Deborah Sampson

Deborah Sampson enlisted in the Continental Army in 1782 under the name Robert Shurtliff. She was twenty-one, from Plympton, Massachusetts, and she had already learned that a poor woman's choices were narrower than a poor man's. The 4th Massachusetts took her. She served as a light infantryman in the last year of the war.

She was wounded. She bound at least one injury herself rather than risk a surgeon who would have seen what the recruiting officer had not. A later illness in Philadelphia ended the disguise. She received an honorable discharge, not a prosecution. The army, for once, chose not to make a spectacle of a soldier who had done the work.

She married Benjamin Gannett and lived in Sharon. Years later the Massachusetts legislature and then Congress recognized the service and granted a pension — slowly, and after she and her advocates had made the case in writing. She lectured about the war when a pension was not yet a living.

She died in Sharon on April 29, 1827. The point of her page is not a costume. It is that the Continental line included a woman who carried a musket under a borrowed name and was paid, at last, as a soldier.