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X Chapter 4 X Becoming“The American Heroine” Deborah Sampson, Collaboration, and Performance While Briton Hammon and John Marrant relied on collaboration to produce their captivity narratives, Deborah Sampson, a female Revolutionary War soldier , took collaboration to new levels with a biography, an address, and poetry, even though only one of these texts bears her name as author. Consequently, she challenges our understanding of what constitutes authorship, especially as it intersects with cultural performance. Where Hammon, Marrant, and Phillis Wheatley invoke literacy and Christianity to claim an Anglo-American identity , Sampson invokes nationalism, patriotism, and genealogy. Like the profession of Christianity, these modes of self-identification were available and empowering even to poor outsiders like Sampson, and they point to the increasing secularization of mass American culture. Using her embodied self in conjunction with texts, Sampson sought to represent the nation as Columbia, arguing that patriotism and valor were not limited by sex, even though the operative discourse of republicanism claimed valor as a specifically masculine quality linked to the citizen-soldier. Although whiteness was certainly enabling to Sampson in a fashion that she leaves unexamined, but which is discussed later in this chapter,1 Sampson’s success at transforming herself into a celebrity depended largely on four interrelated factors that she controlled: first, her ability to fulfill expectations for both masculine and feminine virtue; second, her strategic deployment of male intermediaries to speak for and represent her in the public sphere; third, her understanding of the performative nature of gender; and, finally, and most important , her keen awareness of the importance of print in shaping public opinion . Given that Sampson was literate, courageous, ambitious, and resourceful, 146 Y chapter four her use of intermediaries to represent her in print indicates yet another strategic choice and yet another performance, but in these cases a performance of female modesty. Her manipulation of so many other authors forces us to question the typical scholarly assumption that credits the most literate of a pair of collaborators as the most dominant or influential in producing a text. Ultimately, the trajectory of Sampson’s fame suggests that even poor, powerless outsiders understood and could manipulate the growing power of print to shape public opinion in the early national era. The extraordinarily charismatic individual had definite advantages in this arena. Sampson was not alone in testing the limits of republican discourse during the American Revolution. At least four poor white women—and possibly more—masqueraded as men in order to enlist in the Continental Army or colonial militias as combatants, motivated, at least in part, by the desire to collect the enlistment bonus.2 Deborah Sampson enlisted twice. Upon her second , successful enlistment in 1782 at age twenty-one under the name “Robert Shurtliff,”3 Sampson served approximately eighteen months, during which time she was wounded. Later she was hospitalized with a contagious fever; during this hospitalization, her caregivers discovered her biological sex, which led to her discharge. After many years of struggle, Sampson eventually collected back pay with interest from the state of Massachusetts and an invalid pension from the U.S. government. She became the subject of newspaper articles, a poem, a portrait, an engraving, and numerous biographies, the first of which, Herman Mann’s 1797 The Female Review, Sampson collaborated on. In these early works, Sampson was celebrated as a patriotic heroine of the American Revolution. In recent years, she has become a feminist symbol and an icon of cross-dressing.4 By way of contrast, the other poor white women who enlisted in the Revolutionary-era military earned only humiliation. Ann Bailey, who enlisted under the name “Samuel Gay,” was tried for fraud, found guilty, fined, and jailed; most of what we know of her ignominy emerges from the records of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature.5 Anne Smith, who enlisted under the name “Samuel Smith,” was similarly jailed for her imposture.6 Historians have identified yet a fourth woman who enlisted in the Continental Army; ostensibly she enlisted as a man to escape parental authority. Her accidental curtsy to an officer betrayed her. Consequently, she was subject to an intentionally degrading strip search and, according to Lieutenant William Barton, author of the letter by which we know of this event, was drummed out of town, a scene which he dispassionately describes: “Curious seeing her dress’d in mens Clothes and [th]e whores march Beating.”7 These four women, all of whom represented themselves as men and sought combatant status...

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