## 1792: The Massachusetts Petition and the First Recognition
In January 1792, approximately nine years after her discharge, Deborah Sampson Gannett petitioned the Massachusetts Legislature for the back pay she had been denied at discharge.
The petition succeeded. The Massachusetts Legislature awarded her 34 pounds with interest and formally praised her service. The language of the resolution acknowledged her military contributions and expressed something approaching admiration.
This was a meaningful recognition, though it was also limited. The 34 pounds was her back pay — the money she was owed for the work she had done — not a pension, not ongoing support, and not a formal acknowledgment that she was entitled to the same benefits as male veterans. It was a correction of a specific wrong, not a structural change.
The Massachusetts recognition did, however, establish a public record of her service and her claim to it. It would serve as a foundation for subsequent petitions.
## Herman Mann and the Problem of The Female Review
In 1797, approximately five years after the Massachusetts petition, Deborah Sampson Gannett worked with a writer and editor named Herman Mann on an account of her wartime service. The result was The Female Review: Life of Deborah Sampson, the Female Soldier in the War of the Revolution, published in 1797 and later revised and significantly expanded in a 1866 edition.
The Female Review raised her public profile and created the narrative framework through which most subsequent popular accounts of her life would be transmitted. It is also, as the Museum of the American Revolution’s collection account explicitly states, a weak and unreliable historical source. Mann took considerable literary liberties. He invented dialogue. He added episodes that are not supported by documentary evidence and in some cases appear to contradict it. He shaped her story according to the literary conventions of the late-eighteenth-century sentimental narrative rather than according to the standards of factual documentation.