Revolution acts: selections from the SPNEA collection

Magazine Antiques, August, 2003 by Nancy Carlisle

While some, like Forbes and Sayward, found the events of the war confining, others found opportunity One who did so was Deborah Sampson (Pl. IX). Family tradition holds that it is her wedding dress that is pictured in Plate X. Sampson's beginnings were inauspicious. The daughter of the farmers Jonathan (1729--1811) and Deborah Bradford Sampson (1732--1811), she was indentured as a servant to a family in Middleborough, Massachusetts, as soon as she was old enough. When she was twenty-four, perhaps wearing this dress, she married Benjamin Gannett (1757--1837), a farmer from Sharon, Massachusetts. She and her husband raised three children while enduring ill health and poverty. It was the sort of life lived by countless others on hardscrabble farms in New England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Another who found himself ambivalent about the events occurring around him was the Reverend Eli Forbes, of Brookfield, Massachusetts. In the portrait shown in Plate VIII he stands at a gleaming mahogany pulpit, the handwritten notes for his sermon resting on an open Bible. In the years leading up to the Revolution, Forbes tried to maintain political neutrality, arguing that it was not the job of a Christian minister to "meddle much with civil Power." (7) This did not suit the patriots of Brookfield. Before long his parish became rancorous, threatening Forbes with violence, and in February 1775 he and his wife Mary (nee Parkman; 1725-1776) were stoned as they rode into town. A few weeks later, the parish locked him out of the meetinghouse and demanded that he explain his position. Apparently his explanation was unacceptable, for soon afterwards he was dismissed. He and his wife traveled to Boston, where they were caught in the upheaval that followed the baffles of Lexington and Concord. They f led the city and traveled north to the coastal town of Gloucester to join a married daughter. Mary Forbes died soon afterward, her health perhaps weakened by the enforced travel. Reverend Forbes was eventually appointed minister of Gloucester's First Church, a position he retained until the end of his life.

What was unusual about Deborah Sampson's life was its middle years, of which there are various accounts. According to one she served for eighteen months as a soldier in the Continental army Early in 1782, dressed in men's clothing, she enlisted in the Massachusetts militia as Timothy Thayer. She was quickly exposed as a woman and forced to return the bounty she had been paid as an enlistee, but within a few months she tried again, this time enlisting in the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment as Robert Shurtleff. She joined the regiment on May 23, 1782, and traveled south firm Worcester, Massachusetts, to West Point, New York. Soon afterwards she was wounded during a skirmish near Tanytown, New York, when a musket bail pierced her thigh. A nineteenth-century account of her life reported that on arrival at a nearby hospital, "under pretext of changing her clothing, she immediately retired, and after three attempts extracted the ball herself,--which she ever after preserved as a sacred relic." (8) Having avoided disc overy, she was not so lucky the following year when she was treated for fever contracted in Philadelphia. She was honorably discharged by General Henry Knox (1756--1806) at West Point in October 1783.