696. Who Was Deborah Sampson? The Girl Who Disguised Herself to Fight in the Revolution

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Way the World Works. So we are once again continuing the series I've been doing on unsung heroes of the American Revolutionary Era.

And we have had quite a few so far. We've had a bunch of really exciting, really fun people. Many of them I did not even know about until I started doing research for these podcast episodes, which I always love.

I love learning new things. I am a lifelong learner. So that's been really, really fun for me.

So we're going to continue that today. We're going to talk about a girl named Deborah Sampson. This is kind of an outdated reference, but I feel like Disney movies are kind of timeless.

But for those of you who have ever watched Mulan, you know the story of the girl who disguises herself to join the army. That's literally what happened with the story of Deborah Sampson. So she is going to be a woman who really believes in the American cause.

And she lies about being a boy to enlist in the army. So let's talk about that right now. So Deborah Sampson is born in Massachusetts.

She's actually born near Plymouth, not in Plymouth, but near Plymouth. And she had relatives that came over on the Mayflower. So she is OG American.

She has been here for a long time. Now her father is lost at sea. That's what we think happened to him at least.

And so her mother is left to raise, I think she had quite a few siblings in her family. So she's left to raise all her kids by herself. So her family's struggling.

So what does that mean? That means Deborah has to go and become an indentured servant. We've talked about indentured servants before, mainly because so much of America was actually built on indentured servants. So an indentured servant is kind of like a voluntary, kind of like being voluntarily enslaved.

But I don't want to say it quite like that because for the enslaved people, they were taken from their homes and forced into this. For an indentured servant, they signed up to basically work for free for passage to America or for like room and board somewhere. And usually it was for a certain amount of time.

So like seven years was one of the standard time periods for an indentured servant. I don't know the specifics of Deborah Sampson's indentured servitude, but we do know she was an indentured servant once her family fell in hard times. I don't know if that was to give her mom, again, one less mouth to feed or what was happening there because indentured servants generally were not paid.

That's the whole point. That's why it's an indentured servant. So I'm not sure the specifics, but we do know that is in fact what she was.

Indentured servitude was not for the weak of heart. Okay, this is hard, hard work. She's in the field.

She's doing manual labor. She's doing a lot of jobs that most women did not do. And while this doesn't sound fun to me, that's actually going to prime her to be ready to take on something that was very much at the time a man's role.

And so she's kind of tough, right? She's tougher than most women. Eventually her indentured servitude time period, however long that may have been, comes to an end. And she actually becomes a teacher because she loved to learn.

All right, she was very thoughtful. She wasn't a rash person. She definitely took great care into thinking things through before she did them.

So when we now get to the part of the story where she's going to go run off and join the army, you have to think this wasn't somebody who did it rushed. This wasn't somebody who had an idea one second was like, let's go do this. Because again, joining a military, male or female is a very risky business, right? Because you are putting your life at risk.

I imagine it must have been very hard for a lot of women during the Revolutionary War because they wanted to help the cause. They were very, for those who were committed to the cause, those who really believed in American independence and everything that stood for. But they weren't allowed to become soldiers.

They weren't allowed to join the military. Now when I think of it, I think there's so many other things women can do. Whether it's even little things like sewing uniforms or helping.

They're raising the kids while the men were off in war. And I'm not saying that's all a woman should do. But at the time, that's kind of all they could do.

There was a lot of things. There was women helping in all sorts of aspects. Remember we talked about the mother of the tea party.

And she helped do the makeup when the Sons of Liberty were disguising themselves as Native Americans to go throw the tea off the ship. So there were little things. Women played a very, very, very big role in the American Revolution.

Don't ever think they didn't. Especially women like Mercy Otis Warren, who was writing plays and using her writing skills to actually write the history of the American Revolution. Abigail Adams, who was one of the rare women, same with Mercy Otis Warren, who actually had a say in society.

The men were really wanting to listen to her. They valued what she had to say because they knew John Adams, her husband, very much valued what she had to say and what she thought. And so you do have a lot of women contributing in the ways that they can.

And for Deborah Sampson, she wanted to be a part of the revolution. She didn't just want to sit on the sidelines. She was brave and she wanted to do something.

So what does she do? She disguises herself as a man and enlists in the army. So serving under the name Robert Shurtleff, that's her name, she serves an entire year, guys, an entire year in the army before anybody even realizes. And we'll get to that part in a minute.

So she is not just like, you know, a backup, like sometimes fighting. She is in war. She is in combat.

She is fighting these battles. She is an active soldier. At one point she gets harmed.

She takes a bullet to her, I think her leg. And this part is so gross. She does not want to be discovered, right? So she can't really seek medical help.

And so she takes the bullet out of her own leg. It took me a minute to have to like hear that part of the story, because I was like, oh, I can't even take a splinter out of my finger when I get one. So I can't imagine taking a bullet out of my own leg.

But that's how committed she was to this. She did not want to get caught. I, you know, I don't know that I can handle it.

If I had an out, if I were to see like, oh, I got a bullet in my leg, we're going to go to the doctor, I'm going to get sent home because I can't do this. But that's just me. I'm sure a lot of girls out there would be willing to fight and willing to do it.

That's not what I would want to do personally, but I still think she's very brave for doing it. And remember how stressful this must be, because not only is she a soldier with regular soldier fears where your main priority is, of course, staying alive, but she also has to protect the secret every second of every day. She is having to make sure that she stays alive and that no one finds out that she is really a girl.

And I am very curious how she disguised her voice, because that's that's that to me seems like the hardest thing. We'll put a picture of her down here when we when we air this episode via video. So if you're not watching the video, if you're only listening to the Spotify or Apple podcast version, check out the video also, because we'll put some pictures on the bottom so you can see what she looks like.

Or you can use this magic thing called Google and see as well. But I always wonder, I'm wondering how she disguised her voice, but somehow she managed to do it. Maybe people are just preoccupied with different things.

So things are going pretty well. I mean, except for the bullet in the leg, things are going pretty well. She is managing to keep her disguise going and nobody's really noticing what's going on.

They're not noticing she's a woman. Again, I wonder how she disguised her voice. And I'm wondering how how closely these soldiers were paying attention.

Either way, she manages to do this for over a year until she gets seriously ill and so seriously ill where I believe she was losing consciousness. And that's where this becomes a problem, right? She was able to deny medical help when she had was injured or, you know, had battlefield wounds by taking care of them herself. But when she becomes so seriously ill that she passes out, that she loses consciousness, a doctor is sent to see her.

And the doctor very quickly realizes, guys, this is a woman who's been fighting. She's been disguised this whole time. So she wakes up and she realizes very quickly, like, OK, the jig is up.

This is not going to last much longer. And they're probably not going to be very happy with me. But she is given a letter and sent away.

Now, she assumes that this letter is going to be a dishonorable discharge. She actually assumes that she's probably going to get punished for this. And here's the really cool thing.

And this really speaks not only to her bravery and to her determination to fight for what she believes in, but this also speaks to to the general. I don't know who it was who who found out and had to make the decision to send her home and honorably discharge her. But he did not rat her out.

He just sent her an honorable discharge, sent her on her way. And she is the only woman to receive a full military pension for serving in the Revolutionary War. So he did not take that away from her, which I think is so cool because there were many ways he could have handled that.

And he chose to honor her service and honor her sacrifice. Now, of course, she was sent home. She was not allowed to keep fighting.

But still, that is just such a cool story to me that he saw. He recognized what she was, her bravery and her courageousness. So she goes home.

The war is over. She ends up actually getting married. She ends up having kids.

She ends up having a very fairly ordinary life. And at one point, I think she even had to fight for her back pension, improve her service. And she was able to do that, which, again, I think is so cool on both her part and the part of the the people in charge, the military men in charge of deciding that because they could have been really rude.

They could have said, you are a woman. You weren't supposed to be fighting. We don't need to give you that money.

So cool. Cool for both sides. In fact, Paul Revere actually wrote a letter on her behalf to say, like, this woman, you know, risked her life.

She deserves the pension for this. So that's another little cool detail. But once again, the story doesn't end there.

So she's now a mother. She's a wife. She's doing, you know, very honorable work raising her family.

But she's also the first woman to give public speeches in America. So she is like like almost on tour, like she's going around. She's telling her story.

Sometimes she even put her uniform on on stage, which you have to realize. I mean, that was huge for this day and age. So she's sharing her story with others.

She's not being silent about it. She's not holding her head in shame that she was caught. She's actually very proud of it.

And the public seems to be pretty proud of it, too, because they're they're going to see her. And so that's really cool. There's a lot of really cool examples of courageousness and bravery in this story.

But I also really love how, you know, we look back at these times and we think women weren't treated well and all this stuff. But you think, OK, yes, she wasn't allowed to serve in the military when she was found out, but they still very much honored her as a hero. And I think that's just so cool.

So Deborah Sampson, that's your next fun trivia you can use to tell your friends how much you know about the American Revolution and these unsung heroes. We will leave it there. As always, don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast.

And until next time, I will talk to you later.