, dated February 20, 1804. He ended his letter with the words: “I have no doubt your humanity will prompt you to do all in Your power to get her some relief, I think her case much more deserving than hundreds to whom Congress have been generous.” The result was an additional pension for Deborah.
While Deborah first appeared onstage dressed as a woman, by the end of the performance she was dressed in her military uniform. She marched, performed drills with her musket, and told audiences details of her life as Robert Shurtliff. But she didn’t reveal too many of the gritty details. “Thus I became an actor in that important drama,” she said to her audiences. She asked them to imagine “the perils and inconvenience of a girl in her teens.”
As she ended her Boston performance as Robert Shurtliff, soldier with the Continental Army, Deborah Sampson Gannett roused the audience by singing “God Save the Sixteen States.”
Mrs. Deborah Gannet of Sharon informes me, that she has inclosed to Your Care a petition to Congress in favour of Her. My works for Manufacturing of Copper, being at Canton, but a short distance from the Neighborhood where she lives: I have been induced to enquire her situation, and Character, since she quitted the Male habit, and Soldiers uniform; for the more decent apparrel of her own Sex; & Since she has been married and become a Mother. — Humanity, & Justice, obliges me to say, that every person with whom I have conversed about Her, and it is not a few, speak of Her as a woman of handsom talents, good Morals, a dutifull Wife and an affectionate parent. —She is now much out of health; She has several Children; her Husband is a good sort of a Man, ‘tho of small force in business; they have a few acres of poor land which they cultivate, but they are really poor.
She told me, she had no doubt that her ill health is in consequence of her being exposed when She did a Soldiers duty; and that while in the Army, She was wounded. We commonly form our Idea of the person whom we hear spoken off, whom we have never seen; according as their actions are described, when I heard her spoken off as a Soldier, I formed the Idea of a tall, Masculine female, who had a small share of understandg, without education, & one of the meanest of her Sex. — When I saw and discoursed with I was agreeably supprised to find a small, effeminate, and converseable Woman, whose education entitled her to a better situation in life.
I have no doubt your humanity will prompt you to do all in Your power to get her some relief, I think her case much more deserving than hundreds to whom Congress have been generous.
I am Sir with esteem & respect Your humble Servant
Paul Revere
“Letter on Behalf of Deborah Sampson Gannett” The Paul Revere House
www.paulreverehouse.org/gift2/details/46-51.pdf
Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier by Alfred Young (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004)
Women of the American Revolution by Mary R. Furbee (Lucent Books, 1999)