In non-financial terms: she received an honorable discharge in 1783. She received a formal recognition from the Massachusetts Legislature in 1792. Her story was published in 1797 in a form that raised her public profile. Paul Revere wrote a letter in her support in 1804. Congress placed her on the pension rolls in 1805. Massachusetts designated her Official State Heroine in 1983. Annual observances and a public statue in Sharon mark her memory. Her story appears in histories of the Revolution and in accounts of women’s participation in American military history.
Whether the totality of what she received — over her lifetime and posthumously — represents adequate recognition of her service and its consequences is a question that different people will answer differently based on their assessment of what adequate recognition would mean. The straightforward observation is that the recognition came late, came in inadequate financial amounts, and required sustained advocacy to achieve. None of it came automatically from the service itself.
The comparison that Paul Revere drew in 1804 — that Congress had been more generous to hundreds less deserving — is a characterization that reflects Revere’s advocacy position. Whether it is accurate in any specific comparative sense is not something the available record can assess. What it reflects is the general sense among her advocates that the standard treatment of Revolutionary War veterans should have applied to her and did not.
The longer view of what she received includes the posthumous and commemorative recognition that has accumulated over two centuries. This recognition is real in the sense that it shapes how she is understood in American history, but it arrived too late to affect her own circumstances or those of the household she lived in. The tension between posthumous recognition and the inadequacy of recognition in life is a consistent feature of the Deborah Sampson Gannett story.