In the summer of 1783, a soldier collapsed in Philadelphia with a high fever. The physician who attended to the patient, Dr. Barnabas Binney, made a discovery in the course of examination that nothing in his medical training had prepared him to make: the soldier was a woman. She had been serving in the Continental Army for more than a year under the name Robert Shurtliff, attached to an elite light infantry unit, and she had kept the secret through skirmishes, wounds, and months of garrison life in the Hudson River Valley. Her name was Deborah Sampson. The fever that ended her concealment could not undo what she had already done.
## Before the Army: Plympton, Middleborough, and the Making of a Decision
Deborah Sampson was born on December 17, 1760, in Plympton, Massachusetts, the eldest of seven children. The family was not poor in the ordinary sense — they were poor in the way that leaves lasting marks. Her father, Jonathan Sampson, abandoned the family when Deborah was approximately five years old. Her mother, Deborah Bradford Sampson, could not support seven children on her own. The children were distributed.
Deborah went first to the household of an elderly widow, then to another family arrangement, and finally, at approximately eight years old, to the household of Jeremiah Thomas in Middleborough. The arrangement was an indenture — a formal binding that traded her labor through age eighteen for housing, food, and whatever education the household provided. It was a legal arrangement common in the era and not unusual for children of impoverished families, but it meant that her childhood was essentially completed in service to someone else’s household.