Dreamer with a Gun

Remembering Deborah Sampson, American patriot

Portrait of Deborah Sampson, 1797

As some visitors to this space know, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the eighteenth century lately. In part, that’s because of my “Sestercentennial Moments” series, which marks key moments from 250 years ago in the runup to the American Revolution. But it’s also because I’ve been working on a book with the working title “Massachusetts Maverick Women: A Revolutionary Tradition.” The book will be a series of profiles (looks like about a dozen) of women from about 1620 to about 1820 who made a mark on American culture—poets, activists, wives, mothers, and more. The overarching argument of the book is that there was a unique cultural matrix in New England generally and Massachusetts in particular—a reform tradition rooted in the Puritan and libertarian elements in Anglo-American culture—that produced a striking breed of people that continues to shape American society to this day.

Right now I’m writing about Deborah Sampson, a poor woman who spent most of her life in what is now the Boston suburb of Sharon. In 1782, Sampson, a self-educated weaver and schoolteacher, presented herself as “Robert Shurtliff,” and enlisted in the Continental Army—in part for financial reasons—and spent the next year and a half as a soldier in the light infantry, where she saw action and was injured not far from where I live I Westchester County. (I also learned she had common ancestors with my wife, a figure very much in the tradition of which I write, which of course is no accident.) Sampson’s gambit was discovered when she fell ill amid an epidemic in Philadelphia, where she was sent as part of a detachment to put down an insurrection at the end of the Revolution. (This is a phase of the war in which the American cause almost unraveled and tends to be overlooked in the history books.) Because the revelation of her sex coincided with the end of the war, after which she had already demonstrated her prowess, she was discharged without penalty and went back to Massachusetts, where she married and had three children. But she also went on a lecture tour in which she narrated her experiences 20 years later—sometimes in uniform—and with great (though not entirely successful) effort, won a pension with back payments from the U.S. government. Yet at the time of her death in 1827 she was living a life of obscure poverty.

Though Sampson had attained a degree of notoriety at the time, it is notable that some of the leading lights of New England womanhood—Judith Sargent Murray, Mercy Otis Warren, and Abigail Adams—had nothing to say about her. (Adams’s son, future president John Quincy Adams, did, however, give a speech about Sampson in his post-presidential career in the U.S. House of Representatives, invoking her example in the fight against slavery.) I suspect that class bias had a lot to do with that. Though she thirsted for it, Sampson never quite attained the respectability of these early feminist icons.

In the centuries since, Sampson has been repeatedly rediscovered and reclaimed for a variety of agendas, notably the heritage revival of the early twentieth century (which had a distinctly Anglo-Saxon racial tinge at a time of surging immigration) and Second Wave feminist women’s historians engaged in the large project of reclamation. These days, it’s Sampson’s gender-bending that generates some excitement. The editor of a 2020 reprint of a 1797 biography of Sampson embraces the possibility that many earlier biographies strenuously avoided: that her sexuality may have been fluid. I myself see Sampson as an avatar of an American Dream of self-reinvention—which, like all American Dreams, is ambiguous and incomplete. But to return to the original point, I’ve become interested in her as a representative of a certain kind of womanhood which, while I don’t always agree with its stances, is estimable. All hail Deborah Sampson!