Jeremiah Thomas had ten sons, and Deborah’s indenture placed her in a household where the rhythms of work and education belonged to the boys. She is described in accounts as having learned to read and write largely on her own initiative, studying at night with books borrowed from the household, attending the winter sessions of school when agricultural demands slackened. She became literate and, by some accounts, more educated than many of her female contemporaries of similar economic background.
Her indenture ended at eighteen. She chose not to marry, which in the social context of late-eighteenth-century Massachusetts was itself a statement. She supported herself by teaching in the summer, when farm families could spare their children for schooling, and by spinning and weaving in the winter. These were respectable occupations for a single woman of modest means, and they gave her a degree of economic autonomy that many women of her station did not have.
She was also, apparently, paying close attention to the war.
The Revolutionary War had been going for years by the time Deborah Sampson was twenty-one. The decisive engagement at Yorktown had occurred in October 1781, though the formal peace was still being negotiated and soldiers were still needed in the field. Through the taverns and community gathering points of Middleborough, she had been in proximity to men who had fought, men who spoke about the war, men who held opinions about what the struggle meant. She had connections to the Baptist community in Middleborough that would later matter for reasons that had nothing to do with religion.