Economic motivation is not an undermining explanation. The men who enlisted in the Continental Army during the Revolution did so for a variety of reasons — patriotic conviction, economic need, social pressure, adventure, escape from circumstances at home — and economic need was among the most common. Deborah Sampson’s economic situation, a single woman without significant resources in a community that had recently disciplined her, gave her strong practical reasons to seek the income and structure that military service would provide.
Patriotic motivation is also possible and not contradicted by the economic reading. The two do not cancel each other. She had grown up in a community engaged in the Revolution, had formed views about the conflict, and by the time she successfully enlisted in May 1782 had already demonstrated her willingness to try. The failed first attempt and the subsequent successful attempt suggest commitment that goes beyond a purely mercenary calculation.
The desire for autonomy and adventure — the pull of a different kind of life than the one that was available to a single woman in Middleborough, Massachusetts — is also a historically plausible motivation. The scholarship on women who served in male disguise in various historical contexts consistently finds that the combination of economic, patriotic, and personal motivations is more typical than any single-cause explanation.
What the record does not support is confident attribution of specific psychological motivations, specific emotional experiences, or a specific hierarchy of causes. The Mann biography attributed motivations that served its narrative purposes. Later scholarship has proposed motivations that serve different interpretive frameworks. Deborah Sampson Gannett’s own statements, as mediated through petitions and the Mann biography, are advocacy documents that emphasize the aspects of her decision most useful for the recognition she was seeking.