The Female Review
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The Female Review wife and children; soon after, mother Deborah Bradford Sampson The Female Review (1797) put five-year-old Deborah out to service in various Massachusetts Herman Mann households. An indentured servant until age eighteen, Sampson, now a “masterless woman,” became a weaver (“one of the very few androgynous trades in New England,” notes biographer Text prepared by Ed White (Tulane University) and Duncan Faherty (Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center). We want to thank Paul Erickson and Alfred Young [40]), then a rural schoolteacher, then, near age the American Antiquarian Society for their tremendous support, and Jodi twenty-one, a soldier in the Continental Army (37). Donning Schorb (University of Florida) for contributing the following introduction. men’s clothes (not for the first time, as it turns out) and adopting the generic name “Robert Shurtliff,” the soldier fought in several skirmishes, suffered battle injuries (to either the groin or upper Mann Seeking Woman: body), and was eventually promoted to serving as “waiter” (an Reading The Female Review officer’s orderly) to brigadier general John Paterson. Sampson’s military career has been most carefully Jodi Schorb reconstructed by Alfred F. Young in Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier. Although The Female Review In the wake of the American Revolution and beyond, claims Sampson/Shurtliff enlisted in 1781 and fought at the Battle Deborah Sampson was both celebrity and enigma, capturing the of Yorktown (September-October, 1781), Sampson/Shurtliff 1 imagination of a nation that had successfully won their actually served in the Continental Army from May, 1782 until independence from England. Herman Mann’s The Female Review October, 1783, in the light infantry company of the Fourth (1797), penned with Sampson’s consent, is less a factual biography Massachusetts Regiment (93, 97). The light infantry was an elite, of Sampson than a fictive shaping of Sampson for early republican highly mobile, and--at the war’s end, at least--well-equipped audiences, a “tangle of fact, invention, and mystery” (Young 3) division of the army. Young’s reconstruction suggests that this that stages the ambivalent relationship between Mann, a former military service was largely in Westchester County around the schoolteacher from Dedham, Massachusetts who had recently Croton River (122), an actively contested area of civil warfare embarked on a career as an editor and printer, and Sampson, his between Washington’s headquarters at West Point and willing yet elusive subject. The narrative’s richness lies in Mann’s British-occupied New York City. attempt to make both an example and a warning of Sampson. Sent as part of a company under Gen. Paterson to Born in 1760 near Plympton, a small farming village, Philadelphia to suppress a mutinous uprising of Continental Sampson was great-great granddaughter of governor William soldiers, Sampson/Shurtliff fell severely ill from contagious fever. Bradford (1590-1657) on her mother’s side and descendent of An attending physician observed the bedridden soldier’s bound Mayflower settler Henry Sampson on her father’s side. Despite an breasts, discovering Sampson’s biological sex. Surprisingly, the illustrious ancestry, Sampson’s family suffered “downward doctor withheld this information until the end of the war, and mobility” (Young 24), marked by poverty and instability. Sampson/Shurtliff continued to serve until the official Paris peace Sampson’s father, an itinerant agricultural laborer, abandoned his treaty in October, 1783, when a stunned Paterson, ostensibly in The Female Review possession of a note containing the doctor’s disclosure, gave the veteran’s honorable service. But rather than present and soldier an honorable discharge—but no pay. Within a year, the dramatize a straightforward argument about Sampson’s moral first newspaper accounts surfaced about “[a]n extraordinary fitness, unquestioned patriotism, and honorable service to instance of virtue in a female soldier” (qtd. in Young 4). country, Mann’s account builds slowly, meanders, invents The Female Review (1797) was published over a decade after episodes, and seems especially concerned—to the point of the Revolutionary War amidst Sampson’s protracted battle to win paranoia—that Sampson’s success will encourage American compensation and an invalid pension for military service. women to abandon their prescribed roles, don men’s garb, and set Struggling financially, Sampson (now married and known as off for greener pastures. Thus, the text provides a useful Deborah Gannett) successfully petitioned the Massachusetts illustration of how challenging it was to defy the era’s gender legislature for back pay in 1792. Suffering from injuries received in norms and still receive public accolades and approval. wartime, Sampson/Gannett then began a much longer battle to “Our better-deserving orphan,” “the young Continental,” win financial support from the U.S. Congress. The government “our fair Soldier,” “our heroic FEMALE,” “the blooming boy,” the had become suspicious of false claims, forcing petitioners to offer “so much admired Virago”: Mann’s range of appellations for extensive documentation and of “decisive disability” that Sampson illustrate the slipperiness of his subject. In Mann’s hand, prevented them from earning a livelihood (Young 191). Having Sampson is an exemplary model of self-directed learning and hid wartime wounds, Sampson lacked such documentation and republican virtue, motivated primarily by love of learning and began an arduous campaign that involved securing the testimony enthusiasm for country, capable of surviving the depredations of 2 of esteemed public figures, including Paul Revere and Philip battle with virtue intact. Despite his admiration, Mann cautions Freneau, and in 1802-3, raising support through a lecture and that Sampson set a dangerous precedent: he encourages female performance tour. Early in this process, Sampson sought out and readers to emulate Sampson’s virtues, but not Sampson’s deeds, collaborated with Herman Mann, a local editor eagerly hoping to constructing his subject as both exemplary patriot and cautionary build his reputation as a printer. Believing Sampson deserving of tale. As tempting as it must be to escape the constraints of the disability pay, Mann began interviewing Sampson around 1793, domestic sphere, opines Mann to his imagined female readership, publishing The Female Review in November 1797; the two the soldier’s life—which the text associates with brutality, continued their collaboration across the next decade and beyond irrational warfare, and brutish masculinity—is no life for a (Hiltner, “She Bled” 191; Young 186). Ultimately, The Female virtuous republican, male or female. So Mann walks the tightrope, Review helped Sampson’s quest for recognition and financial documenting Sampson’s spirit of “enterprise,” shielding his restitution: the narrative sold briskly, with all fifteen hundred subject from accusations of impropriety, heralding the “fair copies selling out. In 1805, Sampson was granted a Massachusetts soldier’s” patriotic sacrifices—all the while discouraging women Invalid Pension of four dollars a month. An 1809 request to raise from abandoning their domestic duties and encouraging the the pension was denied, but in 1816, Congress agreed to an award nation to seek peaceable resolution rather than protracted warfare. of $76.80 a year (Young 233). Thanks to the pioneering literary scholarship of Judith Thus, The Female Review was intended to shape Sampson’s Hiltner and the sustained sleuthing of historian Alfred Young, we public reputation and make the case for the celebrated military now have a much better understanding of how the historical The Female Review Sampson differed from The Female Review’s constructed quest of the man who had forsaken her” (qtd. in Dugaw 130), counterpart. While many of Mann’s claims can be verified, suffering a musket ball wound to the groin (which Snell removes “extensive portions of the text are fabricated or imaginatively with her own fingers to escape detection), fighting with valor, and augmented episodes” (Hiltner 191, 194), including the shipwreck inspiring the amorous attentions of multiple woman.1 The Female death of Sampson’s father (he abandoned the family and Soldier was one of many wildly popular “female warrior” ballads remarried), Sampson’s participation in the battle at Yorktown and accounts that provided entertainment and alternative models (which happened before Sampson enlisted), Sampson’s time as a of female heroism. Mann “elaborated Gannett’s life story to frontier scout among Indians (no evidence exists that Sampson develop the woman warrior tale in radically new ways,” spent time as a military scout under Philip Schuyler or in the Ohio incorporating American Revolutionary ideology into a largely territories under Benjamin Tupper), and Sampson’s rescue of a British genre: an orphaned daughter (not unlike America herself) white female Indian captive, whom the narrative claims the scout remakes herself, mobilized not by heterosexual love (so snatched from the stake and soonafter married (a fiction, alas). prominent a motivator in the female warrior tradition), but by Seizing on these contradictions, Hiltner has usefully described the love of country (Gustafson 391). The Female Review as a “polyglot interplay of historical fact and Other genres that infuse The Female Review include Indian republican romance . so characteristic of