Deborah Sampson
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Deborah Sampson (1760-April 29 1827) was a female soldier during the American War of Independence who fought dressed as a man.
Deborah Sampson (or Samson, which was probably the original spelling) was born in Winnetuxet (later Plympton, Massachusetts) on December 17, 1760. She was her parents' firstborn, and had three brother and three sisters. When Deborah was five, her father went to sea. Because her mother could not raise the whole family alone, Deborah went to live with her mother's cousin Ruth Fuller, who died when Deborah was eight years old. She then went to live with Mrs Thatcher and worked as an indentured servant for the household of deacon Benjamin (or Jeremiah) Thomas. In her free time, she went to school or read. She also learned how to shoot a musket with Thomas's sons.
When the American War of Independence started, Sampson was fifteen years old. In 1779, at the age of 18, she finished her term of servitude and became a teacher in Middleborough public school.
In the winter of 1780, Benjamin Thomas visited and told Deborah that his sons had been killed in battle while serving under the Marquis de Lafayette. At the time, she was rooming with a married couple, Benjamin Leonard and his wife. The next year, she took the clothes of the Leonards' son and visited her mother and a fortune-teller, testing her disguise. Apparently it worked.
On May 20, 1782, Sampson enlisted for three years in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment of the Continental Army at Bellingham, Massachusetts under the assumed name of Robert Shurtleff (although other sources state a name as Shirtliffe, Shurtliffe, Shurlieffe or even Timothy Thayer). She became part of the company serving under captain George Webb (or Nathan Thayer), which was sent to West Point, New York. She served in a light infantry division.
Sampson was foraging for food near Tarrytown when she was shot in the leg. Fearing exposure, she refused to see a doctor and tended to the wound herself. The leg did not recover completely. During the following eighteen months she was wounded twice more: she received a sword cut to the head and another bullet in the leg. Each time, she treated the wound herself. Later, she contracted a fever and was sent to a hospital, where Dr. Barnabas Binney realized that she was a woman. Binney did not go public, but took her to his own home in Philadelphia to recuperate and spoke to her commanding officer.
When Deborah had recovered, she was assigned to deliver a letter to George Washington. Reputedly, Washington discharged her and gave her money to get home without saying a word. Her service was over. Officially, general Henry Knox gave her honorable discharge on October 25, 1783.
Following her discharge, Sampson's Baptist church excommunicated her for wearing men's clothing.
In 1784, Sampson married farmer Benjamin Gannet, with whom she had three children. In 1792, the Massachusetts General Court granted her a payment of 34 pounds for her wartime service. In 1802, she began to go on tours, wearing her uniform and talking about her wartime experience. In 1804, Paul Revere started a petition that eventually granted her a pension of four dollars per month and later a land grant.
Deborah Sampson died on April 29, 1827, in Sharon, Massachusetts. Her husband petitioned for compensation for medical expenses due to her wartime wounds, and her children were granted $466.66.
Books:
- Lucy Freeman and Alma Pond - America's First Woman Warrior (1992)