The scholarship is also necessarily limited by the survival of documents. A significant amount of what would give a fuller picture of her life — her own correspondence before the 1806 Revere letter, testimony from people who knew her and served with her, records from the Middleborough Baptist church — is either lost or has not yet been located.
## What the Record Establishes
What the documented historical record — setting aside the Mann embellishments, the Yorktown claim, and the later accretions of legend — actually establishes about Deborah Sampson is worth stating directly.
She was born in 1760 in Plympton, Massachusetts, to a family that could not support her. She was indentured as a child, worked as a servant through adolescence, and educated herself in conditions not designed to support her education. She made a decision, in early 1782, to enlist in the Continental Army under a male alias, was found out, and tried again at a greater distance from her home community.
She served approximately seventeen months in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment, in the Light Infantry Company, performing the duties assigned to elite forward units in the Hudson River Valley. She was wounded in or around 1782, treated herself to avoid the medical examination that would have exposed her, and carried a musket ball in her thigh for the rest of her life.
She fell ill in Philadelphia in 1783, was treated by Dr. Barnabas Binney, who discovered her sex, protected her secret during her recovery, and eventually disclosed her identity to her commanding officer. She received an honorable discharge on October 25, 1783.