Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier

Abstract

With his thoughtful analysis of the life of Deborah Sampson, Alfred F. Young continues his work illuminating the lives of ordinary people. Sampson was the only woman we know to have successfully masqueraded as a man in the Continental Army, serving eighteen months before she was discovered. After the war, she resumed her female identity and married. Yet she resisted the confinement of the role of wife and mother and lobbied aggressively for a pension and publicized her wartime accomplishments in what was probably the first lecture tour by a woman in the United States. With this subject, Young faced a particular challenge. Little that Sampson wrote has survived. The best contemporary sources about her life are a memoir written by Herman Mann at her request in 1797, which he wrote after conversations with her, and the public lecture she delivered, which Mann also wrote. Both these sources are highly suspect. Mann was, Young observed, “inept” and “fabricated events” to make his heroine more appealing (p. 13). However, he also occasionally told the truth, leaving Young the task of sorting fact from fiction. Young supplemented and interrogated Mann's work with public records and letters from people who knew her. He also drew on material culture, examining items such as her wedding dress and a teacup passed down to her descendents, which he linked with the traditional stories associated with them. Even with those items, the details of Sampson's life seemed “beyond recovery” (p. 18). Young then turned to the rich scholarship of the revolutionary era to place her in the context of other people in a similar place and condition—such as the working poor, Baptists converts, those who aspired to gentility, as well as soldiers and veterans—to paint a picture of Sampson's social world.