The denial of back pay that accompanied the honorable discharge is an equally significant fact. She had served seventeen months. The pay owed to Robert Shurtliff for that service was withheld because she was a woman. The honorable discharge acknowledged the legitimacy of the service; the withheld pay enacted the sex-based disqualification that the service itself had challenged.
The gap between these two facts — honorable discharge and denied pay — is the gap that her subsequent decades of petitioning were trying to close. The Massachusetts Legislature partially closed it in 1792. The federal government partially closed it in 1805. Neither closure was complete.
## The Shaping of Early American Memory: How Her Story Was First Told
The first decade after her discharge, Deborah Sampson Gannett’s story was not widely known. She had returned to Massachusetts, married, and was living the ordinary life of a farm wife in Sharon. The war had ended. The country was building new institutions. The question of what to do with the memory of extraordinary individual acts was not yet formalized.
The Herman Mann project that produced The Female Review in 1797 was, in part, a commercial venture. Mann was a printer, editor, and writer in Dedham, Massachusetts, who saw in Deborah Sampson’s story material for a publication that would find readers. The genre of female adventure narrative had European precedents, and the figure of the woman warrior or woman soldier had appeared in popular fiction and folklore for centuries. Mann was working in an established tradition when he shaped Sampson’s story for publication.