She petitioned the Massachusetts Legislature in 1792 and received back pay. She worked with Herman Mann on a 1797 biography that embellished her story significantly. She conducted a speaking tour approximately 1802–1804, which is documented in a contemporaneous diary. Paul Revere wrote a letter supporting her pension petition in 1804. Congress placed her on the pension rolls in 1805. She continued to petition for additional recognition in 1809 and 1816. She died in 1827.
The record also establishes what it doesn’t know: the specifics of her inner life, the full character of her relationships, the precise details of specific military engagements, and the complete picture of how she understood the choices she made.
## The Second Story: How the Legend Was Built
Deborah Sampson’s story has two histories: the history of what she actually did, and the history of what people said she did. The second history is in some ways as interesting as the first.
Herman Mann’s 1797 Female Review established the template. It took a genuinely dramatic story — a woman who served in the Continental Army for seventeen months, was wounded, and was only discovered when illness incapacitated her — and added to it the literary elements of the late-eighteenth-century sentimental narrative: invented dialogue, private thoughts, romantic atmosphere, and dramatic episodes that served the genre rather than the documentary record.
The 1866 expansion of the Mann biography, produced after her death and after the deaths of most people who could have disputed its claims from personal knowledge, added another layer. By the mid-nineteenth century, the story had been circulating for nearly seventy years in the embellished form, and the embellishments had become indistinguishable from the documented core in most popular retellings.