She Dug It Out Herself — Deborah Sampson
The ball is lodged in the muscle of her left thigh. The surgeon at the field hospital would discover everything if she let him examine her, so she does not let him examine her. She takes the sword gash on the forehead — there is no hiding that — but the thigh she handles herself, alone, with a penknife dipped in lamp oil and no anesthetic except the absolute necessity of silence. She gets the ball partly out. The deeper fragment stays for the rest of her life.
It is 1782.
She does not just enlist. She enlists as a man, under the name Robert Shurtleff, in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment on a May morning in 1782, tall enough and strong enough and determined enough that no one questions it, and she serves seventeen months in the Hudson Valley neutral ground where the war is still real and the skirmishes still kill people.
She does not just survive the wound. She tends it herself, returns to her unit, and continues in the field through the summer and into the fall, until a fever in Philadelphia lays her unconscious long enough for the army surgeon to discover the truth, keep her confidence, and arrange an honorable discharge rather than a court martial.
She does not just go home. She delivers a lecture tour in 1802 — the first known American woman to conduct a national speaking tour — appearing in full Continental uniform at the Federal Street Theatre in Boston and in cities from Providence to Albany, presenting an address to audiences who have no cultural category for what they are seeing.
She does not just ask for a pension. She fights for it for fifteen years, from her 1783 discharge to the 1805 federal pension, with Paul Revere writing Congress on her behalf after visiting her farm in Sharon, calling her much more deserving than hundreds to whom Congress have been generous.
Her Spark of Liberty was the refusal to ask permission to serve.
She signed the name Robert Shurtleff, shouldered a thirty-pound fighting load, and walked into a war that had no legal place for her, because the alternative was staying home.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”
Born in Plympton, Massachusetts, on December 17, 1760, she was bound as an indentured servant at age ten and taught herself to read from the household children’s schoolbooks. She enlisted in the Continental Army in May 1782 under the alias Robert Shurtleff and served in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment in the Hudson Valley. She was wounded in a skirmish near Tarrytown in the summer of 1782 and treated the wound herself to avoid discovery. She was found out in Philadelphia in 1783 when a fever left her unconscious, and she was honorably discharged in October 1783 at West Point by General Henry Knox. She married Benjamin Gannett in April 1785. In 1792 Governor John Hancock signed her Massachusetts back-pay award. In 1804 Paul Revere wrote to Congress on her behalf. In 1805 she was placed on the federal military pension roll. She died in Sharon, Massachusetts, on April 29, 1827.
Her name was Deborah Sampson Gannett.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
The Speedwell’s Confession, Book One of the Sparks of Liberty series, is live on Amazon Kindle and free with Kindle Unlimited.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GZ5QH7L8
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