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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy. Saturday. May twenty third is Deborah Samson Day in Massachusetts,
so since it's May twenty third, we've chosen our episode
on her as Today's Saturday Classic. Deborah Samson served in
the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War under the name
Robert Shirtliff. This originally came out on July fourth, twenty
twenty two. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,

(00:28):
a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This episode
is coming out on July fourth, which is Independence Day
in the US. So since we have an episode coming

(00:49):
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 Samson,
who known by her married name of Deborah Samson Gennett
as well. Just as a note upfront, we recognize that
gender is broader and more nuanced than this, and that

(01:13):
is not a new idea. Deborah Samson was descended from
multiple people who arrived in North America aboard the Mayflower
in sixteen twenty, at which point, there were indigenous nations
all over the continent that recognized and continue to recognize
more than two genders. We've also talked about people like
the Public Universal Friend, who we covered on the show

(01:33):
in twenty twenty, and the Friend lived at the same
time as Deborah Samson did. They described themselves as genderless,
but the communities that Deborah Samson 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

(01:55):
made her famous, which is serving in the Continental Army
as Robert Shirtliffe during the Revolutionary War. Deborah Samson was
born on December seventeenth, seventeen sixty in Plimpton, Massachusetts, which
is just inland from Plymouth. Her family spelled their last
name Samsom. The spelling with the pa in the middle

(02:18):
shows up in her life later on. Deborah's parents were
Jonathan Samson Junior and Deborah Bradford Samson, and as Tracy
just said, they were both descended from people who had
traveled to North America aboard the Mayflower. The Elder Deborah
Samson was the great granddaughter of Plymouth Colony governor William Bradford.
Jonathan's ancestors included Miles Standish and John and Priscilla mullens Alden,

(02:43):
who today are probably best known as characters from the
Courtship of Miles Standish by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 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

(03:04):
root of the family's poverty. But there are probate records
showing that Jonathan Samson's senior'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. Family drama. Jonathan Samson

(03:25):
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

(03:46):
children with her. 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. Than When Deborah was ten, she was
indentured to the Thomas family. Some sources say that she
was indentured to Benjamin Thomas Deecon at First Church of Middleborough,

(04:10):
and others say it was to Jeremiah and Susan Thomas.
There were so many Thomas's living in this area that
it was nicknamed Thomastown, and Susan was Benjamin's daughter, so
it's understandable that there is some confusion about exactly who
she was indentured to. This was a large family, with
more boys than girls, and although Deborah wasn't provided with

(04:32):
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. 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 seventeen
ninety seven. Parts of that biography were definitely fabricated, and

(04:54):
we will be talking about that more and 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. Samson's
indenture ended when she was eighteen. For the next couple

(05:14):
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. She also joined First Baptist
Church of Middleborough on November twelfth, seventeen eighty. That was
shortly before she turned twenty. Although there was a pretty
big Baptist community in Middleborough, they had at least three

(05:37):
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. 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's seventeen

(05:58):
ninety seven biography. He does give a lengthy recounting of
a vivid and violent dream she reportedly had just before
the Battle of Lexington in seventeen seventy five. 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

(06:19):
about what was going on. Although thousands of men joined
the military at the start of the war, by the
late seventeen seventies 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

(06:43):
to serve in the place of men who had been
drafted but didn't want to go. 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 town to decide how
much money they would offer as a bounty. This led

(07:04):
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. Yeah,
this caused various issues. In addition to the disappearance of
people who had claimed a bounty and then just vanished,

(07:25):
they were disproportionately enlisting people who were desperate for money
and maybe not people who were who would do well
as soldiers. There was a whole many layers going on
with this. Samson's first attempt to join the army might
have been in pursuit of a bounty. This is documented

(07:48):
in a diary entry by Abner Weston dated January twenty third,
seventeen eighty two. This diary was found in New Hampshire
in twenty eighteen and then bought by the Museum of
the Amya Revolution in Philadelphia in twenty nineteen. Somehow it
did not cross my radar for any of the unearthed
episodes that happened during that time. Weston wrote, quote, there

(08:10):
happened an uncommon affair at this time for Deborah Samson
of this town dressed herself in men's clothes and hired
herself to Israel Wood to go into the Three years service,
but being found out, returned the hire and paid the damages.
Other second and third hand accounts add some other details
to this, including that Samson was living in the home

(08:33):
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 Samson's roommate at the
Leonard house, where Jenny was probably working as a servant.
After giving her name as Timothy Thayer and receiving her bounty,

(08:54):
Samson 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 Samson. Apparently, Samson's

(09:14):
way of holding a pen was distinctive because of an
injury to one of her fingers, and after being questioned,
Samson reportedly confessed and returned the bounty money. This was
really a scandal, and although herman Mann's biography gave some
other reasons. Samson may have enlisted for the second time
to try to get away from it. We will get
to that after a quick sponsor break. On May twentieth,

(09:46):
seventeen eighty two, Robert Shirtliff 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

(10:09):
would pass before anybody realized that Robert Shirtliffe, whose name
is spelled a lot of different ways in different various
records for anybody, realized that he had previously been known
to everybody before this point as Deborah Sampson. Shirtliffe was
mustered into the fourth Massachusetts Regiment at Worcestern, Massachusetts. Three
days later, he marched with the regiment to West Point,

(10:31):
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. Webb's
company spent most of their time in the Hudson River Valley.
The Battle of Yorktown had ended the previous fall, and

(10:53):
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

(11:14):
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 sides of the British and some of the United States.
In this particular area, they were more likely to be
allied with or otherwise support the British. Although this area
didn't see any major battles in seventeen eighty two or

(11:37):
seventeen eighty three, 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,

(11:59):
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 in her body for
the rest of her life. It is extremely likely that

(12:22):
during her time as Robert Shirtliff, 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 Samson's biography is uncannily similar to another work,

(12:42):
which was titled The Female Soldier, that describes the experiences
of Hannah Snell, who joined the British Army as James
Gray in seventeen forty five and fought against the Jacobites.
Back in Middleborough, Massachusetts, First Baptist Church was deciding what
to do about Deborah Sampson's earlier enlistment as Timothy Thayer

(13:03):
the Church Minutes from September third, seventeen eighty two read quote.
The Church considered the case of Deborah Sampson, 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 unchristian like, and at last

(13:24):
left our parts in a sudden manner. And it is
not known among us where she is gone. And after
considerable discourse, it appeared that as several brethren had labored
with her before she went away without obtaining satisfaction, concluded
that it is the church's duty to withdraw fellowship until
she returns and makes Christian satisfaction. Okay, that means they

(13:46):
basically kicked her out, and still 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 contact, but at
the time it was more of a general description of
bad behavior, and in terms of a conviction. Cross dressing

(14:07):
had been outlawed in Massachusetts since the sixteen nineties. The
prohibition on cross dressing 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. To
return to Samson's time as Robert Shirtliff, that injury made
it impossible to keep up with the light infantry, so

(14:30):
Shirtlift seems to have convinced someone to assign him to
the task of caring for a wounded soldier who could
not be moved. After that, Shirtlift was given another assignment
in seventeen eighty three, this time working as a waiter
for General John Patterson. This wasn't a food service position,
it was more like a personal servant. Shirtliff accompanied Patterson

(14:51):
in his unit to Philadelphia, which at the time was
the US capital. An armistice went into effect on April nineteenth,
seventeen eighty three, 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.

(15:12):
Demands for pay and for better conditions were part of
a mutiny along the Pennsylvania line in seventeen eighty three,
and Patterson's troops were sent to Philadelphia to try to
put that mutiny down. In Philadelphia, Robert Shirtliffe became ill
with a fever and delirium and was hospitalized. The cause
isn't clear, although there were epidemics of both measles and

(15:34):
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. Yeah, it could
have been something totally else, but those two diseases really
were rampant. While working at a hospital in Philadelphia, doctor

(15:56):
barnabas Binny discovered that one of his patients, known as
Robert Shirtliffe, was wearing a breastbinding, but he kept that
a secret. It is not totally clear how Samson's commanding
officers eventually learned her identity. In Man's book, Benny gave
her a letter that explained the whole situation and told

(16:16):
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, whatever those details were,
general Henry Knox granted Robert Shirtliffe an honorable discharge on

(16:40):
October twenty third, seventeen eighty three. 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 cross dressing,

(17:03):
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, or people who might describe themselves as non
binary or as transgendermen today, but the honorable discharge of

(17:25):
Robert Shirtliff is really unique. After being discharged, Samson 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 Shirtliffe,
but it did not mention Samson's name. Quote for particular reasons.

(17:49):
It doesn't say what they are, just that they're particular.
This was printed in the Independent Gazette or the New
York Journal revived on January tenth, seventeen e 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.

(18:13):
Vis a lively, comely young nymph, nineteen 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, and received two wounds,

(18:36):
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

(18:59):
offering an ex 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 and warmly attached to

(19:20):
the cause of her country, in 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
right up. A couple of factual notes on this. Samson
was about twenty one when she enlisted, rather than nineteen,

(19:42):
and although recruits were expected to serve for three years,
Robert Shirtliff's time in the army is documented it closer
to eighteen months. Samson's parents also weren't really involved in
her life at all, so this story about fleeing an
unwonted marriage reads more like a literary trope and a
way to make readers or sympathetic to her, Rather than
any real explanation of her reasoning. We'll talk about Samson's

(20:06):
post Revolutionary war life after another quick sponsor break. Deborah
Sampson married Benjamin Gannette of Sharon, Massachusetts, on April seventh,
seventeen eighty five. There is a gown in the collections

(20:28):
of Historic New England that may have been her wedding dress.
Was originally made as an open gown to be worn
with a petticoat around seventeen seventy, and then it was
remade as a full dress without that open front about
fifteen years later. Then it was altered again in the
seventeen eighties, presumably so Deborah could get married in it.
So the dress from there was passed down within the family.

(20:52):
Some of her descendants even wore it for things like
historical reenactments and other events. Deborah and Benjamin had three children, Earl,
Mary and Patience, and they adopted Susannah 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

(21:13):
was entitled to as a veteran. This started with petitioning
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for backpay in seventeen ninety two.
She was awarded thirty four pounds. Over the course of
seventeen ninety seven and seventeen ninety eight, Gannett applied for
a pension under the Invalid Pension Act of seventeen ninety three.

(21:34):
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, so 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. Herman Mann's

(21:55):
biography of her was almost certainly written to support this
pension application, As we said earlier, It was published in
seventeen ninety seven, 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

(22:15):
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

(22:36):
taste for economy, principles of domestic education, etc. I do
love the long title. I do too. They're so funny.
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.

(22:57):
There are some critics today that have described it not
as a biography or a memoir, but as a novel.
Seems like Man 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

(23:18):
we mentioned and the sneaking a way to remove a
musket ball also in that category, or things like a
romantic interlude involving a young woman from Baltimore who falls
in love with this patient known as Robert Shirtliff at
a military hospital in Philadelphia, who she, of course believes
to be a man. There's so many dramatic and thrilling tales. Yeah,

(23:40):
there are a lot of them, and several people have
traced and this also save dramatic tale is in this
other book that was in circulation at the time. There
are parts of this writing that are flatly untrue. Like
Man claims Deborah Samson Gennett 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

(24:03):
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 Man'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

(24:25):
to be sent to her uncle, who she said lived
in James City. This is almost certainly just completely fabricated.
Man 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

(24:47):
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 and elishments, like an eagle bearing a shield
that's decorated with stars and stripes. Mann was not the
only writer trying to support Deborah Sampson Gannett's pension efforts.

(25:10):
Shortly after she filed her paperwork, poet Philip Freneau published
A Soldier Should be Made of Sterner Stuff on Deborah Gannette,
and that was published in a publication called The time Piece.
Although Gannette 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 eighteen

(25:32):
oh two 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

(25:52):
wrote it for her. She would speak while wearing a dress,
and then she would go off stage and change into
her soldier's uniform and then come back and do military
drills like presenting her arms. We don't really know how
much Genet stuck to the prepared remarks that man worked on,
but we do have a print version of it. It
begins quote not unlike the example of the patriot and philanthropists,

(26:15):
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

(26:38):
prevented a torpid rest. If you found that to be
a whole lot of words that essentially said nothing, I
was very stilted. I have 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

(26:59):
life for her time in the army, 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

(27:21):
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. Deborah Samson Connette was finally
awarded a pension as a disabled veteran on March eleventh
of eighteen oh five, after some prominent people spoke up
on her behalf, one of them being Paul Revere. Her

(27:43):
pension started at four dollars a month, and then she
applied for and was granted increases in that amount in
eighteen sixteen and eighteen nineteen. 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

(28:03):
earlier example is Margaret Cochrane 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 sixteenth, seventeen seventy six, 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

(28:27):
a lifetime pension on July sixth, seventeen seventy nine, although
at half the amount that men received. In her later years,
Deborah Samson Ginnett 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

(28:49):
cross dressing was still really scandalous, and any association with
the military could be seen as very suspicious for women.
There were thousands of women in 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,

(29:12):
and this all fed into a lot of really salacious
rumors that she seems to have found genuinely upsetting. Dembra Samson.
Gannett died on April twenty ninth, eighteen twenty seven, at
the age of sixty six. At the time, Herman Mann
was working on a revised version of her memoir, one
that was written in first person, in which she had
given him permission to print only after her death. Mann

(29:36):
got almost two hundred 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. Benjamin
Gennett petitioned the government for a survivor's pension, one that

(29:59):
typically would have been paid to a widow after the
death of her veteran husband. Congress authorized this on July seventh,
eighteen thirty eight, with a committee noting that the Revolution
had quote furnished no other similar example of female heroism, fidelity,
and courage. Benjamin Ginnett actually died about eighteen months before

(30:19):
Congress finalized this payment, so in the end, it went
to his attorney and his heirs. John A. Venon printed
a new version of Herman Mann's biography of Deborah Samson
Ganet in eighteen sixty six. 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

(30:41):
in the nineteenth century. During World War II, a liberty
ship was named the SS Deborah Gannett. In nineteen eighty three,
Governor Michael Dukakis signed legislation naming Deborah Sampson the official
heroine of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, with May twenty third
being designated as Deborah Sampson Day. A life sized statue

(31:02):
of her was unveiled at the Sharon, Massachusetts Public Library
on Veterans Day nineteen eighty nine. In the late twenty teens,
legislation known as the Deborah Sampson Act was introduced to
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

(31:23):
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. Row MD Veterans
Healthcare and Benefits Improvement Act of twenty twenty which was
signed into law on January fifth, twenty twenty one. In
this Act, title five, Deborah Sampson is subtitled Improving Access

(31:46):
for Women Veterans to the Department of Veterans Affairs. 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 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

(32:07):
is Gail databases that I have access to through the
public library. Gail's first book result when I searched for
Deborah Samson is from the nineteen ninety two book Notable
Black American Women. I was immediately confused, since none of
the material that I had gathered before that point suggested
that Deborah Gannette was black, and the many references that

(32:30):
I had seen to were ancestors being aboard the Mayflower
without mentioning any other ancestors kind of implied that she
was not. Sources from Gannette'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

(32:52):
newspaper articles to personal journals. The idea that Deborah Samson
was black seems to trace back to William's Nell's book
Colored Patriots of the American Revolution that was published in
eighteen fifty five. This book is noteworthy on its own
William Coopernell was a journalist an abolitionist. This was one

(33:13):
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 soldier's service in the
War of eighteen twelve and on christ Path addics in
the Boston Massacre. He is somebody who could be an
episode subject of the show One Day. Colored Patriots of
the American Revolution references Lemuel Burr, who was black and indigenous.

(33:38):
Lemuell'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 quote, Lemuel Burr,
grandson of Seymour, a resident of Boston, often speaks of

(33:58):
their reminiscences of Deborah Ganet. Nell then prints the text
of the General Court of Massachusetts resolution awarding Debra Gannet
thirty four pounds for services in the Continental Army. Multiple
historians have traced the idea that Deborah Samson Gannet was
black to this passage. People interpreted her inclusion in this

(34:20):
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

(34:40):
the Revolutionary War. 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 eighteen seventy six. He
was speaking to the Colored Ladies' Centennial Club in Boston,
and he used Ganet as an example of black women's

(35:01):
contributions to the war. The idea that Deborah Samson Genet
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 nineteen ninety two
book that we mentioned. To be totally clear, it is

(35:23):
not impossible that Deborah Samson Gannet 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 Samson

(35:47):
Gannett's documented ancestors trace back to people who emigrated from
Europe during the seventeenth century, nearly all of them from
England during the Great Puritan Migration. It would have been
a scandal for any of them who have had a
child with somewhat of African descent, and there just hasn't
been anything found to suggest that that kind of scandal happened.

(36:08):
For folks who want more on Deborah Samson Gennett, one
of the more recent books about her is titled Masquerade,
The Life and Times of Deborah Samson 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. Yeah.

(36:31):
This is the second time in recent memory that there's
been a novel that I 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.
No not rest will way to spend your time now,

(36:54):
would not say those aren't important stories. Yeah, I mean
it's been extremely well reviewed. Yeah, I just I was
not prepared and did not continue reading. There you go.
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses

(37:16):
History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe
to the show on the iHeartRadio, app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.