The Woman Who Played the Man: Deborah Sampson, Soldier in the American Revolution

Abstract

Alfred F. Young. Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier. New York: Knopf, 2004. x + 417 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $26.95 (cloth); $16.00 (paper). About five years ago I heard an eminent historian predict that, while it was not yet clear in what new direction American historical scholarship was heading, it was clear that micro-histories were now passé. This book by Alfred Young, which re-tells the fascinating story of Deborah Sampson Gannett, a Massachusetts woman who achieved short-lived fame after impersonating a male soldier during the American Revolution, proves that prediction to have been premature. Like other recent offerings in early American history, this book illustrates the way a close study of a little-known individual or event can help bring to light new perspectives on the past that have been obscured by conventional historical narratives. As one of a very small number of full-length studies of an ordinary white woman during the revolutionary and early national eras, it makes a valuable contribution to American women's history. It offers nuggets of insight about an array of historical topics (the nature of late-eighteenth-century rural life, how the military worked during the American Revolution, the meanings with which consumer goods could be invested by ordinary people in the early nineteenth century). What's more, it tells a terrific story. Young has long been known as a practitioner of "history from below," which tries to recover ordinary people's impact on the historical process. Until the 1980s, for American historians that usually meant analyzing evidence about large groups of subjects whose collective tracks through the past could be traced more easily (and perhaps more reliably) than individual ones, which tended to be very faint. But since 1990 or so, following the lead of European scholars, American historians like Laurel Ulrich, John Demos, Patricia Cohen, Richard and Irene Brown, and Alfred Young himself have become increasingly good detectives and storytellers, skilled at uncovering information about the lives of ordinary individuals and telling their stories in [End Page 493] historically contextualized, often riveting narratives.1 This is a very good thing for the discipline of history. As human beings, we understand the world better through stories than through social scientific analyses, and American readers are hungry for stories about the American past. Highly readable narratives which give readers access to subaltern perspectives and to social historians' insights about American history are welcome in a field that is becoming overwhelmed with biographies of famous white American men. Writing this kind of book requires a historian to face some big methodological challenges, as Young points out in his prologue. Deborah Sampson Gannett left few of her own words behind. The main source of evidence about her life is a sensationalized, semi-fictional 1797 biography by Herman Mann, with whom she cooperated without being entirely forthcoming. Young begins his book by explaining the difficulties involved in finding Gannett's own voice underneath the layers of fabrication and distortion in Mann's text. Indeed, he continues throughout the book to comment on various interpretive issues. As a result, his voice is quite prominent, explaining here, why he has credited some assertion from the biography, or there, why he has dismissed another. Young's interpretive digressions, making him more than usually present within the narrative, are usually a great virtue: his personal voice effectively reminds us that history is a deeply human, interpretive craft, not a science in which dispassionate, omniscient researchers simply gather and process data. Occasionally, though, his voice becomes more prominent than Deborah's own, which is sometimes barely audible in the problematic sources. For example, her story of a recurring dream of defending herself against an attack by monsters, which Mann had already partially appropriated by telling it in his words, seems to become still less Deborah's own when placed...