Whether the tour was the first national lecture tour by an American woman is a question the available sources do not resolve definitively. Some accounts describe it as such; others are more cautious. What is clear is that it was an unusual and historically notable example of a woman using public speaking as both a professional and political tool in the early republic.
## Paul Revere’s Letter
In February 1804, Paul Revere wrote a letter to Congressman William Eustis on behalf of Deborah Sampson Gannett.
Revere was by this point a well-known local figure — a successful businessman who had recently established a copper mill in Canton, a man whose Revolutionary service was known to his contemporaries, though his elevation to the iconic status he now occupies in American memory was a later development. He was Deborah Gannett’s neighbor in the greater Sharon area.
The letter has become one of the better-documented aspects of her post-service story, partly because of who wrote it and partly because of what it reveals about how her supporters framed her case. Revere described being surprised, on meeting her, that she was “a small, effeminate, and conversable woman” rather than the “tall, masculine female” he had expected. He stressed her domestic virtues — “a dutiful wife,” “an affectionate parent,” “good morals” — and he described the family as “really poor.”
He also made a more directly political argument: he wrote that Congress had been more generous to “hundreds” less deserving than Deborah Gannett, and he advocated for her pension explicitly on the grounds of military service and injury rather than solely on grounds of need or sympathy.