The Soldier Who Wasn’t
Deborah Sampson — Continental Army, 1782-1783
Photo by gustaf von zeipel
Deborah Sampson enlisted in the Continental Army as Robert Shurtliff, a name she had borrowed from a dead brother. She was twenty-one years old and had been planning this for longer than most people plan anything.
She was born in 1760 in Plympton, Massachusetts. Her father abandoned the family when she was young. She was indentured as a servant at age ten, bound until she turned eighteen. She educated herself at night, reading by firelight. When her indenture ended she taught school, but teaching paid almost nothing, and the war was happening, and she had been thinking about the war.
She tried to enlist once before, in 1781, was discovered, and was publicly rebuked by her church. She tried again in 1782 under a different name and a different town. This time it worked.
She served for seventeen months in the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, seeing action in several engagements around New York. She was wounded twice. The first time, in a skirmish near Tarrytown, she took a sword cut to the head and a musket ball in the thigh. She allowed the head wound to be treated. The thigh wound she dug out herself with a penknife rather than allow a doctor to examine her.
The second wound she could not treat herself. A Dr. Binney, treating her for fever in a Philadelphia hospital, discovered that she was a woman. He said nothing to the Army. He took Sampson to his home to recover, then wrote a letter to her commanding officer. General Henry Knox arranged her honorable discharge in October 1783.
She returned to Massachusetts, married, had three children, and spent the next two decades attempting to obtain a pension for her service. Veterans received pensions. She had been a veteran.
Paul Revere wrote a letter on her behalf to a congressman. “I have been induced to enquire her situation,” Revere wrote, “and find it to be much more needy than her industry and worthy character deserves.”
In 1805, Congress passed a special act granting her a full military pension.
She spent her final years giving lectures about her service — one of the first women in American history to lecture publicly. She died in 1827. Massachusetts eventually granted her heirs a pension as well.
The formal reason she enlisted was never more complicated than this: she believed in the cause, she wanted to serve, and she saw no reason why a woman should not do what she was capable of doing. She had been told all her life what she couldn’t do. She had found this information inaccurate.