Martha Washington And Deborah Sampson: Two Paths Of Courage

We explore how Martha Washington and Deborah Sampson advanced the Revolution through very different forms of leadership. One shaped morale and public life; the other broke barriers to fight and spy under a borrowed name.

• Pairing Martha Washington and Deborah Sampson through military connection
• Deborah Sampson’s enlistment as Robert Shirtliff and covert missions
• Self-treatment of wounds to protect her identity
• Discovery, honorable discharge, and veteran legacy
• Martha Washington’s destroyed correspondence and historical traces
• Presence at Valley Forge and role in sustaining morale
• Defining the social tone for the early capital and first ladies
• Multiple models of women’s leadership including Abigail Adams
• Service, virtue, and contributing to ends larger than self

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School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership

Center for American Civics

Chapters

• 1:32 Setting The Stage: Two Founders
• 2:07 Why Pair Martha And Deborah
• 3:32 Deborah Sampson’s Disguise And Service
• 6:18 Missions, Wounds, And Discovery
• 8:57 Honor, Afterlife, And Legacy
• 10:30 Martha Washington’s Lost Letters
• 13:17 Valley Forge And Moral Support

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:46

Welcome back everyone to Civic Senior Year. We have our Women of the Founding expert, Dr. Kirsten Burkhog. And today we're talking about Martha Washington and Deborah Samson, which is very interesting because, you know, when we were kind of doing our pre-discussion on women of the founding, this came up and I'd never heard of Deborah Sampson. So Dr. Burkhogg, again, thank you for coming here. Why is it important for us to study Martha Washington and Deborah Sampson kind of together?

SPEAKER_01: 1:21

I think the clearest connection between them probably runs through their connection to the military. So Martha Washington, of course, is the wife of the General George Washington, the you know, pinnacle of military commandership during the American Revolution. Comparatively, Deborah Sampson, who I'm guessing many people listening to this podcast have never heard of before, was a woman who served in the American Revolution in a time before women were allowed to serve in the military in the United States and in Great Britain. So there was no precedent for her service. And in fact, she had to disguise herself as a man in order to serve in the American Revolution. So that's the clearest connection between the two. And there's lots we could talk about in terms of Martha Washington and her service to the men of the American Revolution, particularly during the Valley Forge winter. So yeah, I think that's the clearest connection between the two and why we might think of them together is that they're both women who are surrounding and involved in the military efforts of the American Revolution.

SPEAKER_00: 2:36

So if women weren't allowed to serve in the military, how is Deborah Sampson serving in our military?

SPEAKER_01: 2:46

So she fully disguised herself as a man. You may have heard the ancient Chinese legend of Mulan or seen the Disney movie. Deborah Sampson's kind of like that. She disguises herself as a man in 1782. She takes on a fake name. She calls herself Robert Shortliffe. And she joins the Massachusetts Reg Regiment, serves under George Webb for two years, completely just concealing her gender. So somehow, throughout the course of all of this, she managed to keep a secret that she was in fact a woman. She lived as Robert Shirtliff for a couple of years. And she was assigned serious and important missions. She was not just a soldier, she was also a spy. She was tasked frequently with spying and scouting and led a number of raids on British soldiers. And she also knew throughout the course of this that if it was ever discovered she was a woman, she would never, she would not be allowed to serve. And as a result, just tried to keep that as secret as possible. She treated a lot of her own battle wounds, in fact, in order to keep these things concealed, right? To prevent people knowing she was a woman. She actually personally removed a bullet from her own thigh in order to prevent people from finding out that she's a woman. And eventually this runs out, right? She is eventually discovered in 1783. She falls ill, has to be kind of taken, you know, to like an inpatient hospital in Philadelphia, and it is discovered she is a woman while she is unconscious. So after that, she's no longer allowed to serve, but she is actually awarded a full honorable discharge from the U.S. military. She goes on to marry, she has some kids. And when she dies in 1826, her husband was awarded spousal support as the husband of a soldier. He is the first recorded instance of a man receiving US military spousal support after a spouse's death. So a cool bundle of things with Deborah Sampson. Another little tidbit about her that I always like is that after the American Revolution, there would often be circumstances where Revolutionary War veterans would be invited to speak or even give reenactments of things that happened during the American Revolution. And she participated in these with gusto and always wore her full uniform to do them. So that's Deborah Sampson. Yeah, she is a really fascinating, fascinating and understudied figure.

SPEAKER_00: 5:20

Wow. I I mean listeners can't see, but I feel like my mouth has been open this whole time, and I'm just it is. It's so interesting that once they found out though, like she still received the respect almost of any other, you know, soldier at that time. So and then we have Martha Washington, right, who did not fight but was still on the battlefront. Can you tell us a little bit about like Martha Washington's role in this?

SPEAKER_01: 5:50

Yeah. So Martha Washington is someone about whom we know less than we would like. And this is in part because it was very much standard practice to burn most, if not all, of the personal correspondence of individuals upon their death. Now, of course, you have some people who know that they are going to be well remembered, famous, like Alexander Hamilton, who preserves a ton of his correspondence, but he does burn some of it, right? If there's anything sensitive, they're very concerned to have that destroyed. And in particular, Martha Washingtiff had all of her correspondence with her husband destroyed. So we do have some knowledge of who she was through some of her remaining letters, but much less than we would like. I do think one way we can kind of get at the importance of Martha, especially in regards to her husband, is by examining what other people had to say about Washington and his wife. So at Washington's funeral, there's this really interesting quote from General Henry Lee. And a lot of people know this quote. He says Washington is first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen. But there's a whole second half to that sentence that we always miss, where he also says that Washington was second to none in the humble and endearing scenes of private life. That Washington was equally as concerned with his home and his wife and their family as he was with his political and military pursuits. And we can see how this was in many ways a reciprocal relationship. Martha Washington, she married, she's Martha Dandridge when she's born. She's Martha Custis later with her first husband. He dies in 1757. They, she and George Washington have a kind of short courtship. She has a couple of children with Custis. Those are the only children that she has. Of course, Washington has no children. They get married in 1759. Only less than a couple of full decades later, the American Revolution is in full swing and George is at the head of it. And she traveled with him throughout the course of the American Revolution. She often lived in the military encampments, uh, including the Valley Forge military encampments during the winters of 1777 and 1778, which are largely well known as like the kind of really, really bad winters of the American Revolution. They're eating their horses, right? And she is there. She is there with George Washington. And we see in her existing letters that the reason she does this and doesn't stay in her home state of Virginia, which she loved, by the way. She was a Virginian born and raised and always wanted to return there. The reason she doesn't just stay in Virginia is because she believes she can be of service to her husband. She can do something to help, to help him. And if she can help him, he can better help his men. She thinks she has a really important role to play by just being a moral support and encouragement to George. Right. And then later on, of course, George Washington becomes president, and she again can't live in her beloved home state of Virginia. She removes with him to the Capitol and has a hand in setting the tone for how first ladies would deal with capital society, which is kind of an ongoing conversation, is what is the role of the first lady? And for her, she went a long way in establishing what is often considered today a kind of courtly society, right? That she and her husband were at the center of this, and that she was the leader of the society, particularly of women in and around the capital. And this goes a long way in setting the tone for how capital society was going to operate in the future. So, right, this is Martha Washington, you know, who is the kind of person behind George Washington. And it's clear in his devotion to her and how people talked about him that he viewed her as important and these sorts of roles. So that's one way that we can think about Martha Washington and her role, in particular in the American Revolution.

SPEAKER_00: 10:01

And so both of these women had very different roles within the revolution. And they're both leadership roles, essentially. They just look a little bit different. So how can we really start to understand the role of women when it is so complex? There's so many different roles that women had in the American Revolution.

SPEAKER_01: 10:26

Yes, there are. And I think that that might, in essence, be the point that there are different roles that women fulfill during the American Revolution because there is no one size fits all definition of how a woman ought to lead or what that leadership should look like within the confines of a marriage. I'll throw in another example that we've talked about recently as well, Abigail Adams during the course of the American Revolution. John is not in the military. John is really active in the politics, and he is never home. So she is running the economy of their household. That is also a really different role than what Martha Washington is doing, than what Deborah Sampson is doing, right? But all of them are serving and they have a focus on serving others and serving the potential future of this country that they're fighting for. So all of them have similar goals. It's not just simply about doing what you want to do because you want to do it. They all are suited for the roles that they have, but it's always for some kind of greater good besides what they want. And I think that we see this not only in virtuous women, but in virtuous people is that ultimately we are not ends in and of ourselves, but we can serve greater ends. We can be the instruments of bigger things. That doesn't mean that we don't matter. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to find roles that suit us, that we're good at, that we can be useful and helpful and of service in, but it does mean that the world doesn't revolve around us and that we're always looking for ways to contribute to bigger and better things than just our own desires.

SPEAKER_00: 12:19

And I think that's the perfect place to end this specific episode. Again, we're gonna have more, but Dr. Bernhardt, again, I've just I've learned so much, and I have so many tabs open on my computer now because today is the first time I've heard of Deborah Samson and even thinking about Martha Washington too. I mean, I know that when she when George Washington was president, she didn't coin the term first lady. That came a little bit later, but she really was the first and kind of set the standard of what that looks like. So again, thank you for your expertise, and I'm so excited for our next one.

SPEAKER_01: 12:56

Thank you.