The record does not establish how she understood her own gender identity in terms that would be legible through modern frameworks, and it does not establish the nature of her emotional or personal relationships in any definitive way. Historians including Alfred Young have been careful about the limits of what the historical record can support on these questions, and that care reflects an accurate reading of what the documents do and do not say.
What can be said is that she made choices — to enlist, to maintain a male presentation, to serve — that required sustained personal agency and personal risk. Economic motivation, patriotic feeling, personal temperament, and desire for autonomy may all have been factors, and they are not mutually exclusive. The attribution of specific psychological motivations to historical figures without documentary support is a form of historical invention that has already done enough damage to her story through the Mann biography and its successors.
What the record leaves open, it should leave open.
## The Weston Diary: A Source-Critical Revelation
The acquisition of the Abner Weston diary by the Museum of the American Revolution around 2019 represents a genuine addition to the historical record, and it is worth spending some time on why.
Most of what we know about Deborah Sampson’s life comes from sources that have particular problems of reliability. The Mann biography is explicitly ghostwritten and embellished. Her own petitions are advocacy documents written to persuade government bodies to recognize her claims. The accounts produced by later historians are often dependent on the Mann biography and on oral traditions that were not subjected to rigorous contemporary documentation.