“Like a bewildered star”;: Deborah Sampson, Herman Mann, and address, delivered with applause

Abstract

A survey of early American narratives of female experience reveals a consis tent pattern of ideological appropriation of women's stories by mediums of cultural authority. Women's lack of political agency and their circumscribed public voice facilitated their complicity in these projects. Colonial clergymen shaped female captivity narratives to support their political agendas, and women's criminal confessions were tailored to reinforce social norms endorsed both by ministers and magistrates.! This essay examines the implications of Herman Mann's appropriation of the experience of Deborah Sampson [Gannett], who served for eighteen months in the continental army during the American Revolution disguised as a male, and who described her exploits in a speech published by Mann under the title Addres [sic], Delivered with Applause.... Between March and October, 1802, in a venture undertaken to earn money for her family, Sampson delivered to audiences in New England and eastern New York at least a part of this text, narrating her military experiences and penitently confessing her transgression of woman's sphere, in what is believed to be the first public speaking tour by a woman in America (Anderson XII). Although previous commentary on Sampson's Address has noted that Mann played a part in shaping the text, a survey of his other publications strongly suggests that he was the sole author of this speech. Mann, a Dedham, Massachusetts printer, occasional poet and newspaper editor, wrote and published, among other texts, patriotic addresses and also criminal confessions in which he assumed the first person voice of his subjects, just as he does in the Sampson address. Five years before he drafted her speech, Mann had compiled, in his own voice, Sampson's memoirs in a book entitled The Female Review, an account which he rewrote after she died, this time employing the first person voice of his subject throughout the text. Although in the 1797 biography he faithfully recorded some facts of her childhood and included verifiable details regarding her military experience, extensive portions of the text were fashioned from other sources, including fabricated or imaginatively augmented episodes.2 The 1802 speech, in which Mann recasts his earlier treatment of Sampson's heroism in significant ways, is important, not because it dramatizes Sampson's own conflicted psyche, as has been argued recently (Campbell), but because it exemplifies cultural strategies for containing dangerous models of female conduct; strategies employed in this case by a representative of liberal republican print culture who consistently advocated improved educational opportunities for women.3 Examining the cultural influences that shaped Mann's appropriation of Sampson's story documents emphatically the shifting gender politics