SYMHC Classics: Deborah Sampson

This 2022 episode covers Deborah Sampson, who could count William Bradford and Myles Standish in her family tree. That tree didn’t include Robert Shurtliff; that was the alias Deborah used to enlist in the Continental Army. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  Happy Saturday. May 23rd is Deborah Sampson Day in Massachusetts. So since it's May 23rd, we've chosen our episode on her as today's Saturday classic. Deborah Sampson served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War under the name Robert Shirtlift.

• 2:26Holly Frey?

  This originally came out on July 4th, 2022. Enjoy.

• 2:33Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:47Holly Frey?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  This episode is coming out on July 4th, which is Independence Day in the US. So since we have an episode coming out on the day itself, which hasn't happened in a very long time, I thought we'd do something that's both thematically related and also a listener request. That is Deborah Sampson, who's known by her married name of Deborah Sampson-Gannett as well. Just as a note upfront, we recognize that gender is broader and more nuanced than this, and that was not, that is not a new idea. Deborah Sampson was descended from multiple people who arrived in North America aboard the Mayflower in 1620, at which point there were indigenous nations all over the continent that recognized and continue to recognize

• 3:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  more than two genders. We've also talked about people like the public universal friend, who we covered on the show in 2020, and the friend lived at the same time as Deborah Sampson did. They described themselves as genderless. But the communities that Deborah Sampson was part of saw things as very, very, very binary. That applies to everything from people's descriptions of her, to how children were educated, to laws about dress. And it is central to what made her famous, which is serving in the Continental Army as Robert Shirtlift during the Revolutionary War.

• 4:10Holly Frey?

  Deborah Sampson was born on December 17th, 1760, in Plimpton, Massachusetts, which is just inland from Plymouth. Her family spelled their last name S-A-M-S-O-N. The spelling with the P in the middle shows up in her life later on. Deborah's parents were Jonathan Sampson Jr. and Deborah Bradford Sampson, and as Tracy just said, they were both descended from people who had traveled to North America aboard the Mayflower. The elder Deborah Sampson was the great granddaughter of Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford. Jonathan's ancestors included Myles Standish and John and Priscilla Mullins Alden, who today are probably best known as characters from The Courtship of Myles Standish by Henry

• 4:55Holly Frey?

  Wadsworth Longfellow.

• 4:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  Deborah was one of seven children, and the family was poor. Jonathan was a farm laborer and claimed that he had been cheated out of his inheritance from his late father, and that his being cheated out of that money was the root of the family's poverty. But there are probate records showing that Jonathan Sampson Sr.'s estate, looks like it was divided up pretty fairly. And then there are also records showing that Jonathan sold his property to his brother-in-law shortly after his father's death.

• 5:28Holly Frey?

  Family drama. Jonathan Sampson eventually went to sea, and when the young Deborah was about five, he didn't come back from a voyage. The family was informed that he had died in a shipwreck, and it's possible that Deborah believed this was what happened to him. But in reality, he had moved to what is now Maine, where he and a woman named Martha lived as a married couple, and he had two more children with her.

• 5:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  Deborah's mother could not afford to raise seven children on her own, so Deborah and at least some of her siblings were sent to live with various friends and relatives. Then when Deborah was 10, she was indentured to the Thomas family. Some sources say that she was indentured to Benjamin Thomas, deacon at First Church of Middleborough, and others say it was to Jeremiah and Susan Thomas. There were so many Thomases living in this area that it was nicknamed Thomas Town, and Susan was Benjamin's daughter, so it's understandable that there is some confusion about exactly who she was indentured to.

• 6:33Holly Frey?

  This was a large family with more boys than girls. And although Deborah wasn't provided with an education the way that the family's children were, she did use their books and school materials to teach herself to read and write.

• 6:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  Most of the documentation we have of Deborah's young life comes from a biography by Herman Mann that was published for the first time in 1797. Parts of that biography were definitely fabricated, and we will be talking about that more in a bit. But it does seem like she learned to do various types of work around the home and the farm during her indenture. And this included tasks that were more often done by men and boys, like plowing and whittling.

• 7:17Holly Frey?

  Sampson's indenture ended when she was 18. For the next couple of years, she worked as a teacher during the summers, in the window between when crops were planted and when they were harvested. In the colder months, she worked as a spinner and a weaver.

• 7:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  She also joined First Baptist Church of Middleborough on November 12, 1780. That was shortly before she turned 20. Although there was a pretty big Baptist community in Middleborough, they had at least three Baptist churches. Most people in the area were congregationalists, especially the people who had the most wealth and power and influence. Baptists were really seen as outsiders.

• 7:56Holly Frey?

  This was all happening during the Revolutionary War, and we don't know much about how the war's earlier years affected Deborah Sampson. That 1797 biography does give a lengthy recounting of a vivid and violent dream she reportedly had just before the Battle of Lexington in 1775, though. It's not totally clear whether this is a dream she actually had, or whether it's a dramatic embellishment. But if it really happened, it may have reflected her fear and anxiety about what was going on.

• 8:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  Although thousands of men joined the military at the start of the war, by the late 1770s, the Continental Army was really struggling to find recruits. Recruitment happened at the state level, and the state started drafting people and offering incentives to entice people to join. This included offering bounties for people who volunteered to serve in the place of men who had been drafted but didn't want to go.

• 8:55Holly Frey?

  Although this did motivate some people to join, it also caused some issues. For example, Massachusetts set quotas for how many recruits each town should provide, and it was up to the towns to decide how much money they would offer as a bounty. This led some people to basically shop around for the biggest bounty they could find. Men were expected to enlist for three years or until the end of the war, whichever came first, but some just disappeared as soon as they claimed their bounty.

• 9:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, this caused various issues. In addition to the disappearance of people who had claimed a bounty and then just vanished, they were disproportionately enlisting people who were desperate for money and maybe not people who were, uh, who would do well as soldiers. Um, there was a whole many layers going on with this. Sampson's first attempt to join the army might have been in pursuit of a bounty. This is documented in a diary entry by Abner Weston dated January 23rd, 1782. This diary was found in New Hampshire in 2018 and then bought by the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia in 2019.

• 10:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  Somehow it did not cross my radar for any of the unearthed episodes that happened during that time.

• 10:16Holly Frey?

  Weston wrote, quote, "There happened an uncommon affair at this time for Deborah Sampson of this town, dress herself in men's clothes and hired herself to Israel Wood to go into the three-year service, but being found out, returned the hire and paid the damages."

• 10:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  Other second and third-hand accounts add some other details to this, including that Sampson was living in the home of Captain Benjamin Leonard, who employed her as a weaver, and that a woman named Jenny helped her steal some of Leonard's son's clothes. Jenny is described as the daughter of an enslaved woman and as Sampson's roommate at the Leonard House, where Jenny was probably working as a servant.

• 10:56Holly Frey?

  After giving her name as Timothy Thayer and receiving her bounty, Sampson went to a tavern and drank, then came home intoxicated, got into bed with Jenny, and got up and went about her business the next morning. When Timothy Thayer didn't report to be mustered in, a woman who had been in the room when he enlisted said she noticed that he held a pen just like Deborah Sampson. Apparently Sampson's way of holding a pen was distinctive because of an injury to one of her fingers. And after being questioned, Sampson reportedly confessed and returned the bounty money.

• 11:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  This was really a scandal. And although Herman Mann's biography gave some other reasons, Sampson may have enlisted for the second time to try to get away from it. We will get to that after a quick sponsor break.

• 11:46Speaker 04

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• 11:48Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 12:17Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 12:29Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 12:40Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 13:31Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 14:21Holly Frey?

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• 15:05Holly Frey?

  Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 15:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  On May 20th, 1782, Robert Shurtliff accepted an enlistment bounty from the town of Uxbridge, Massachusetts. He was tall, taller than the average soldier, but apparently too young to grow facial hair. There were no physical exams required to enlist at this point. Nobody had to provide any kind of documentation of their name or their age. About a year and a half would pass before anybody realized that Robert Shurtliff, whose name is spelled a lot of different ways in various records, before anybody realized that he had previously been known to everybody before this point as Deborah Sampson.

• 16:00Holly Frey?

  Shurtliff was mustered into the 4th Massachusetts Regiment at Worcester, Massachusetts, three days later. He marched with the regiment to West Point, where he was assigned to Captain George Webb's Company of Light Infantry. The Light Infantry was seen as an elite group, made up of young, agile men who could move quickly, do reconnaissance, and engage in skirmishes with the enemy.

• 16:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  Webb's Company spent most of their time in the Hudson River Valley. The Battle of Yorktown had ended the previous fall, and that is seen as the last major battle of the Revolutionary War and as a decisive victory for the United States. But the war did not actually end for almost two more years after that. Much of the Hudson River Valley was neutral ground between US territory and New York City, which was still being held by the British. But there were lots of troops from both sides in this area. There were also French troops who were allied with the United States, as well as indigenous peoples. Some were on the side of the British and some of the United States.

• 17:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  In this particular area, they were more likely to be allied with or otherwise support the British.

• 17:10Holly Frey?

  Although this area didn't see any major battles in 1782 or 1783, there were lots of smaller skirmishes. Later on, Herman Mann's biography of Deborah Sampson would recount a dramatic tale of her being seriously wounded with a head injury and two musket balls lodged in her thigh. She was so afraid that her sex would be discovered that she thought about taking her own life with a pistol. Instead, she made her way to a French encampment where she allowed a French doctor to treat and dress her head wound before sneaking away with some wine, a penknife, and a needle to extract the musket balls herself. She was able to remove one of them and treat and dress the wound, but the other remained

• 17:54Holly Frey?

  in her body for the rest of her life.

• 17:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  It is extremely likely that during her time as Robert Shurtliff, Deborah Sampson really was wounded in action and really was disabled afterward. She had to document all that to receive pensions for her service, which she did. We'll talk about that more later. However, this part of Sampson's biography is uncannily similar to another work, which was titled "The Female Soldier." That describes the experiences of Hannah Snell, who joined the British Army as James Gray in 1745 and fought against the Jacobites.

• 18:32Holly Frey?

  Back in Middleborough, Massachusetts, First Baptist Church was deciding what to do about Deborah Sampson's earlier enlistment as Timothy Thayer. The church minutes from September 3rd, 1782 read, "The church considered the case of Deborah Sampson, a who last spring was accused of dressing in men's clothes and enlisting in the army, and although she was not convicted, yet was strongly suspected of being guilty, and for some time before behaved very loose and un-Christian-like, and at last left our parts in a sudden manner, and it is not known among us where she has gone. And after considerable discourse, it appeared that as several brethren had labored with her before she went away, without obtaining satisfaction,

• 19:15Holly Frey?

  concluded that it is the church's duty to withdraw fellowship until she returns and makes Christians satisfaction."

• 19:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, that means they basically kicked her out and she apologized and was absolved for having done wrong. A couple of other notes on this. Today, the word loose has sexual connotations when it's used in this kind of a context, but at the time, it was more of a general description of bad behavior. And in terms of a conviction, crossdressing had been outlawed in Massachusetts since the 1690s. The prohibition on crossdressing also traced back to a verse in the biblical book of Deuteronomy, which described men dressing in women's clothes and vice versa as an abomination.

• 20:00Holly Frey?

  To return to Sampson's time as Robert Shurtliff, that injury made it impossible to keep up with the light infantry. So Shurtliff seems to have convinced someone to assign him to the task of caring for a wounded soldier who could not be moved. After that, Shurtliff was given another assignment in 1783, this time working as a waiter for General John Patterson. This wasn't a food service position. It was more like a personal servant.

• 20:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  Shurtliff accompanied Patterson and his unit to Philadelphia, which at the time was the US Capitol. An armistice went into effect on April 19, 1783. And as the US started demobilizing its forces, it furloughed troops without fully paying people for their services, also without a clear plan for funding pensions for anybody. Demands for pay and for better conditions were part of a mutiny along the Pennsylvania line in 1783, and Patterson's troops were sent to Philadelphia to try to put that mutiny down.

• 21:02Holly Frey?

  In Philadelphia, Robert Shurtliff became ill with a fever and delirium and was hospitalized. The cause isn't clear, although there were epidemics of both measles and smallpox in Philadelphia at that time. Measles is the more likely of the two, since the various descriptions of this don't include typical smallpox symptoms. And George Washington had ordered the troops to be inoculated against it.

• 21:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, it could have been something totally else, but those two diseases really were rampant. While working at a hospital in Philadelphia, Dr. Barnabas Benny discovered that one of his patients, known as Robert Shurtliff, was wearing a breast binding, but he kept that a secret. It is not totally clear how Sampson's commanding officers eventually learned her identity. In Mann's book, Benny gave her a letter that explained the whole situation and told her to deliver it to General Patterson. And she did that even though she was pretty sure the letter was saying that she was a woman. Later, even more romanticized versions of this claimed that she gave the letter not to Patterson, but to George Washington himself.

• 22:11Holly Frey?

  Whatever those details were, General Henry Knox granted Robert Shurtliff an honorable discharge on October 23, 1783. And this is not at all how the Continental Army or the various militias generally dealt with women who tried to enlist or with people who successfully enlisted but were later discovered to have female bodies. It was way more common for people to be publicly shamed, charged with crimes, including fraud and crossdressing, or subjected to just deeply humiliating and traumatizing physical examinations, which really were just sexual assaults. It's possible that there are other women who managed to serve undetected in the Revolutionary War

• 22:55Holly Frey?

  or people who might describe themselves as non-binary or as transgender men today. But the honorable discharge of Robert Shurtliff is really unique.

• 23:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  After being discharged, Sampson returned to Massachusetts. And as far as we know, once she got there, she resumed her life as Deborah Sampson. The first public report of her service in the Revolutionary War was published just a few months later. It named Robert Shurtliff, but it did not mention Sampson's name, quote, "for particular reasons." It doesn't say what they are, just that they're particular.

• 23:31Holly Frey?

  This was printed in the Independent Gazette, or the New York Journal Revived, on January 10, 1784. And it was picked up by other newspapers later on. It began, quote, "An extraordinary instance of virtue in a female soldier has occurred lately in the American Army in the Massachusetts Line. There's a lively, comely young nymph, 19 years of age, dressed in man's apparel, has been discovered. And what redounds to her honor she has served in the character of a soldier for near three years undiscovered, during which time she displayed herself with activity, alertness, chastity, and valor, having been in several skirmishes with the enemy

• 24:12Holly Frey?

  and received two wounds, a small shot remaining in her to this day. She is a remarkable vigilant soldier on her post and always gained the admiration and applause of her officers. Was never found in liquor and always kept company with the most upright and temperate soldiers." This report describes her illness and the discovery of her sex and her honorable discharge before offering an explanation for why she did all of this. Quote, "The cause of her personating a man, it is said, proceeded from the rigor of her parents, who exerted their prerogative to induce her to marriage with a young man she had conceived a great antipathy for. Together with her being a remarkable heroine

• 24:56Holly Frey?

  and warmly attached to the cause of her country and the service of which it must be acknowledged she gained reputation and no doubt will be noticed by the compilers of the history of our grand revolution." I have so many feelings about that write-up. A couple of factual notes on this. Sampson was about 21 when she enlisted, rather than 19. And although recruits were expected to serve for three years, Robert Shurtliff's time in the Army is documented at closer to 18 months. Sampson's parents also weren't really involved in her life at all. So this story about fleeing an unwanted marriage reads more like a literary trope and a way to make readers more sympathetic to her

• 25:38Holly Frey?

  rather than any real explanation of her reasoning. We'll talk about Sampson's post-revolutionary war life after another quick sponsor break.

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• 26:21Holly Frey?

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• 27:06Holly Frey?

  Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 27:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  Deborah Sampson married Benjamin Gannett of Sharon, Massachusetts on April 7, 1785. There is a gown in the collections of historic New England that may have been her wedding dress. It was originally made as an open gown to be worn with a petticoat around 1770, and then it was remade as a full dress without that open front about 15 years later. Then it was altered again in the 1780s, presumably so Deborah could get married in it. So the dress from there was passed down within the family. Some of her descendants even wore it for things like historical reenactments and other events.

• 28:30Holly Frey?

  Deborah and Benjamin had three children, Earl, Mary, and Patience. And they adopted Susanna Shepherd after her mother died. As had been the case in Deborah's own childhood, the family struggled financially, which is one of the reasons she worked so hard to get the benefits that she was entitled to as a veteran. This started with petitioning the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for back pay in 1792. She was awarded 34 pounds.

• 28:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  Over the course of 1797 and 1798, Gannett applied for a pension under the Invalid Pension Act of 1793. It's not clear why four years passed between when the law was passed and when she submitted an application, but this process could be really onerous. As we said earlier, there was a lot of stuff that you had to document. Sometimes that documentation was really hard to track down or didn't exist. It's possible she had trouble finding a lawyer who was willing to help her with it.

• 29:28Holly Frey?

  Herman Mann's biography of her was almost certainly written to support this pension application. As we said earlier, it was published in 1797, and its full title was "The Female Review or Memoirs of an American Young Lady Whose Life and Character Are Peculiarly Distinguished, Being a Continental Soldier for Nearly Three Years in the Late American War," during which time she performed the duties of every department into which she was called with punctual exactness, fidelity, and honor, and preserved her chastity inviolate by the most artful concealment of her sex, with an appendix containing characteristic traits by different hands, her taste for economy, principles of domestic education, et cetera.

• 30:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  I do love the long title.

• 30:16Holly Frey?

  I do, too. They're so funny.

• 30:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  This book is so romanticized and it has so much in common with other books in print at the time, not just the one we mentioned earlier. There were multiple others. There are some critics today that have described it not as a biography or a memoir, but as a novel. Seems like Mann himself might have even thought of it this way, too. And he later talked about it having just been rushed into print without enough time to do a good job with it. Some parts of it are questionable, but not totally impossible, like the vivid dream that we mentioned and the sneaking away to remove a musket ball. Also in that category are things like a romantic interlude involving a young woman from Baltimore who

• 31:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  falls in love with this patient known as Robert Shurtliff at a military hospital in Philadelphia, who she, of course, believes to be a man.

• 31:11Holly Frey?

  There's so many dramatic and thrilling tales.

• 31:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, there are a lot of them. And several people have traced. And this also same dramatic tale is in this other book that was in circulation at the time.

• 31:22Holly Frey?

  There are parts of this writing that are flatly untrue, like Mann claims Deborah Sampson-Gannett was at the Battle of Yorktown, which was over long before she enlisted. There's also an account of rescuing a white woman who was held captive by indigenous people and marrying her, but putting off consummating the marriage until it could be properly solemnized in the city. In the words of Mann's book, quote, "On their return to Philadelphia, they purchased her a suit of clothes, but she, unable to express her gratitude, received them on her knees and was doubtless glad to relinquish her sham marriage and to be sent to her uncle, who she said lived in Jame City." This is almost certainly just completely fabricated.

• 32:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  Mann commissioned a portrait of Gannett by folk artist Joseph Stone, which became the basis for the engraving for the book's frontispiece. This portrait still exists in the collection of the Rhode Island Historical Society today. It shows her in a feminine white dress with long brown hair that curls softly around her cheeks and her shoulders, blue eyes, fair skin with rosy cheeks and a pretty prominent jaw. It's framed with some patriotic embellishments, like an eagle bearing a shield that's decorated with stars and stripes.

• 32:38Holly Frey?

  Mann was not the only writer trying to support Deborah Sampson Gannett's pension efforts. Shortly after she filed her paperwork, poet Philip Freneau published "A Soldier Should Be Made of Sterner Stuff" on Deborah Gannett, and that was published in a publication called The Timepiece.

• 32:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  Although Gannett pursued this pension she was entitled to for months, her petition for it wound up stalled in Congress. She tried applying again a few years later, and in 1802, she went on a speaking tour to raise money and to try to gather support. She went all around New England and New York and was billed as "the American heroine." She worked with Herman Mann again on the text of the address that she would give on this tour. Some historians have concluded that this was not a collaboration between the two of them, but he just wrote it for her. She would speak while wearing a dress, and then she would go offstage and change into her soldier's uniform and then come back and do military drills, like presenting her arms.

• 33:36Holly Frey?

  We don't really know how much Gannett stuck to the prepared remarks that Mann worked on, but we do have a print version of it. It begins, quote, "Not unlike the example of the patriot and philanthropist, though perhaps perfectly so in effect, do I awake from the tranquil slumbers of retirement to active public scenes of life, like those which now surround me. That genius, which is the prompter of curiosity, and that spirit, which is the support of enterprise, early drove, or rather, allured me from the corner of humble obscurity. Their cheering aspect has again prevented a torpid rest."

• 34:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  If you found that to be a whole lot of words that essentially said, said nothing, very tilted, bad for you, bad news for you. The whole thing is like this. And it's a lot more about patriotic ideals than about any real specifics from her life or her time in the army.

• 34:36Holly Frey?

  Which makes for maybe bad copy, but probably worked really well to drum up crowds to support her. Gannett kept a journal during her tour, and this journal reveals that it was really kind of a difficult time. She was traveling alone and she was sick a lot. There are lots of descriptions of toothaches and a pain in her face. And at one point, what she described as dysentery. And she also just really missed her children.

• 35:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  Deborah Sampson Gannett was finally awarded a pension as a disabled veteran on March 11th of 1805. After some prominent people spoke up on her behalf, one of them being Paul Revere. Her pension started at $4 a month, and then she applied for and was granted increases in that amount in 1816 and 1819.

• 35:25Holly Frey?

  Sometimes she's described as the first woman in American history to receive a military pension, or the first woman to be wounded while fighting for the United States. But neither of these is true. One earlier example is Margaret Cochran Corbin, who became a camp follower after her husband John joined the Pennsylvania military. Margaret was helping her husband load his cannon at the Battle of Fort Washington on November 16th, 1776, and when he was killed, she took his place. She was then seriously wounded as well, and she became a prisoner of war after the battle. The Continental Congress awarded her a lifetime pension on July 6th, 1779, although at half the amount that men received.

• 36:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  In her later years, Deborah Sampson Gannett seems to have wanted her family to know about and to remember her time as a soldier, but she really stepped away from the public spotlight. While her military service was described as exemplary, the idea of crossdressing was still really scandalous. And any association with the military could be seen as very suspicious for women. There were thousands of women camp followers during the war. And even though a lot of them were doing absolutely necessary work, like cooking and mending and caring for the sick, they were viewed with a lot of derision and suspicion. And this all fed into a lot of really salacious rumors that she seems to have found genuinely upsetting.

• 36:53Holly Frey?

  Deborah Sampson Gannett died on April 29th, 1827, at the age of 66. At the time, Herman Mann was working on a revised version of her memoir, one that was written in first person and which she had given him permission to print only after her death. Mann got almost 200 subscribers to fund this revised work, but he also died before getting it published. His son took up the project and made all kinds of revisions, but then he died as well. Overall, these revisions made the book more sensationalized and definitely not more accurate.

• 37:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  Benjamin Gannett petitioned the government for a survivor's pension, one that typically would have been paid to a widow after the death of her veteran husband. Congress authorized this on July 7th, 1838, with a committee noting that the revolution had, quote, "furnished no other similar example of female heroism, fidelity, and courage." Benjamin Gannett actually died about 18 months before Congress finalized this payment. So in the end, it went to his attorney and his heirs.

• 37:59Holly Frey?

  John A. Vinton printed a new version of Herman Mann's biography of Deborah Sampson Gannett in 1866. It included lots of annotations and corrections, as well as new information. There were also lots of dime novels and other stories about her printed in the 19th century.

• 38:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  During World War II, a Liberty ship was named the SS Deborah Gannett. In 1983, Governor Michael Dukakis signed legislation naming Deborah Sampson the official heroine of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, with May 23rd being designated as Deborah Sampson Day. A life-sized statue of her was unveiled at the Sharon, Massachusetts Public Library on Veterans Day, 1989.

• 38:42Holly Frey?

  In the late 20-teens, legislation known as the Deborah Sampson Act was introduced in Congress a number of times, at one point passing the House but getting stalled in the Senate. This legislation was meant to improve women's access to care and benefits through the Department of Veterans Affairs and to improve the quality of that care. The bill's content was eventually folded into the Johnny Isaacson and David P. Rowe, M.D., Veterans Health Care and Benefits Improvement Act of 2020, which was signed into law on January 5, 2021. In this act, Title V, Deborah Sampson, is subtitled "Improving Access for Women Veterans to the Department of Veterans Affairs."

• 39:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  Before we get to listener mail, something came up during research on this that would normally probably go into the Friday behind the scenes, but it seems like enough listeners might have heard about it and be wondering that I wanted to go ahead and talk about it now. When I'm pulling together resources for episodes, one of the places I look is Gale databases that I have access to through the public library. Gale's first book result when I searched for Deborah Sampson is from the 1992 book Notable Black American Women. I was immediately confused since none of the material that I had gathered before that point suggested that Deborah Gannett was Black, and the many references that I had

• 40:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  seen to her ancestors being aboard the Mayflower, without mentioning any other ancestors, kind of implied that she was not.

• 40:12Holly Frey?

  Sources from Gannett's lifetime don't mention her race at all. It wasn't typical for white writers to spell out another white person's race, but noting the race of Black people was routine in everything from enlistment records to newspaper articles to personal journals. The idea that Deborah Sampson was Black seems to trace back to William C. Nell's book Colored Patriots of the American Revolution that was published in 1855.

• 40:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  This book is noteworthy on its own. William Cooper Nell was a journalist and abolitionist. This was one of the first books by a Black person to document the contributions of other Black people to the American Revolution. Nell also wrote books about black soldiers' service in the War of 1812 and on Crispus Attucks and the Boston Massacre. He is somebody who could be an episode subject of the show one day.

• 41:05Holly Frey?

  Colored Patriots of the American Revolution references Lemuel Burr, who was black and indigenous. Lemuel's grandfather Samuel Burr was friends with Jeremy Jonah and both served in the Revolutionary War. Burr was in Gannett's regiment and Jonah was in another regiment that was also stationed in the Hudson Valley. To quote the book, "Lemuel Burr, grandson of Seymour, a resident of Boston, often speaks of their reminiscences of Deborah Gannett." Nell then prints the text of the General Court of Massachusetts resolution awarding Deborah Gannett 34 pounds for services in the Continental Army.

• 41:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  Multiple historians have traced the idea that Deborah Sampson Gannett was black to this passage. People interpreted her inclusion in this book as meaning that she was black as well, although it's really not entirely clear if this was Nell's intent or not. From there, it made its way into other people's work. The earliest examples of this are primarily from black writers and speakers who were doing the important and necessary work of documenting and publicizing black people's participation in the Revolutionary War.

• 42:15Holly Frey?

  For example, Lewis Hayden, who was enslaved from birth but liberated himself and became a prominent part of the Underground Railroad before the Civil War, gave an address during the US Centennial in 1876. He was speaking to the Colored Ladies Centennial Club in Boston, and he used Gannett as an example of black women's contributions to the war. The idea that Deborah Sampson Gannett was black became more widespread during the Civil Rights Movement, and it still comes up today, primarily in sources that are focused specifically on black people's achievements, like lists of facts for Black History Month and that 1992 book that we mentioned.

• 42:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  To be totally clear, it is not impossible that Deborah Sampson-Gannett had African ancestry somewhere in her family tree. She had one grandmother and one great-grandfather whose parents aren't clearly documented. And of course, it's also possible that one of her ancestors had an affair of some sort that wouldn't be reflected in things like birth and marriage records. But beyond that, Deborah Sampson-Gannett's documented ancestors trace back to people who immigrated from Europe during the 17th century, nearly all of them from England during the Great Puritan Migration. It would have been a scandal for any of them to have had a child with someone of African descent, and there just hasn't been anything found to suggest that that kind of scandal

• 43:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  happened.

• 43:41Holly Frey?

  For folks who want more on Deborah Sampson-Gannett, one of the more recent books about her is titled Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier. That's by Alfred F. Young. There's also a recent novel titled Revolutionary by Alex Myers. Myers is a transgender man, so he brings a really unique perspective to telling this story.

• 44:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, this is the second time in recent memory that there's been a novel that I've started reading and did not finish. In this case, it's because there is a rape in the first chapter, and I noped hard out of it at that point. I was just not up for reading a book that started out with a rape over the weekend.

• 44:22Holly Frey?

  No, not restful way to spend your time.

• 44:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  No.

• 44:27Holly Frey?

  Which is not to say those aren't important stories.

• 44:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, I mean, it's been extremely well-reviewed.

• 44:34Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 44:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  I was not prepared and did not continue reading.

• 44:39Holly Frey?

  There you go.

• 44:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 45:07Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 45:42Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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