Deborah Sampson

Rather than focusing on a specific battle, campaign, or mission, this chapter is the story of American Continental Army Private Robert Shurtleff of the Fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment.  A front-line skirmish ranger troop who survived multiple life-threatening situations, shouldered a musket in horrifically-bitter face-to-face battles against Loyalists and British redcoats all across upstate New York during the closing days of the Revolution, and once survived being sliced in the head with a cavalry saber.  But Robert Shurtleff isn't just notable because he was a tough sucker who put his life on the line in ultra-deadly circumstances, fought with the unbridled blood-lust of a pinned-down wolverine, and took two bullets for his country.

He is notable because he was also, in reality, a woman named Deborah Sampson who had tricked everyone into thinking she was a guy and fought throughout the entire war with the Continental Army.

Deborah Sampson was born in Plympton, Massachusetts on December 17, 1760, into a family that was about as American as a bald eagle wolfing down charbroiled hamburger patties and cheap domestic lager at an NFL tailgate party.  Her grandparents had been original gangsta pilgrims landing on Plymouth Rock, but I guess at some point her dad made some tragically-idiotic life decisions, lost a ton of money on bad investments and general dumb ideas, then ditched his family and then fled to Europe never to be heard from again (some sources speculate he was killed in a shipwreck, while others claim he moved to Maine and started a new family).  Deborah was just five years old when this went down, but that wasn’t enough to deter her evil mom from splitting her up from her brothers and sisters and shipping her off to live with some random family friends somewhere in rural Massachusetts.  She bounced from house to house for five years, then at the ripe old age of ten years old one of her foster families sold her into indentured servitude, where she basically worked as a slave on some plantation farm out in Middleborough.  For the next eight years.  Welcome to the real world kid, here’s your shovel.

As an indentured servant, Deborah wasn’t allowed to go to school or get an education, but this tall, powerfully-built, determined teenage girl not only grew strong from long hard days working in the field, she also taught herself to read and write and spent her spare time secretly reading anything she could get her hands on.  Plowing by day and reading political pamphlets by night, Sampson somehow managed to educate herself to the point where after she was released from her servitude (on her 18th birthday!), she got a job as a schoolteacher pretty much immediately.  I know that old one-room 1780s schoolhouses aren’t exactly an associate professorship at Harvard, but this should give you some indication of this woman’s natural intelligence and how hard she worked to get what she had.

Well, chilling in the life of a 1780s schoolmarm wasn’t all that appealing to Deborah Sampson, so after a particularly-obnoxious encounter with some goofball who’d fallen in love with her (she described him as having “all the sang-froid of a Frenchman and the silliness of a baboon,” then says she “set him down a fool or in a fair way to be one,” which makes absolutely no sense to me but I bet it’s some super-clever old-school trash-talking), she decided, yeah, forget this, I’m outta here.  Since it was actually literally illegal for women to not wear big pretty dresses all the time, Deborah Sampson used her income to buy a bunch of cloth, secretly stitched herself a pair of regular pants, dressed up as a man, and went off to enlist in the Continental Army and fight in the American Revolution.

Sampson failed on her first attempt to become a soldier, when someone in the Army recruiting office knew her personally and recognized her by the weird way she held a pen (she’d had one of her fingers seriously jacked-up in an encounter with a robber that I wish I knew more about).  The recruiting sergeant told her he’d have her arrested if she attempted to enlist again.  So, naturally, she walked out the front door, walked several miles up the road to the next town, and enlisted with the crew of a privateer warship that was headed off to sink British supply transport ships off Cape Cod.

Deborah Sampson’s pirate career lasted about two days.  It turned out the captain she signed on with was a raging maniac who enjoyed screaming at and beating up his sailors, so she jumped ship in Uxbridge harbor and enlisted in the Continental Army under the fake name Robert Shurtleff.  When the uniform they issued her didn’t fit, she didn’t mess around worrying that the company tailor might notice she wasn't a guy – she grabbed a needle and thread and altered the uniform herself.

Pvt. Shurtleff mustered in with the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment and was sent to West Point, New York, to do battle with the British infantry that was still occupying New York City.  Standing five foot eight and more than tough enough to handle the brutal drilling of the Continental Army, Sampson fit right in with the other troops stationed in the blistering heat of the New York summer, and was apparently so convincing as an ultra-manly warrior that the other troops didn’t even flinch.  They did, however, jokingly make fun of her because she never had to shave (they assumed this was because she was just a teenage boy), and they gave her a hilariously-appropriate nickname:  Molly.

During her three years of military service in the Continental Army, Private Robert Shurtleff was on front-line duty for roughly seventeen months of combat.  Part of the Fourth Infantry's Light Infantry Company, a unit of skirmishers, scouts, and fast-moving ranger troops, Shurtleff saw her first action in a hardcore battle against Loyalist forces outside White Plains, New York.  Charging head-on into battle, bayonet at the ready, she stormed the enemy redoubt and continued to fight in brutal hand-to-hand combat despite receiving a sword wound to the head from a loyalist saber.  For most people, you’d think nearly being decapitated after getting whacked in the dome with a sword would at least put them out of action for a while, but Sampson made a career out of constantly refusing medical treatment and “walking it off” every time someone drilled her with a fist, bayonet, rifle butt, or bullet.

A few weeks later she was shot in the shoulder outside Tarrytown and would just suck it up and walk around with a Brit bullet lodged in her arm for the rest of her life.  Think about that the next time someone tells you that whining is for girls.

Fighting up and down the Hudson River Valley for the next year and a half, Deborah Sampson and the Light Infantry were involved with dozens of small-scale yet amazingly-brutal fights against British troops, American loyalists, and even a couple Native American tribes north of the Hudson that randomly ambushed the Colonial forces from time to time.  Despite being constantly under-supplied, low on ammo, and without adequate amounts of food or warm clothing, the Fourth Massachusetts soldiered on, engaging in hardcore close-quarters fighting every step of the way.

Four months after her being shot in the shoulder, Deborah Sampson was out with a small company of thirty other soldiers on a raid to attack a Loyalist camp, set it on fire, and steal all of their horses.  The mission went off just as planned, but as she was charging down a fleeing traitor loyalist scumbag (while riding on the horse that she had just stolen from him, which is pretty hilarious), some guy popped up, busted a flintlock at her and planted a .69-caliber chunk of hot lead right into her upper thigh.  She finished off the kill, but slumped from her horse, covered in blood.  One of her comrades rode her six miles to the hospital, but despite barely hanging on to her consciousness, Deborah Sampson would rather have died in battle than go back to her old life – so instead of being seen by the surgeon, she manned up, went into the bathroom, and dug the bullet out of her leg with a pocketknife.

It took her three tries to get it out.  With a three-inch pocketknife blade.  And no anesthesia.

Sampson refused further medical treatment, strapped a tourniquet on it, and walked out of the hospital.  Two weeks later one of her squadmates came down with malaria, so she volunteered to stay behind the main body of the unit and take care of him, a move that also bought her time to heal as well.  Unfortunately they were put up in the home of a guy who claimed to be a patriot but was actually a loyalist sympathizer, and he gave such poor medical care to the sick soldier that the dude died.  Then the guy locked Deborah in his cellar and told her he was going to hold her prisoner until the British Army came and arrested her.  Naturally, she escaped, found a crew of local militia, and had the guy arrested as a traitor and a murderer.

The adventures of Pvt. Robert Shurtleff continued on well into 1782, long after the Revolutionary War was "officially" over.  In 1782 she took a raiding party to the headwaters of the Hudson to fight Indians, receiving a written commendation for bravery in the face of the enemy.  A few months after that she was part of a unit that was ambushed by loyalist forces, and had to jump into the freezing river and swim across it in the dead of winter while enemy troops shot at her.   She nearly drowned, but her quick thinking helped save the lives of many men in her company who followed suit.

Sampson was eventually appointed to be aide-de-camp to a General Patterson, but when she fell sick and was hospitalized the Army doctor was pretty surprised to realize during a routine examination that Private Robert Shurtleff wasn't who "he" said he was.  The doctor nursed Sampson to health, then sent her back to her commander with a letter explaining the situation.

En route to her commander, her ship was caught in a storm and sunk.  Sampson nearly drowned, but somehow managed to escape the wreckage and swim to shore.

Sampson gave the letter to her commander and confessed that she wasn’t actually a dude.  Pretty much everyone was like holy crap, but since she’d been a loyal soldier for three long years of the war they didn’t freak out the way you might expect.  General Fat Henry Knox gave her an honorable discharge from the military, allowing her to keep her uniform and collect a war veteran’s pension... making her one of the very few women to receive that honor from the Continental military.

After the war, Deborah Sampson got married, had three kids, and bought a farm.  She became pretty legendary after writing her memoirs, traveled the country as a public speaker, and lived to be 68 years old.

She would be the first woman officially recognized as serving in the United States Army.  She wouldn’t be the last.