On April 7, 1785, approximately eighteen months after her discharge, she married Benjamin Gannett, a farmer from Sharon, Massachusetts. She would spend the rest of her life as Deborah Sampson Gannett, a farmer’s wife in Sharon.
The farm was small and the finances were persistently difficult. Benjamin Gannett was not a prosperous farmer. They had three children — a son named Earl and daughters named Mary and Patience — and in 1796 they adopted Susannah Baker Shepherd. The household was sustained by the usual mix of agricultural work and the supplementary income that Deborah Gannett was able to bring in through teaching and weaving, the same occupations she had relied on before her service.
The leg wound from the Tarrytown engagement did not heal cleanly. The musket ball that remained in her thigh created chronic problems that limited her ability to work and that accumulated over the years into a significant disability. The physical consequences of her service were real and lasting, and they exacerbated the family’s financial difficulties in ways that her later petitions to various bodies would document.
For several years after the war, she did not seek recognition publicly. The cultural logic of her situation was not hospitable to a public claim. She had disguised herself as a man to serve in an army that formally excluded women. She had maintained that disguise for seventeen months and had been honorably discharged when it ended. None of the frameworks available to her for making a claim — veteran’s service, military contribution, sacrifice for the republic — had been designed with her in mind.