The tour was called, according to some accounts, “The American Heroine.” The format was distinctive. She would appear first in feminine dress and speak about womanhood, framing her experience in terms that acknowledged the transgression of gender conventions while apologizing for it. She would then change into military uniform and demonstrate military drills — the loading, cleaning, and firing of a musket, the physical exercises she had learned and performed during her service.
Her 1802 lecture diary, which is held at the Boston Public Library, is one of the primary documents of her post-service life. The diary gives a more ground-level view of the tour than the Mann biography — the logistics of travel, the audiences, the receipts, the physical difficulties of performing while managing a leg wound that had never fully healed. As a primary source, it differs in character from the Mann biography: it is her own contemporary record rather than a ghostwritten narrative shaped for publication.
The tour was apparently motivated in part by financial necessity. The Gannett farm was not prospering. The book’s royalties, if any were paid, had not transformed the family’s circumstances. A speaking tour was one of the few ways available to a woman in early-nineteenth-century America to earn money from a public presence, and Deborah Gannett appears to have understood and used that mechanism.
It may also have been intended, at least in part, to build the public case for a federal pension. The Massachusetts Legislature had recognized her service in 1792, but federal recognition remained outstanding. The tour increased her public visibility and reinforced the narrative of her service at a time when she and her allies were preparing to make a formal claim.