Sisters in Arms by Julie Wheelwright

Author:Julie Wheelwright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Chapter 7

The Legacy

‘And dost thou ask what fairy had inspired

A NYMPH to be with martial glory fired?

Or what from art, or yet from nature’s laws,

Has join’d a FEMALE to her country’s cause?

Why on great Mars’s theatre she drew

Her FEMALE pourtrait [sic] though in soldier’s hue?’1

Deborah Gannett, 1802

At the age of forty-two, the highly respected Mrs Benjamin Gannett, née Deborah Sampson, was proud to pass for a youthful soldier in her Continental Army uniform. Leaving her husband and three children, she lectured and toured through New England and New York from March 1802 to April 1803, thrilling audiences with her daring stories of fighting the British forces. In female attire, she addressed her audience, apologizing for her ‘uncouth’ actions as a soldier that were, nonetheless, justified by her ‘good intentions of a bad deed’. Warming to her subject, this living symbol of ‘Liberty and Peace’ described how she ‘burst the tyrant bonds which held my sex in awe and clandestinely or by stealth, grasped an opportunity which custom and the world seemed to deny, as a natural privilege’.2

With the address completed, and after a chorus of military songs, Mrs Gannett would leave the stage for a brief costume change. In Providence, Rhode Island, on 5 May 1802, as she mingled among the audience dressed in her breeches and uniform, she heard the audience swear ‘that I was a lad of not more than 18 years of age’. When the uniformed soldier mounted the podium, her public were ‘full of unbelief – I mean that in regard to my being the person that served in the Revolutionary Army.’3 Then Gannett would perform with her musket while a company of officers barked their commands, and rounded out the evening with a patriotic anthem.4

Mrs Gannett was motivated to climb back into uniform for the same reason she first took to wearing breeches. As she admitted in The Female Review, she had enlisted, ‘to have a little frolic and to see how it would seem to put on a man’s clothing but chiefly for the purpose of procuring a more ample supply of money.’5 Once her bounty was secured, ‘A new world now opened to my view, the objects of which seemed as important as the transition before seemed unnatural.’6 In her uniform she could exercise not only her musket but her intellect. As the Honourable Peter Force of Washington, DC wrote of her, ‘she conversed with such ease on the subject of theology, on political subjects and military tactics that her manner would seem masculine.’7 Gannett, ‘a master of self-promotion’, may have used her humble address to deflect criticism of her ‘demonstrative, illustrative style’ and arouse audiences’ sympathy.8 Addressing the women, Gannett expressed her ‘most sincere declaration of friendship for that sex … which neither in adversity or prosperity could I ever learn to forget or degrade.’9 As Robert Shurtliff, she had neither exploited other women nor sacrificed her own sexual integrity with her comrades. Despite her adventures, Gannett reassured her audience that while

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