SYMHC Classics: Deborah Sampson

I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This episode is coming out on July fourth, which is Independence Day in the US. So since we have an episode coming out on the day itself, which hasn't happened in a very long time, I thought we'd do something that's both thematically related and also a listener request. That is Deborah Samson, who known by her married name of Deborah Samson Gennett as well. Just as a note upfront, we recognize that gender is broader and more nuanced than this, and that

is not a new idea. Deborah Samson was descended from multiple people who arrived in North America aboard the Mayflower in sixteen twenty, at which point, there were indigenous nations all over the continent that recognized and continue to recognize more than two genders. We've also talked about people like the Public Universal Friend, who we covered on the show in twenty twenty, and the Friend lived at the same

time as Deborah Samson did. They described themselves as genderless, but the communities that Deborah Samson was part of saw things as very, very very binary. That applies to everything from people's descriptions of her to how children were educated, to laws about dress, and it is central to what made her famous, which is serving in the Continental Army

as Robert Shirtliffe during the Revolutionary War. Deborah Samson was born on December seventeenth, seventeen sixty in Plimpton, Massachusetts, which is just inland from Plymouth. Her family spelled their last name Samsom. The spelling with the pa in the middle shows up in her life later on. Deborah's parents were Jonathan Samson Junior and Deborah Bradford Samson, and as Tracy just said, they were both descended from people who had

traveled to North America aboard the Mayflower. The Elder Deborah Samson was the great granddaughter of Plymouth Colony governor William Bradford. Jonathan's ancestors included Miles Standish and John and Priscilla mullens Alden, who today are probably best known as characters from the Courtship of Miles Standish by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Deborah was

one of seven children and the family was poor. Jonathan was a farm laborer and claimed that he had been cheated out of his inheritance from his late father and that his being cheated out of that money was the root of the family's poverty. But there are probate records showing that Jonathan Samson's senior's estate looks like it was divided up pretty fairly, and then there are also records showing that Jonathan sold his property to his brother in

law shortly after his father's death. Family drama. Jonathan Samson eventually went to sea, and when the young Deborah was about five, he didn't come back from a voyage. The family was informed that he had died in a shipwreck, and it's possible that Deborah believed this was what happened to him, but in reality, he had moved to what is now Maine, where he and a woman named Martha lived as a married couple, and he had two more

children with her. Deborah's mother could not afford to raise seven children on her own, so Deborah and at least some of her siblings were sent to live with various friends and relatives. Than When Deborah was ten, she was indentured to the Thomas family. Some sources say that she was indentured to Benjamin Thomas Deecon at First Church of Middleborough, and others say it was to Jeremiah and Susan Thomas.

There were so many Thomas's living in this area that it was nicknamed Thomastown, and Susan was Benjamin's daughter, so it's understandable that there is some confusion about exactly who she was indentured to. This was a large family, with more boys than girls, and although Deborah wasn't provided with an education the way that the family's children were, she did use their books and school materials to teach herself

to read and write. Most of the documentation we have of Deborah's young life comes from a biography by Herman Mann that was published for the first time in seventeen ninety seven. Parts of that biography were definitely fabricated, and we will be talking about that more and a bit, But it does seem like she learned to do various types of work around the home and the farm during her indenture, and this included tasks that were more often done by men and boys, like plowing and whittling. Samson's

indenture ended when she was eighteen. For the next couple of years, she worked as a teacher. During the summers, in the window between when crops were planted and when they were harvested, in the colder months, she worked as a spinner and a weaver. She also joined First Baptist Church of Middleborough on November twelfth, seventeen eighty. That was

shortly before she turned twenty. Although there was a pretty big Baptist community in Middleborough, they had at least three Baptist churches, most people in the area were Congregationalists, especially the people who had the most wealth and power and influence. Baptists were really seen as outsiders. This was all happening during the Revolutionary War, and we don't know much about how the war's earlier years affected Deborah Sampson. That's seventeen

ninety seven biography. He does give a lengthy recounting of a vivid and violent dream she reportedly had just before the Battle of Lexington in seventeen seventy five. Though it's not totally clear whether this is a dream she actually had or whether it's a dramatic embellishment, but if it really happened, it may have reflected her fear and anxiety

about what was going on. Although thousands of men joined the military at the start of the war, by the late seventeen seventies the Continental Army was really struggling to find recruits. Recruitment happened at the state level, and the state started drafting people and offering incentives to entice people to join. This included offering bounties for people who volunteered to serve in the place of men who had been drafted but didn't want to go. Although this did motivate

some people to join, it also caused some issues. For example, Massachusetts set quotas for how many recruits each town should provide, and it was up to the town to decide how much money they would offer as a bounty. This led some people to basically shop around for the biggest bounty they could find. Men were expected to enlist for three years or until the end of the war, whichever came first. But some just disappeared as soon as they claimed their bounty. Yeah,

this caused various issues. In addition to the disappearance of people who had claimed a bounty and then just vanished, they were disproportionately enlisting people who were desperate for money and maybe not people who were who would do well as soldiers. There was a whole many layers going on with this. Samson's first attempt to join the army might have been in pursuit of a bounty. This is documented in a diary entry by Abner Weston dated January twenty third,

seventeen eighty two. This diary was found in New Hampshire in twenty eighteen and then bought by the Museum of the Amya Revolution in Philadelphia in twenty nineteen. Somehow it did not cross my radar for any of the unearthed

episodes that happened during that time. Weston wrote, quote, there happened an uncommon affair at this time for Deborah Samson of this town dressed herself in men's clothes and hired herself to Israel Wood to go into the Three years service, but being found out, returned the hire and paid the damages.

Other second and third hand accounts add some other details to this, including that Samson was living in the home of Captain Benjamin Leonard, who employed her as a weaver, and that a woman named Jenny helped her steal some of Leonard's son's clothes. Jenny is described as the daughter of an enslaved woman and as Samson's roommate at the Leonard house, where Jenny was probably working as a servant.

After giving her name as Timothy Thayer and receiving her bounty, Samson went to a tavern and drank, then came home intoxicated, got into bed with Jenny, and got up and went about her business. The next morning, when Timothy Thayer didn't report to be mustered in, a woman who had been in the room when he enlisted said she noticed that

he held a pen, just like Deborah Samson. Apparently, Samson's way of holding a pen was distinctive because of an injury to one of her fingers, and after being questioned, Samson reportedly confessed and returned the bounty money. This was really a scandal, and although herman Mann's biography gave some other reasons. Samson may have enlisted for the second time to try to get away from it. We will get

to that after a quick sponsor break. On May twentieth, seventeen eighty two, Robert Shirtliff accepted an enlistment bounty from the town of Uxbridge, Massachusetts. He was tall, taller than the average soldier, but apparently too young to grow facial hair. There were no physical exams required to enlist at this point, nobody had to provide any kind of documentation of their

name or their age. About a year and a half would pass before anybody realized that Robert Shirtliffe, whose name is spelled a lot of different ways in different various records for anybody, realized that he had previously been known to everybody before this point as Deborah Sampson. Shirtliffe was mustered into the fourth Massachusetts Regiment at Worcestern, Massachusetts. Three days later, he marched with the regiment to West Point, where he was assigned to Captain George Webb's company of

light Infantry. The light Infantry was seen as an elite group made up of young agile men who could move quickly, do reconnaissance and engage in skirmishes with the enemy. Webb's company spent most of their time in the Hudson River Valley. The Battle of Yorktown had ended the previous fall, and that is seen as the last major battle of the Revolutionary War and as a decisive victory for the United States, but the war did not actually end for almost two

more years after that. Much of the Hudson River Valley was neutral ground between US territory and New York City, which was still being held by the British, but there were lots of troops from both sides in this area. There were also French troops who were allied with the United States, as well as indigenous peoples. Some were on the sides of the British and some of the United States. In this particular area, they were more likely to be

allied with or otherwise support the British. Although this area didn't see any major battles in seventeen eighty two or seventeen eighty three, there were lots of smaller skirmishes. Later on, Herman Mann's biography of Deborah Sampson would recount a dramatic tale of her being seriously wounded with a head injury and two musket balls lodged in her thigh. She was so afraid that her sex would be discovered that she

thought about taking her own life with a pistol. Instead, she made her way to a French encampment, where she allowed a French doctor to treat and dress her head wound before sneaking away with some wine, a penknife, and a needle to extract the musket balls herself. She was able to remove one of them and treat and dress the wound, but the other remained in her body for the rest of her life. It is extremely likely that during her time as Robert Shirtliff, Deborah Sampson really was

wounded in action and really was disabled afterward. She had to document all that to receive pensions for her service, which she did. We'll talk about that more later. However, this part of Samson's biography is uncannily similar to another work, which was titled The Female Soldier, that describes the experiences of Hannah Snell, who joined the British Army as James Gray in seventeen forty five and fought against the Jacobites.

Back in Middleborough, Massachusetts, First Baptist Church was deciding what to do about Deborah Sampson's earlier enlistment as Timothy Thayer the Church Minutes from September third, seventeen eighty two read quote.

The Church considered the case of Deborah Sampson, who, last spring was accused of dressing in men's clothes and enlisting in the army, And although she was not convicted yet, was strongly suspected of being guilty, and for some time before behaved very loose and unchristian like, and at last left our parts in a sudden manner. And it is

not known among us where she is gone. And after considerable discourse, it appeared that as several brethren had labored with her before she went away without obtaining satisfaction, concluded that it is the church's duty to withdraw fellowship until she returns and makes Christian satisfaction. Okay, that means they basically kicked her out, and still she apologized and was absolved for having done wrong. A couple of other notes

on this. Today, the word loose has sexual connotations when it's used in this kind of a contact, but at the time it was more of a general description of bad behavior, and in terms of a conviction. Cross dressing had been outlawed in Massachusetts since the sixteen nineties. The prohibition on cross dressing also traced back to a verse in the Biblical Book of Deuteronomy, which described men dressing

in women's clothes and vice versa as an abomination. To return to Samson's time as Robert Shirtliff, that injury made it impossible to keep up with the light infantry, so Shirtlift seems to have convinced someone to assign him to the task of caring for a wounded soldier who could not be moved. After that, Shirtlift was given another assignment in seventeen eighty three, this time working as a waiter for General John Patterson. This wasn't a food service position,

it was more like a personal servant. Shirtliff accompanied Patterson in his unit to Philadelphia, which at the time was the US capital. An armistice went into effect on April nineteenth, seventeen eighty three, and as the US started demobilizing its forces, it furloughed troops without fully paying people for their services, also without a clear plan for funding pensions for anybody.

Demands for pay and for better conditions were part of a mutiny along the Pennsylvania line in seventeen eighty three, and Patterson's troops were sent to Philadelphia to try to put that mutiny down. In Philadelphia, Robert Shirtliffe became ill with a fever and delirium and was hospitalized. The cause isn't clear, although there were epidemics of both measles and

smallpox in Philadelphia at that time. Measles is the more likely of the two, since the various descriptions of this don't include typical smallpox symptoms, and George Washington had ordered the troops to be inoculated against it. Yeah, it could have been something totally else, but those two diseases really

were rampant. While working at a hospital in Philadelphia, doctor barnabas Binny discovered that one of his patients, known as Robert Shirtliffe, was wearing a breastbinding, but he kept that a secret. It is not totally clear how Samson's commanding officers eventually learned her identity. In Man's book, Benny gave her a letter that explained the whole situation and told her to deliver it to General Patterson, and she did that even though she was pretty sure the letter was

saying that she was a woman. Later, even more romanticized versions of this claimed that she gave the letter not to Patterson but to George Washington himself, whatever those details were, general Henry Knox granted Robert Shirtliffe an honorable discharge on October twenty third, seventeen eighty three. And this is not at all how the Continental Army or the various militias generally dealt with women who tried to enlist, or with people who successfully enlisted but were later discovered to have

female bodies. It was way more common for people to be publicly shamed, charged with crimes including fraud and cross dressing, or subjected to just deeply humiliating and traumatizing physical examinations which really were just sexual assaults. It's possible that there are other women who managed to serve undetected in the Revolutionary War, or people who might describe themselves as non binary or as transgendermen today, but the honorable discharge of

Robert Shirtliff is really unique. After being discharged, Samson returned to Massachusetts, and as far as we know, once she got there, she resumed her life as Deborah Sampson. The first public report of her service in the Revolutionary War was published just a few months later. It named Robert Shirtliffe, but it did not mention Samson's name. Quote for particular reasons. It doesn't say what they are, just that they're particular.

This was printed in the Independent Gazette or the New York Journal revived on January tenth, seventeen e and it was picked up by other newspapers later on. It began quote, an extraordinary instance of virtue in a female soldier has occurred lately in the American Army in the Massachusetts Line. Vis a lively, comely young nymph, nineteen years of age, dressed in man's apparel, has been discovered, and what redounds

to her honor. She has served in the character of a soldier for near three years, undiscovered, during which time she displayed herself with activity, alertness, chastity, and valor, having been in several skirmishes with the enemy, and received two wounds, a small shot remaining in her to this day. She is a remarkable vigilant soldier on her post, and always gained the admiration and applause of her officers. Was never found in liquor, and always kept company with the most

upright and temperate soldiers. This report describes her illness and the discovery of her sex, and her honorable discharge, before offering an ex explanation for why she did all of

this quote. The cause of her personating a man, it is said, proceeded from the rigor of her parents, who exerted their prerogative to induce her to marriage with a young man she had conceived a great antipathy for, together with her being a remarkable heroine and warmly attached to the cause of her country, in the service of which it must be acknowledged, she gained reputation, and no doubt will be noticed by the compilers of the history of

our Grand Revolution. I have so many feelings about that right up. A couple of factual notes on this. Samson was about twenty one when she enlisted, rather than nineteen, and although recruits were expected to serve for three years, Robert Shirtliff's time in the army is documented it closer

to eighteen months. Samson's parents also weren't really involved in her life at all, so this story about fleeing an unwonted marriage reads more like a literary trope and a way to make readers or sympathetic to her, Rather than any real explanation of her reasoning. We'll talk about Samson's post Revolutionary war life after another quick sponsor break. Deborah Sampson married Benjamin Gannette of Sharon, Massachusetts, on April seventh,

seventeen eighty five. There is a gown in the collections of Historic New England that may have been her wedding dress. Was originally made as an open gown to be worn with a petticoat around seventeen seventy, and then it was remade as a full dress without that open front about fifteen years later. Then it was altered again in the seventeen eighties, presumably so Deborah could get married in it. So the dress from there was passed down within the family.

Some of her descendants even wore it for things like historical reenactments and other events. Deborah and Benjamin had three children, Earl, Mary and Patience, and they adopted Susannah Shepherd after her mother died. As had been the case in Deborah's own childhood, the family struggled financially, which is one of the reasons she worked so hard to get the benefits that she

was entitled to as a veteran. This started with petitioning the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for backpay in seventeen ninety two. She was awarded thirty four pounds. Over the course of seventeen ninety seven and seventeen ninety eight, Gannett applied for a pension under the Invalid Pension Act of seventeen ninety three.

It's not clear why four years passed between when the law was passed and when she submitted an application, But this process could be really onerous, so we said earlier, there was a lot of stuff that you had to document. Sometimes that documentation was really hard to track down or didn't exist. It's possible she had trouble finding a lawyer

who was willing to help her with it. Herman Mann's biography of her was almost certainly written to support this pension application, As we said earlier, It was published in seventeen ninety seven, and its full title was The Female Review, or Memoirs of an American Young Lady whose life and

character are peculiarly distinguished. Being a Continental soldier for nearly three years in the Late American War, during which time she performed the duties of every department into which she was called with punctual exactness, fidelity, and honor, and preserved her chastity inviolate by the most artful concealment of her sex, with an appendix containing characteristic traits by different hands, her taste for economy, principles of domestic education, etc. I do

love the long title. I do too. They're so funny. This book is so romanticized, and it has so much in common with other books in print at the time. Not just the one we mentioned earlier, there were multiple others. There are some critics today that have described it not as a biography or a memoir, but as a novel. Seems like Man himself might have even thought of it this way too, and he later talked about it having just been rushed into print without enough time to do

a good job with it. Some parts of it are questionable but not totally impossible, like the vivid dream that we mentioned and the sneaking a way to remove a musket ball also in that category, or things like a romantic interlude involving a young woman from Baltimore who falls in love with this patient known as Robert Shirtliff at a military hospital in Philadelphia, who she, of course believes

to be a man. There's so many dramatic and thrilling tales. Yeah, there are a lot of them, and several people have traced and this also save dramatic tale is in this other book that was in circulation at the time. There are parts of this writing that are flatly untrue. Like Man claims Deborah Samson Gennett was at the Battle of Yorktown,

which was over long before she enlisted. There's also an account of rescuing a white woman who was held captive by indigenous people and marrying her, but putting off consummating the marriage until it could be properly solemnized in the city.

In the words of Man's book quote, on their return to Philadelphia, they purchased her a suit of clothes, but she, unable to express her gratitude, received them on her knees and was doubtless glad to relinquish her sham marriage and to be sent to her uncle, who she said lived in James City. This is almost certainly just completely fabricated. Man commissioned a portrait of Gannett by folk artist Joseph Stone, which became the basis for the engraving for the book's frontispiece.

This portrait still exists in the collection of the Rhode Island Historical Society today. It shows her in a feminine white dress with long brown hair that curls softly around her cheeks and her shoulders, blue eyes, fair skin with rosy cheeks, and a pretty prominent jaw. It's framed with some patriotic and elishments, like an eagle bearing a shield that's decorated with stars and stripes. Mann was not the only writer trying to support Deborah Sampson Gannett's pension efforts.

Shortly after she filed her paperwork, poet Philip Freneau published A Soldier Should be Made of Sterner Stuff on Deborah Gannette, and that was published in a publication called The time Piece. Although Gannette pursued this pension she was entitled to for months, her petition for it wound up stalled in Congress. She tried applying again a few years later, and in eighteen oh two she went on a speaking tour to raise

money and to try to gather support. She went all around New England and New York and was billed as the American Heroine. She worked with herman Mann again on the text of the address that she would give on this tour. Some historians have concluded that this was not a collaboration between the two of them, but he just wrote it for her. She would speak while wearing a dress, and then she would go off stage and change into her soldier's uniform and then come back and do military

drills like presenting her arms. We don't really know how much Genet stuck to the prepared remarks that man worked on, but we do have a print version of it. It begins quote not unlike the example of the patriot and philanthropists, though perhaps perfectly so. In effect, do I awake from the tranquil slumbers of retirement to active public scenes of life,

like those which now surround me. That genius, which is the prompter of curiosity, and that spirit, which is the support of enterprise, early drove, or rather allured me from the corner of humble obscurity. Their cheering aspect has again prevented a torpid rest. If you found that to be a whole lot of words that essentially said nothing, I

was very stilted. I have bad news for you. The whole thing is like this, and It's a lot more about patriotic ideals than about any real specifics from her life for her time in the army, which makes for maybe bad copy, but probably worked really well to drum up crowds to support her. Gannett kept a journal during her tour, and this journal reveals that it was really kind of a difficult time. She was traveling alone, and

she was sick a lot. There are lots of descriptions of toothaches and a pain in her face and at one point what she described as dysentery, and she also just really missed her children. Deborah Samson Connette was finally awarded a pension as a disabled veteran on March eleventh of eighteen oh five, after some prominent people spoke up on her behalf, one of them being Paul Revere. Her pension started at four dollars a month, and then she applied for and was granted increases in that amount in

eighteen sixteen and eighteen nineteen. Sometimes she's described as the first woman in American history to receive a military pension or the first woman to be wounded while fighting for the United States, but neither of these is true. One earlier example is Margaret Cochrane Corbin, who became a camp follower after her husband John joined the Pennsylvania military. Margaret was helping her husband load his cannon at the Battle of Fort Washington on November sixteenth, seventeen seventy six, and

when he was killed, she took his place. She was then seriously wounded as well, and she became a prisoner of war after the battle. The Continental Congress awarded her a lifetime pension on July sixth, seventeen seventy nine, although at half the amount that men received. In her later years, Deborah Samson Ginnett seems to have wanted her family to know about and to remember her time as a soldier,

but she really stepped away from the public spotlight. While her military service was described as exemplary, the idea of cross dressing was still really scandalous, and any association with the military could be seen as very suspicious for women.

There were thousands of women in camp followers during the war, and even though a lot of them were doing absolutely necessary work like cooking and mending and caring for the sick, they were viewed with a lot of derision and suspicion, and this all fed into a lot of really salacious rumors that she seems to have found genuinely upsetting. Dembra Samson. Gannett died on April twenty ninth, eighteen twenty seven, at

the age of sixty six. At the time, Herman Mann was working on a revised version of her memoir, one that was written in first person, in which she had given him permission to print only after her death. Mann got almost two hundred subscribers to fund this revised work, but he also died before getting it published. His son took up the project and made all kinds of revisions, but then he died as well. Overall, these revisions made

the book more sensationalized and definitely not more accurate. Benjamin Gennett petitioned the government for a survivor's pension, one that typically would have been paid to a widow after the death of her veteran husband. Congress authorized this on July seventh, eighteen thirty eight, with a committee noting that the Revolution had quote furnished no other similar example of female heroism, fidelity,

and courage. Benjamin Ginnett actually died about eighteen months before Congress finalized this payment, so in the end, it went to his attorney and his heirs. John A. Venon printed a new version of Herman Mann's biography of Deborah Samson Ganet in eighteen sixty six. It included lots of annotations and corrections, as well as new information. There were also lots of dime novels and other stories about her printed in the nineteenth century. During World War II, a liberty

ship was named the SS Deborah Gannett. In nineteen eighty three, Governor Michael Dukakis signed legislation naming Deborah Sampson the official heroine of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, with May twenty third being designated as Deborah Sampson Day. A life sized statue of her was unveiled at the Sharon, Massachusetts Public Library

on Veterans Day nineteen eighty nine. In the late twenty teens, legislation known as the Deborah Sampson Act was introduced to in Congress a number of times, at one point passing the House but getting stalled in the Senate. This legislation was meant to improve women's access to care and benefits through the Department of Veterans Affairs, and to improve the

quality of that care. The Bill's content was eventually folded into the Johnny Isaacson and David P. Row MD Veterans Healthcare and Benefits Improvement Act of twenty twenty which was signed into law on January fifth, twenty twenty one. In this Act, title five, Deborah Sampson is subtitled Improving Access

for Women Veterans to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Before we get to listener mail, something came up during research on this that would normally probably go into the Friday behind the scenes, but it seems like enough listeners might have heard it and be wondering that I wanted to go ahead and talk about it now. When I'm pulling together resources for episodes, one of the places I look is Gail databases that I have access to through the

public library. Gail's first book result when I searched for Deborah Samson is from the nineteen ninety two book Notable Black American Women. I was immediately confused, since none of the material that I had gathered before that point suggested that Deborah Gannette was black, and the many references that I had seen to were ancestors being aboard the Mayflower without mentioning any other ancestors kind of implied that she was not. Sources from Gannette's lifetime don't mention her race

at all. It wasn't typical for white writers to spell out another white person's race, but noting the race of black people was routine in everything from enlistment records to newspaper articles to personal journals. The idea that Deborah Samson was black seems to trace back to William's Nell's book Colored Patriots of the American Revolution that was published in eighteen fifty five. This book is noteworthy on its own

William Coopernell was a journalist an abolitionist. This was one of the first books by a black person to document the contributions of other black people to the American Revolution. Nell also wrote books about black soldier's service in the War of eighteen twelve and on christ Path addics in the Boston Massacre. He is somebody who could be an episode subject of the show One Day. Colored Patriots of the American Revolution references Lemuel Burr, who was black and indigenous.

Lemuell's grandfather, Samuel Burr, was friends with Jeremy Jonah and both served in the Revolutionary War. Burr was in Gannett's regiment, and Jonah was in another regiment that was also stationed in the Hudson Valley. To quote the book quote, Lemuel Burr, grandson of Seymour, a resident of Boston, often speaks of their reminiscences of Deborah Ganet. Nell then prints the text of the General Court of Massachusetts resolution awarding Debra Gannet

thirty four pounds for services in the Continental Army. Multiple historians have traced the idea that Deborah Samson Gannet was black to this passage. People interpreted her inclusion in this book as meaning that she was black as well, although it's really not entirely clear if this was Nell's intent or not. From there, it made its way into other

people's work. The earliest examples of this are primarily from black writers and speakers who were doing the important and necessary work of documenting and publicizing black people's participation in the Revolutionary War. For example, Lewis Hayden, who was enslaved from birth but liberated himself and became a prominent part of the underground railroad before the Civil War, gave an

address during the US Centennial in eighteen seventy six. He was speaking to the Colored Ladies' Centennial Club in Boston, and he used Ganet as an example of black women's contributions to the war. The idea that Deborah Samson Genet was black became more widespread during the Civil Rights Movement, and it still comes up today, primarily in sources that are focused specifically on black people's achievements, like lists of facts for Black History Month and that nineteen ninety two

book that we mentioned. To be totally clear, it is not impossible that Deborah Samson Gannet had African ancestry somewhere in her family tree. She had one grandmother and one great grandfather whose parents aren't clearly documented, and of course it's also possible that one of her ancestors had an affair of some sort that wouldn't be reflected in things

like birth and marriage records. But beyond that, Deborah Samson Gannett's documented ancestors trace back to people who emigrated from Europe during the seventeenth century, nearly all of them from England during the Great Puritan Migration. It would have been a scandal for any of them who have had a child with somewhat of African descent, and there just hasn't been anything found to suggest that that kind of scandal happened.

For folks who want more on Deborah Samson Gennett, one of the more recent books about her is titled Masquerade, The Life and Times of Deborah Samson Continental Soldier. That's by Alfred F. Young. There's also a recent novel titled Revolutionary by Alex Myers. Myers is a transgender man, so he brings a really unique perspective to telling this story. Yeah. This is the second time in recent memory that there's been a novel that I started reading and did not finish.

In this case, it's because there is a rape in the first chapter and I noped hard out of it at that point. I was just not up for reading a book that started out with a rape over the weekend. No not rest will way to spend your time now, would not say those aren't important stories. Yeah, I mean it's been extremely well reviewed. Yeah, I just I was not prepared and did not continue reading. There you go.

Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.