The collaboration between Mann and Sampson on the 1797 text is not fully documented. The degree to which she participated in the embellishments — whether she endorsed them, tolerated them, or was surprised by them — is not something the surviving record establishes. What is clear is that she went along with the publication and later used the book as part of her public self-presentation during the lecture tour.
The form of the 1797 book reflects its era. It uses third-person narration to describe Sampson’s interior states, motivations, and private experiences in ways that no third-person narrator could actually know without her testimony — and the testimony, if given, was mediated through Mann’s literary preferences and his sense of what would sell. The book has the shape of a novel of sensibility more than a military memoir, and that shape imposed on the factual core a set of emotional and psychological elaborations that were literary conventions rather than documented experiences.
The 1866 edition, produced decades after her death, is even more problematic as a source. By 1866, most people who had known her personally were also dead. The opportunity for correction or challenge to the expanded narrative was significantly reduced. And the 1866 edition was being produced at a time when the question of women’s roles in society — the suffrage movement, the debates about women’s participation in the Civil War that had just concluded — gave the Deborah Sampson story renewed cultural resonance and created new incentives for an impressive rather than an accurate account.