The diary as a source has not been as fully integrated into popular accounts of her life as it deserves to be. Scholars who have worked with it — Alfred Young’s Masquerade makes use of it — treat it as the most reliable document of her post-service self-presentation. The contrast between the diary’s ground-level accounting and the Mann biography’s heroic narrative gives a useful dual perspective on how Deborah Sampson Gannett understood and presented her own story.
## Why She Did It: Economic Motive, Patriotism, and the Limits of Attribution
The question of why Deborah Sampson enlisted in the Continental Army has attracted more interpretive energy than the documentary record can support, and it is worth being careful about the distinction between what the record establishes and what scholars and popular writers have proposed as explanation.
The documented economic context is significant. She was, at the time of her enlistment, a single woman in her early twenties with no guaranteed income and no family wealth. Teaching and weaving were her livelihoods, and both were precarious. Teaching was seasonal. Weaving was physically demanding work for modest return. An enlistment bonus — the payment offered to recruits joining the Continental Army — represented real money in her circumstances.
The failed first enlistment at Middleborough, if the Abner Weston diary account is accurate, included the collection of an enlistment bonus that she subsequently returned when the disguise was exposed. This detail, if accurate, is consistent with the economic motivation reading: she attempted to collect the bonus before the full commitment of service was required. The subsequent successful enlistment at Uxbridge would have included a similar bonus.