Deborah Sampson of Plympton, Massachusetts has an incredible connection to the American Revolution. She was the first woman to ever enlist in the United States military and was the first woman take a bullet for the country. She did it by pretending to be a man for nearly two years.
Using the name Robert Shurtlieff, Sampson served with the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment from 1781 to 1783 in the Revolutionary War, which started 250 years ago this week.
Amateur historian Steve Connolly of Sharon has taken a long look at Sampson’s life and produced a nine-part documentary about her.
How Deborah Sampson joined the military
Connolly discovered Sampson was forced into indentured servitude for a Middleborough family when she was a young girl, after her father abandoned her, her mother and her six siblings.
When Sampson wasn’t secretly studying textbooks that belonged to her new brothers, she was learning how to do things that many women never did, like shooting a musket, hunting, riding horses and woodworking. Those skills that would eventually help her enlist in George Washington’s Continental Army, under the alias Robert Shurtlieff.
“All the direct lineage into Deborah, they all came over on the Mayflower, so she came from some pretty strong stock. Physical attributes helped her. She was taller, and she became country strong. Old journals talk about how she could chop wood,” Connolly explained.
“She wanted to be part of this, she really set her goals. She was going to help answer the call for her new nation.”
As part of her disguise, Sampson would bind her chest with cloth, and at the age of 21, she was drafted into the light infantry, an elite unit known for being more mobile and agile than regular infantry.
“She was an astute soldier. She would search up on the flanks of impending battle and size things up and go back and tell the men this is where we’re going to attack and this is how were going to do things,” Connolly said.
How many times was Deborah Sampson shot?
But at Sampson’s first skirmish in Tarrytown, she was shot in the thigh with a musket ball by a local band of British loyalists, also known as Tories. What she did next earned her a spot in history.
“Deborah Sampson was the first woman to take a bullet for our country. She fought to defend a document that didn’t fully defend her. All men are created equal it read, it made no mention of women. When she took a blast in battle to her leg, she was afraid to reveal her secret, so she took out a penknife, she dug out the musket ball and she sewed herself back up again. That’s grit,” actress Meryl Streep said in her 2016 speech at the Democratic National Convention.
What happened to Deborah Sampson when she got caught?
That kind of bravery would keep her secret safe for almost two years, until a fever put her in the hospital. Her doctor, Barnabas Binney, was in for quite a surprise.
“This is a solider in our elite light infantry, the best of the best. It’s a woman!” Connolly said. “He was so shocked he had to get her out of that hospital immediately. He brought her to his house for rehabilitation to keep her safe.”
Once nursed back to health, Sampson turned herself in. But to her surprise, the men were impressed with what she done. She wasn’t punished. In fact, she was given an honorable discharge. With a little help from Paul Revere, she became the first woman to receive a military pension.
“A woman stood up for our country, she answered the call. She wasn’t just going to be a nurse, she was going to be a soldier. What was so wrong with that?” Connolly said.
Kean Collection / Getty Images 
Sampson would go on to have a full life after the war, becoming a mother to four children. In 1802, she began a year-long lecture tour about her experiences, the first woman in America to do so.
Sampson died in 1827 at the age of 66. She’s buried at Rock Ridge Cemetery in Sharon. Her headstone reads ‘The Female Solider’ and it includes both names – Deborah Sampson and her alias, Robert Shurtlieff. A statue of Sampson stands outside the library in Sharon.
In 1983, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis declared Sampson the official heroine of the Commonwealth.
Congress passed the Deborah Sampson Act and it was signed into law in 2021. It established the Office of Women’s Health at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. It also provides women veterans greater access to critical care and resources like counseling, child care and legal services.
For more information about Deborah Sampson, visit the state’s website.
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