Deborah Sampson: No Longer in Disguise

In preparation for the upcoming exhibition Myth and Memory: Stories of the American Revolution, which commemorates the 250th anniversary of American independence, Historic New England has been gathering objects and archival material from its collections to highlight New England’s Revolutionary stories. Many of these items arrived at Historic New England with mythologies attached to them, and Myth and Memory separates fact from fiction and uncovers how the narratives surrounding these items have evolved over time. One such story concerns Deborah Sampson. In our first blog post about Sampson, we examined what it meant to be a female soldier during and after the American Revolution. This post explores how a wedding dress can help tell the complex life story of a mother, wife, and veteran.

Historic New England’s collection includes the wedding dress Deborah Sampson wore when she married Benjamin Gannett in 1785. The dress was passed down in the Gannett family before arriving at Historic New England in 1998. Originally designed as an open robe, revealing the petticoat underneath, in the late eighteenth century the gown was altered into a round gown, with a skirt that closed across the front. It is interesting as a rare surviving example of a wedding dress from eighteenth-century New England, but it is also a tool with which to tell Sampson’s story. While it would have been powerful to display textiles representing Sampson as both a soldier and a wife and mother, her military uniform has been lost to history. When understood in the context of the supporting texts left by Sampson and others about her life and role in the American Revolution, her wedding dress prompts us to reconsider how she was remembered by the public and portrayed by historians in her own time and today.

Sampson walked a fine line between traditional womanhood as a mother and wife and the more masculine roles of war veteran and public lecturer. In the speech she gave across the country, likely written by her biographer Herman Mann, Sampson apologized for breaking from gender norms to disguise herself as a man to fight in the war. She also revealed herself to be a proponent of a set of beliefs that, in same year the United States celebrated its bicentennial, historian Linda Kerber labelled “Republican Motherhood”: The idea that women were responsible for cultivating morality and patriotic ideals in the next generation of American leaders, which afforded them political influence even without formal political power. “The rank you hold in the scales of beings is, in many respects, superior to that of man,” Sampson declared in her stump speech. “Nurses of his growth, and invariable models of his habits, he becomes a suppliant at your shrine, emulous to please, assiduous to cherish and support, to live and to die for you.” 

Sampson’s balancing act was carefully calibrated to appeal to her era’s feminine and masculine norms. To be taken seriously, Sampson could not appear so feminine as to have her claims to veteran benefits declined. On the other hand, she could not present herself as too masculine, or she might be seen as a threat to patriarchal society. Rather Sampson, probably with Mann’s help, made choices for her public presentation that would garner her respect and attention. She may have argued that women had power, but she was also “willing to acknowledge what I have done, an error and presumption. I will call it an error and presumption because I swerved from the accustomed flowry path of the female delicacy to walk upon the heroic precipice of feminine perdition.”

This balance between the masculine and feminine extends to Sampson’s appearance in visual culture, in the early republic and today. In 1797, Mann commissioned a portrait of Sampson for the front page of her biography. Joseph Stone, an artist from Framingham, Massachusetts, was chosen to complete the portrait. Stone depicted Sampson wearing a white dress with a golden band under her bust, a gold necklace, and her hair down. Sampson is dressed in feminine clothing, but her face bears a strong jaw and chin, masculine features typical of Stone’s style. While the choice of artist was likely due to accessibility and affordability, Stone’s portrait of Sampson likely strengthened Mann’s readers’ perceptions of her as a strong-willed woman. Two hundred years later, on November 11, 1989, the town of Sharon, Massachusetts, unveiled a life-sized sculpture of Sampson by Lu Stubbs in front of the public library. Stubbs’s Sampson has a soldier’s military coat hiding her colonial dress and a more feminine face than in Stone’s portrait.

In 1797, Sampson was depicted only as a woman. In 1989, she was presented as both a woman and a soldier. In Myth and Memory, Historic New England will share her full story as teacher, soldier, wife, mother, and advocate.

Fall 2024 curatorial intern Mackenzie Landsittel was a contributing author for this post.