To the doctor on duty in a Philadelphia military hospital one day shortly after the close of the Revolutionary War, the unconscious soldier Robert Shurtliff probably seemed like just another feverish body on another sweaty sickbed. But when the doctor put his hand on Shurtliff’s chest in search of a pulse, he discovered that his patient suffered from a condition then extremely rare among soldiers–womanhood. As a later writer coyly put it, on Shurtliff’s body were found the “breasts and other tokens of a female.”
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Sampson grew up poor in the Massachusetts towns of Plympton and Middleborough, an indentured household servant from the time she was 10 until she was 18, then a spinner, weaver, and teacher. At about five foot seven, she was taller than most women and a good many men of her day. Middleborough residents who knew her as a young woman said years later that they “often thought as they looked on her stalwart form Deborah Sampson should have been a man.” A surviving portrait of her shows a woman with long curls and feminine dress but severe features. As a free single female with her own, albeit meager, income, she was considered a “masterless woman.” Her marriage prospects were slim, since she had no family connections, dowry, or property to attract a husband. But Young speculates that she may not have minded. He writes that she possessed “a kind of independence she was in no hurry to give up.”
Maybe that independent spirit–or the bounty money given new recruits–led the 21-year-old Sampson to disguise herself as a man and enlist in the Continental Army under the name Timothy Thayer. She was recognized almost at once and later the act led her Baptist church to shun her. She reenlisted in another town as Robert Shurtliff. This time she wasn’t discovered for 17 months.
“Mann just drove me crazy,” says Young. Yet he couldn’t completely dismiss the book as a source. “He talked to her, he knew her. She didn’t reject him. So there has to be something there.” Young picked the book apart as best he could. Sometimes he was able to distinguish fact from fiction; sometimes he could only point out plausibility and implausibility. Mann’s account of the doctor discovering her “breasts and other tokens of a female,” for example, isn’t completely verifiable, though it seems probable enough.
“You make discoveries like that very early, and it keeps you going,” Young says, “but it also spoils you.” For there was much drudgery ahead, digging through records for scraps of information. “You go a little bit crazy looking for stuff,” he says. “I did develop a sense of obligation to the person to get her right. So you keep looking for tiny clues. You keep going and going. And it’s a long pull.”
Her fame got a little boost with the advent of the women’s movement and the relaxation of sexual standards, and in the 80s she was declared the state heroine of Massachusetts and honored with a statue in the town of Sharon. A children’s book about her, The Secret Soldier, was published in 1999, and she appears as a character on the PBS cartoon Liberty Kids (her voice is provided by Whoopi Goldberg).
